File talk:Atomic & ionic radii.svg
Meaning of the non-ionic atoms[edit]
The non-ionic forms were originally called simply "atoms". I adjusted it to be "neutral atoms" to distinguish it from the ionic forms, which makes sense in light of their relative sizes. However, there are many possible meanings of a "neutral atom" (monoatomic in a vacuum, in a covalent bond, etc.) and I don't see any additional explanation or citation for the data (@Popnose: do you remember your source?). The values do match the "Covalent (single bond)" column at en:Atomic radii of the elements (data page). Will have to track down the citations to see which one(s) are actually used. But also, that dataset is described as a somewhat dated dataset compared to en:Covalent radius. It would be great if this image could be redone in a way that made updating easier, such as re-casting the spheres in terms of single generic paths for the "outer" and "inner" spheres that are then scaled by value for each atom. DMacks (talk) 19:50, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
