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Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker developed a semi-empirical description of nuclear masses and mass defects. The semi-empirical mass formula connects nuclear binding energy with the number and arrangement of protons and neutrons, rather than treating every measured mass as an unrelated datum. In modern explanatory terms, bulk binding scales roughly with the nucleon number $A$, a surface correction with $A^{2/3}$, and the electrostatic cost with $Z^2/A^{1/3}$. These competing scalings explain why increasing nuclear size does not improve the binding per nucleon indefinitely.^[ref]

A physicist.^[ref][ref]