Timeline for How Should Questions About "Traditional" Chemical Bonding Concepts be Answered?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
4 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 2, 2014 at 19:16 | comment | added | Dissenter | The best I think most undergrad students of chemistry can do is understand: 1) Qualitative aspects of valence bond theory 2) Hybridization and its limitations 3) Molecular orbital theory (qualitative aspects only) | |
| Jun 2, 2014 at 19:16 | comment | added | Dissenter | Good questions and comments. I'm afraid a lot of handwaving does go on at the undergrad level when describing bonding. For example, hybridization has been described as "a meat grinder; throw in 3/4th of a pound of ham and 1/4th of a pound of pork and what do you get? An sp3 hybridized orbital with 75% ham character and 25% pork character." I'm not kidding, I've heard this meat analogy several times. | |
| Jun 1, 2014 at 13:52 | comment | added | Martin - マーチン Mod | I'd like to second that. For chemical bonding in general I usually try to provide a more canonical approach. The empirically found observations are usually in some way approximations to the truth and should therefore be treated as these and then there are concepts like hypervalency, which resembles an incomplete (ancient) point of view - one should always state the flaws of these concepts. | |
| Jun 1, 2014 at 0:48 | history | answered | Nicolau Saker Neto | CC BY-SA 3.0 |