Five Numbers Fitted to the Chart: The von Weizsäcker Mass Formula, Priced
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Ask a room of physicists where the valley of stability runs, or why binding energy per nucleon hovers near eight million electron-volts across the nuclear chart, and the map they reach for was drawn in 1935, when Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker organised the masses of nuclei into five physically named terms — volume, surface, Coulomb, asymmetry, pairing — riding on Gamow's picture of the nucleus as a charged liquid drop. The map is real, and I credit it at full strength in this paper: five numbers reproduce the smooth binding trend of the whole chart and return the stability valley's run with genuine fidelity. What I evaluate is where the five numbers come from. Every coefficient — a_V, a_S, a_C, a_A, a_P — is a least-squares fit to the measured masses the formula then reproduces; no step in 1935 computes any of them. The formula is exactly linear in each coefficient, so the fit is read back whole in every prediction: on my bench, a one-percent move in a_V alone moves the predicted binding of lead-208 by 32.760 MeV, and two published coefficient sets disagree by up to 1.128 MeV on the same nuclei with no deriving equation to prefer either. The shell structure that dominates the residuals is excluded by the founding picture itself — the magic nuclei carry residuals from −5.455 MeV to +5.229 MeV with mixed sign, the whole shell signal standing as error. Grade for this census entry, printed at full size: REASON FOUND / STILL TURNING — explicitly not a kill and not a falsification. The program headline stands unmoved: vacuum catastrophe NOT SOLVED / PARTIAL, producing-count 0.
Author: Aldred, William Alexander
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225348211