Talk:Helium/Archive 1

message: HELP! Often, when I visit a Wikipedia article on an element, I get the article itself doing fine, but then, from then to the remainder of when Wikipedia is being used in the current window, each subsequent page has a not-loading background. Does anyone know how to help this?? Georgia guy 01:53, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anyone please keep this from happening?? 

message: First of all: I'm impressed by the rate of improvements on this page. The coverage and quality has vastly improved since this was nominated as FA. Some remarks:
* I wondered whether you are aware of the Liquid helium page and the  request for a merge with this page. I guess we could merge liquid helium with helium-3 and helium-4 and delete/redirect. 
:Oops!  No, I wasn't.  It looks like it should be folded into this page, or a "Main article: liquid helium" tag could be added to this article, and we could move some of our content there.  Liquid helium contains information about both He-3 and He-4 as well as their miscibility; I don't know which of the superfluid properties work for He-3.  --Andrew 23:41, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)
::Offloading some of the detail to the liquid helium article was my plan all along. Please proceed but leave a summary here. --mav
* I'd like to see a phase diagram as shown here but maybe they belong in the helium-3 and helium-4 articles.
:Me too, but I don't know that to do about copyright issues - we certainly can't collect the data to make our own, and effectively tracing somebody else's seems pretty dubious from a copyright point of view.  Some abortive searching for a free one went nowhere, but there's some hope a US federal government agency has posted something.--Andrew 23:41, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC) 
::(I am not a lawyer.) I don't see how the relative position of lines in a diagram could be copyrighted whose shape is uniquely determined only by descriptive physical property data. Attribute the source to make sure, but as long as we don't copy the exact image or any creative content like colors, text style or placement and such, tracing the plotted lines should be fair use, if anything. Femto 14:14, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm sorry for not mentioning your large contribution. Be sure it is appreciated. I'm fairly new here and jumped in after the FA nomination and didn't look at the history but simply at what was there at the time. I was and am impressed by the rate of improvement since then on a rather specialised and sometimes difficult subject. That the rate was even higher before ... I was simply unaware. Jan van Male 13:51, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: My mistake then - I'm just a bit shell-shocked by the unexpected amount of rework that had to be done due to using a bad source. --mav 16:19, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some remarks after a lot of improvements 

message: Maveric149 wrote: "putting nationalities back ; no harm in having them here and nationality is very important in the history of elements". 
Q: Why do you find it very important in the history of elements? I understand that some people take great pride in the achievements of their compatriots and I don't want to discuss the merits or shortcomings of this position. People are different; they have all sorts of hobby horses. Other people e.g. would be interested in knowing how many of these were white males. This sort of information can be looked up in the individual people articles. Each of these interests can be important in their own right, but what does this have to do with helium in particular? I am not sure if there is really no harm done by inserting nationalities where they are redundant, but this is not my point. I think a good encyclopedia article should go beyond avoinding harm. It should try to express as much pertinent information as possible, and separate the chaff of information glut from the wheat.  
Also, what do you think is gained by inserting obvious occupations, such as "chemist"?
Minor questions:
* why do you call someone who is born in London "English" and someone who's born in Glasgow "British"?
* Is "Swedish chemists Per Teodor Cleve and Abraham Langlet in Uppsala in Sweden" really an improvement? Uppsala University is arguably the best known university in Sandinavia, and Uppsala already has a link to sweden, for those who don't know.  
Thank you!
:The history of the discovery of the elements has always been very competitive between nations. Also, every source I've used to expand this article has mentioned the nationality of the person making whatever discovery. Doing this is a very common practice outside of Wikipedia and is done for every element I know of here in Wikipedia. Lastly, that info does not take up much space, we should not expect each user to to click on the names, and the info here helps to contextualize (very few people know who the scientists are, but a great many will know something about the nation the person was in). --mav 12:04, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: nationalities and obvious occupations

message: I was about to pull these sentences out until i realised that the article has been featured.  I will therefore not temper with the article but can't help but feel the the gas use has been mentioned way too much. Pulling this peice off may improve the article. "Helium is used in cryogenics, in deep-sea breathing systems, to cool superconducting magnets, in helium dating, for inflating balloons, for providing lift in airships and as a protective gas for many industrial uses (such as arc welding and growing silicon wafers). Inhaling a small volume of the gas temporarily changes the quality of one's voice." gathima 01:45, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redundancy 

message: User:Sunborn had removed the information on stablites of synthetic isotopes of Helium. I reverted. Is there any special reason why we shouldn't include this information.?
Zeimusu | (Talk page) 07:16, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It has been decided in the two wikiprojects of Elemenets and Isotopes that only the isotopes with a half-life greater than 0.5 Megaseconds or around a week. So in accordance with this I removed all unstable helium isotopes from the box. It is of course emphasized this applies to the infobox and not the overall article. The isotopes should be included in article but it was decided that having over 60 isotopes in an infobox would be not wanted. (Indium has more than 67 isotopes) Trace isotopes and those of human importance are also included in the infobox. --metta, The Sunborn 20:23, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok, that's good with me, and thanks for letting me know. It might be an idea to put a note to the above effect in talk or in the edit summary, to stop lusers like me from reverting.  Zeimusu | (Talk page) 13:33, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Information on unstable isotopes

message: Would someone care to contribute on steps (if any) that are taken to conserve helium?  Of all elements this is only one that will literally fade away through industrial use and it cannot be replaced by anything else.JMcC 12:07, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Conservation

message: i personally think this article should be as it is now, i have rechanged it back to what it was in november. Like this it will tell you anything and everything that a person would every want to know about helium. And wen u consider it this talk page is is 90 kilobytes in size. when the article on helium as it is now is 40, and it has information, this talk page dosent.
:Actually we simply ought feel collectively embarrassed that this and this blanking vandalism from 12.146.247.* slipped past. Femto 21:49, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  My older rechange 

message: I stumped onto this document that some of you might want to use to add a bit to the history section. Enjoy! Nergaal (talk) 15:25, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Uber-nice reference

message: Not yet included in the article is what I heard: Helium is used in medical intensive care, if a narrow breathing path makes breathing difficult. Helium has about the same viscosity resistance in comparison to air, as long as laminar flows are compared. Air flow gets - according to higher density and therefore higher Reynolds number Re earlier turbulent than the less dense helium, and turbulent flow makes more resistance than. Re grows relevant high if one breathes gas at the - compared to normal - rather high pressure of the ambiance while diving deep in water, or breathing organs are constricted. See articles 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12627000 and 
http://copd.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=copd&cdn=health&tm=269&f=00&su=p736.9.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi%3Fartid%3D137275 and
http://copd.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=copd&cdn=health&tm=272&f=00&su=p736.9.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.rtmagazine.com/issues/articles/1999-04_10.asp
An aluminium 2-Groschen coin (Austria, about 1950-2000, lightweight with 0,9 g) rolls out in an upright fixed round latex balloon of about 28 cm diameter for up to 2,75 min if filled with helium, but only 2,25 min if air-filled. This is why - hearable - turbulences brake rather quickly down the speed of the coin to a gas-characteristic transition speed to laminar flow, which is lower for air than for helium. --Helium4 (talk) 15:09, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Medical Use, Transition Turbulent-Laminar 

message: Why is it that hardly anybody cares to specify if a listed value for the heat capacity of a gas is measured under constant volume or constant pressure? The numbers are significantly different, and lead to very wrong results if one condition is implicitly assumed while the figure in fact was measured under the other. Since He is very close to an ideal gas it is fairly easy to confirm that the listed number in the article is for constant pressure, I will change the article to specify that. In many other articles the given numbers are useless! WikiPidi (talk) 14:32, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm, seems it's not that easy, as nested templates are used. I've brought the issue up on the Template:Infobox_element talk page WikiPidi (talk) 15:51, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text:  This particular heat capacity of 20.786 J/mole/K is exactly 2.5000 R (to 5 sig digits!), so obviously it's constant pressure heat capacity for a monatomic gas. Furthermore, exactly the same figure is given for the the other 4 noble gases Ne,Ar,Kr,Xe. This is fishy, as real substances rarely show the same heat capacity to 5 sig digits, even when it is the correct one. Even fishier still, radon is also listed as having the same heat capacity of 20.786 J/mole/K, which means this is certainly a calculated not a measured value, since nobody has collected enough radon to measure its heat capacity to that value (radon itself produces so much heat from its own decay that this would be a difficult and perilous measurement to even get an estimate for). SO at this point I have to say is TILT. Calculated values from theory should be marked so. SBHarris 17:29, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Heat capacity: Constant volume or pressure 

message: Is it worth mentioning in the article that helium got its anomalous -ium suffix because Lockyer and Frankland assumed that the new element would be a metal? The irksome thing is that, while I'm utterly sure that this is so, I can't find an unambiguous reference to cite - can any of you do better? Kay Dekker (talk) 23:02, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Are you sure there was a rule to have the suffix "ium" only for metals? There are other counterexamples to this "rule": selenium, germanium, polonium - a non-metal and two metalloids. And current IUPAC rules propose that newly-discovered elements must all end in "ium", whether they're metals or not. --Roentgenium111 (talk) 22:22, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Etymology 

message: As I'm only reading up on this right now (learning), not sure if I'm correct but
the Physical Properties side panel shows the Molar Heat Capacity as 5R/2 whereas this Wiki page 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_capacity   (Half way down at the heading "The simple case of the monatomic gas"
states  it should be 3R/2 for all monatomic gases ????  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.41.81.212 (talk) 23:29, 9 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: See this thread. Materialscientist (talk) 23:39, 9 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Molar Heat Capacity 5R/2 Wrong ? 

message: Now we have it: Nature's Building Blocks: Everything You Need to Know About the Elements 2011 gives us the "real" history of Lockyear in  Vijaydurg India in 1868. This contradicting his (Lockyers) own description of the events. So do not quote this 2011 version of John Emsley for the discovery of helium, he is wrong.--Stone (talk) 07:25, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Nature's Building Blocks: Everything You Need to Know About the Elements 2003 So do not quote this 2003 version of John Emsley for the discovery of helium, in which he is wrong right.--Stone (talk) 08:30, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: What? You mean Lockyear's own account is wrong (which wouldn't be the first time that first-person historical accounts are inflated), but Emsley's historical account, based on many sources, is correct? So we SHOULD quote Emsley? SBHarris 19:45, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, I meant the second Emsley is right from 2003. The newest version of Emsley is wrong and is contradicting the written report of Lockyer from 1868. So lets stick to the old and right version.--Stone (talk) 06:04, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  Okay, I didn't notice the different dates at the end of the two Emsley links. I've taken the liberty of adding them in bold to your comments above. If that's not okay with you, of course remove them. SBHarris 18:34, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I will try to contact Emsley, I only found his phone number and no mail so I try to call him.--Stone (talk) 11:53, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I am in contact with  Emsley and we try to figure out the story will having a look into the available documents.--Stone (talk) 21:03, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wrong history