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On page 100 of the article "The
Spectrophotometric Analysis and Modeling of Sunscreens" of the January
1997 issue of the Journal of Chemical
Education is one of the common errors of today's indifference to sloppiness:
Beer's law provides a relationship among
absorbance, molar absorptivity (e), path length
(b) and molar concentration (c):
A = ebc
This equation is not Beer's law; it is the Beer-Lambert law. Beer's law is A =
kc; b is constant; k is a x b, or in
the form for molar absorptivity, k is e x b; a is
absorptivity. Lambert's law is A = k'b; c is constant;
k' is a x c, or e x c.
Please, as Editor, stop the lazy sloppiness of misnaming the Beer-Lambert law. There is a Beer's law, and it
is not the Beer-Lambert law.
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