User:Vera Kehrli

I have a background in physics and there mainly in mass spectrometry. I am working in a company designing mass spectrometers. When I visited Wikipedia I was surprised to see how poorly the articles were written. I was also surprised that the articles of mass spectrometry were completely hijacked by analytical chemists with very poor understanding of math and scientific terminology. Most of them have no clue what a quantity or a unit is. I decided to tidy up the mass spectrometry articles a bit. Thereby I became very interested in the science of measuring, also known as metrology. Especially I read all the documents about terminology of IUPAP, IUPAC, ISO-31 and the VIM (international vocabulary of metrology). I learned that way back there were two schools of metrology: those that believe that all quantities are dimensionless and those that think quantities fundamentally have dimensions (and thereby units) except if they cancel each other. By now the second school basically took over. Only in chemistry the use of "dimensionless" quantities is still common. For example chemists still use a dimensionless quantity called "relative atomic mass" which is not a mass but a ratio of two masses. I found that most chemists are overwhelmed by handling the concepts of the two schools in parallel, with the result that many formulas in chemistry publications are wrong, ambiguous, confusing. It would serve the chemists very well if they could get rid of their anachronistic dimensionless quantities and use the same quantities that are used by the rest of the world. Not only would they make fewer mistakes, also the world could understand them much better. It turned out that some chemists really love their fringe terminology so much that they would revert all the changes I made to bring the articles back to a state where not even they themselves could understand them. I am now getting tired of being stalked by incompetent chemists and hope to find a better working atmosphere here on CZ.