The primary difficulty with Mach's definition of mass is that it fails to take into account the potential energy (or binding energy) needed to bring two masses sufficiently close to one another to perform the measurement of mass. This is most vividly demonstrated by comparing the mass of the proton in the nucleus of deuterium, to the mass of the proton in free space (which is greater by about 0.239%—this is due to the binding energy of deuterium). Thus, for example, if the reference weight m 2 is taken to be the mass of the neutron in free space, and the relative accelerations for the proton and neutron in deuterium are computed, then the above formula over-estimates the mass m 1 (by 0.239%) for the proton in deuterium. At best, Mach's formula can only be used to obtain ratios of masses, that is, as m 1 / m 2 = | a 2 | / | a 1 |. An additional difficulty was pointed out by Henri Poincaré, which is that the measurement of instantaneous acceleration is impossible: unlike the measurement of time or distance, there is no way to measure acceleration with a single measurement; one must make multiple measurements (of position, time, etc.) and perform a computation to obtain the acceleration. Poincaré termed this to be an "insurmountable flaw" in the Mach definition of mass.