Copper Salt Notebook
This is a short notebook for a clear jar, a copper salt, and the slow work of looking again. Its formulas are not decorations: each one marks a material claim that can be read in prose, in HTML, or in plain text.
Blue crystals
The familiar hydrate CuSO4·5H2O carries water into the written formula. On a page, the dot and the subscript should remain legible without becoming a diagram or a code sample.
The notation is modest. It records a relation between copper sulfate and water while leaving the experiment itself open to observation, measurement, and revision.
Water as a record
Water is H2O, but a formula can also name a change. The formation of liquid water can be written as a reaction whose source remains readable in a text export.
The arrow is a relation, not a claim that the page has balanced or verified an experiment. It gives the reader a compact way to see the terms before and after the change.
Reversible attention
Some records are better held as reversible relations. Nitrogen and hydrogen can be set beside ammonia without forcing a paragraph to do the work of the equation.
A chemical publication can therefore keep ordinary prose around notation, while formulas and reactions retain their own readable structure.