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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic, but I admire the effort to translate the formula to Unicode characters in the title. It's not just a simple copy-paste from the article.

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GPT-4 does it very well though. (Not saying OP used it, was just curious if that'd work.)

Prompt:

> Observation of zero resistance above 100∘ K in Pb10−xCux(PO4)6O

> convert this to a title, with the correct usage of unicode

Output:

> Observation of Zero Resistance Above 100 K in Pb₁₀₋ₓCuₓ(PO₄)₆O

Wow, I would've never thought to use ChatGPT for this. Very cool.

I use ChatGPT as a word calculator for literally everything all of the time. It’s super great for achieving proper formatting easily!

Indeed. I always tell it to use proper fancy quotes and proper apostrophes in its output, but I can't get it to do it 100% of the time despite trying out many prompt variations and telling it the Unicode values etc etc.

ChatGPT says:

    The chemical formula "Pb10−xCux(PO4)6O" can be written in Unicode as follows:

    Pb₁₀₋ₓCuₓ(PO₄)₆O

    Please note that not all characters may be perfectly aligned due to font 
    variations and rendering differences in different systems. However, this 
    representation should provide a close approximation to the chemical formula.

As plain text: Pb₁₀₋ₓCuₓ(PO₄)₆O

EDIT: Note that arxiv uses mathjax (JS) to take a compound formula as plain text and applies subscript, superscript, etc. styling to it. ("Pb10−xCux(PO4)6O")

The submitter also fixed the incorrect use of the degree symbol before K, lol.

"degrees Kelvin" is wrong? Why's that?

The SI unit is just “kelvin” because it’s an absolute scale. Usually “degrees” is only used with Celsius and Fahrenheit scales because they are relative. Not sure about Rankine…

https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/kelvin-introduction

> zero on the Rankine scale is absolute zero, but a temperature difference of one Rankine degree (°R or °Ra) is defined as equal to one Fahrenheit degree

But Rankine is an absolute scale. "By analogy with the SI unit, the kelvin, some authors term the unit Rankine, omitting the degree symbol."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_scale

Ah, interesting - this NIST page uses °R, which is at odds with the explanation in the other page on Kelvin (which doesn’t mention Rankine). I’m not sure if that’s because there’s a strong convention to use the degree symbol with Rankine or if there’s an additional reason not mentioned by the Kelvin page

https://www.nist.gov/pml/special-publication-811/nist-guide-...

Technically the units of temperature are "degrees Celsius", "degrees Fahrenheit", "Kelvin", etc. ie "degrees" is part of the name of the units "degrees Celsius" and "degrees Fahrenheit". "Kelvin" is the name of the unit by itself, so "degrees" is not supposed to be used before Kelvin.

In practice everyone's so used to saying "degrees" for temperatures that they end up saying it with Kelvin too.

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