Talk:Nascent state (chemistry)

Proposed redirect
After nascent hydrogen has been fixed, the best thing to do with this article is a redirect. No practicing chemist believes in the nascent state any longer. 158.93.6.11 (talk) 22:31, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Oppose. A quick review of Google Scholar indicates that there is plenty of reliable sourcing to write an article about this deprecated theory. VQuakr (talk) 22:54, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
 * In what context does the term appear? Are you talking about the deprecated theory to explain reductions at the metal surface, about monatomic hydrogen in the Langmuir torch, or about systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium - Simon Bauer, the celebrated mass spectrometrist tried to revive the word for that use. 158.93.6.11 (talk) 23:03, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
 * The former. I haven't seen any source that refers to the monotomic hydrogen in an AHW torch as nascent. How successful has Bauer been at popularizing the term? It could rate a separate article if it really is a separate concept. VQuakr (talk) 23:18, 6 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Oppose No physicist takes credence in N rays either. Well, there probably are a few crackpots... N rays are an interesting bit of history, why not the nascent state? Jim1138 (talk) 23:42, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Support The articles cover the same ground, the (historical) concepts of nascent hydrogen and the nascent state are for all purposes identical. 158.93.6.11 (talk) 14:52, 7 May 2017 (UTC)
 * So you think the two articles should be merged (as opposed to redirected)? They are rather demonstrably not identical. VQuakr (talk) 18:26, 7 May 2017 (UTC)
 * They are very much identical. The nascent state is invoked really only in the context of hydrogen. (The 1942 review incidentally says as much, the work is hardly ever used for active oxygen, chlorine or nitrogen and workers in the field recognized even then what the likely explanation was.) Are you a chemist? You interests seem to lie elsewhere. 158.93.6.11 (talk) 19:29, 7 May 2017 (UTC)
 * That's not particularly true, ie nascent chlorine. VQuakr (talk) 07:31, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Chemical abstracts lists 68 occurrences of the phrase in total, 19 of these post-1990. The majority of these 19 refers to spectroscopy of molecules in a highly excited state (in the Simon Bauer sense), the rest is about active species, hypochlorite radical, nitrosyl chloride or such. According to primary sources it's footnote material at best. But Wikipedia should be built on review articles, and the 1942 review makes it abundantly clear that "nascent chlorine" is about active species and devotes just a quarter of a page to the subject. Are you a subject expert and want to school the review authors? 158.93.6.11 (talk) 15:23, 8 May 2017 (UTC)