I’ve been trying to read and comprehend the reasons why, but I still don’t get it.
In: Chemistry
Well originally it was decided to use hydrogen. Made sense, but technically challenging to actually weigh. Physicists/chemists moved on to oxygen which was easier. And hey. Oxygen is pretty common, so if we’re picking an arbitrary element Oxygen makes enough sense.
Then we discovered isotopes which screwed everything up. Some guys decided to use the average of oxygen isotopes found in nature, and others decided to use oxygen-16. Unfortunately the two different groups never reconciled and both systems remained in common usage.
Eventually a big international conferenced decided on C-12 which put the unit of atomic weight between the values of the two Oxygen based units.
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