The Blueprint of Water

pH

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pH

Definition

pH is the negative base-ten logarithm of hydrogen ion concentration, a compact logarithmic scale for expressing acidity. It reports the position of hydrogen in an equilibrium system, not an amount of acid or caustic added.

Sørensen invented pH at the Carlsberg Laboratory to fold hydrogen-ion concentrations spanning a hundred trillionfold into a tidy 0 to 14 scale. The compression makes one probe reading describe both hydrogen and hydroxide at a known temperature, but it also hides the magnitude of chemical shifts. Read as a position it predicts what will scale, corrode, grow, and how chlorine performs, but mistaken for a quantity it misleads operators.

Acid base equilibrium tug-of-war · Self-ionization of water · pOH

How it connects

Part of The Blueprint of Water · 📏 measurement

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