Atomic mass
The term "atomic weight" is being phased out slowly and being replaced by "relative atomic mass", in most current usage. This shift in nomenclature reaches back to the 1960s and has been the source of much debate in the scientific community, which was triggered by the adoption of the unified atomic mass unit and the realization that weight was in some ways an inappropriate term. The argument for keeping the term "atomic weight" was primarily that it was a well understood term to those in the field, that the term "atomic mass" was already in use (as it is currently defined) and that the term "relative atomic mass" might be easily confused with "relative isotopic mass" (the mass of a single atom of a given nuclide, expressed dimensionlessly relative to 1/12 of the mass of carbon-12; see section above).
Whole number rule
During the 1920s, it was thought that the atomic nucleus was made of protons and electrons, which would account for the disparity between the atomic number of an atom and its atomic mass. In 1932, James Chadwick discovered an uncharged particle of approximately the mass as the proton, which he called the neutron. The fact that the atomic nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons was rapidly accepted and Chadwick was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1935 for his discovery.