Jones Beene wrote:
> Well, I am still of the opinion that the mass difference between CH and > 13C "should have" been noticed by the authors in the spectrometry, since > it so very critical to their conclusion, and so obvious as an > alternative ... should I say "alternative to the near-miraculous > conclusion" which the propose; and efforts are underway to confirm this. As far as I can tell from the references I've got here (on the desktop...) the difference in mass between 12C-H and 13C is about 1 part in 1000. Can a mass spectrometer typically distinguish such a small mass difference? Generally one looks to mass spec to distinguish between things which different by some number of nucleons; this is a tiny fraction of that. I'm not challenging anything, I'm just asking; my knowledge of current mass spec capabilities is, to put it politely, limited.
