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New Results Contradict Long-Held Chemistry Dogma
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have found that the long-held belief that only the outer, valence, electrons of an atom interact may be false. Computer simulations have shown that at pressures like those in the center of the Earth the inner, core, electrons of lithium also interact."
Dogma?
If it was dogma the priests of chemistry would be denying the evidence and punishing its discoverers.
That's the difference between science and religion. For science, new information enlarges our understanding of the world. For religion, new information only threatens sanctified prejudices.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
For anyone who wants to read the actual paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.2781
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Just because an electron is in the outer "core" doesn't mean it's a valence electron. Similarly, the converse is also true. As IUPAC put it, the number of valence electrons is equal to "the maximum number of univalent atoms (originally hydrogen or chlorine atoms) that may combine with an atom of the element under consideration, or with a fragment, or for which an atom of this element can be substituted." This still holds true for the interactions in question in TFA.
46487 466780 252994 376409 96920 39622 205366 244315 622115 512361 668040 63608 259203 955314 811176 652718 166330 23922
Aahhh, that's why all the experiments I made while standing in the center of the earth sometime failed!
But frankly, I fail to see any practical applications for this. We are talking about 1,5 million atmospheres and 3000 Kelvin - hence not a typical lab environment.
But I will with no doubt be proven wrong in the following years. That is why following science is so fun at times :-)
Some true "meaning-of-life stuff" in this story.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Now that's a fucking shocker. Most Chemistry today focuses on conditions either similar to STP or than can be created within STP. STP is "Standard Temperature and Pressure" Usually defined for the purpose of convenience of communication as 298K and 760 Torr. They define this as "standard" because everybody in Chemistry knows that chemistry changes as you change conditions, and it's useful to have a standard to compare to, even an arbitrary one (298K, 760 Torr is "average" sea level temperature and air pressure). The standard is also very useful for Chemical Engineering.
The article is poorly written garbage.
Simply Supular ! http://supular.com/
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
What if nature is not flawed and only mans's perception is? Perhaps earth was a paradise till we messed it up?
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
High-pressure reactions are an almost completely unexplored aspect of chemistry; and the research that has been done shows that atoms and molecules behave much differently under high pressures. For example, a lot of research is being done now utilizing ultra-high pressure water as a replacement for organic solvents, for greener chemistry. If there's one thing we've learned from these high-pressure experiments, it's that everything acts different, so it really doesn't go against our "dogma" at all; it just goes against the "dogma" of STP reactions, which makes sense, as this was not an STP reaction. It's an incredibly cool finding; just not something that's going to turn all of our current chemical understanding upside down by violating "dogma."
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
So just to get this straight: science always lives up to the ideals of the best of scientists, while religions all conform to the practices of the worst practitioners?
Computer simulations? You mean like the computer simulations that say the earth is warming? Hahahaha...
Chemists already know that core electrons do influence bonding and such. It is simply a short cut to ignore them. Hence, when one wants to get the last few digits on your answer you turn on "core correlation" which treats the core and valance regions the same.
Furthermore, the conditions in question here are so extreme as to border on being a plasma or some such. So I am not really surprised to see some effect that are negligible under "normal" conditions to grow and become important.
While I'm glad you can warp the news to wank off your weird beliefs, you should invest more time in reading comprehension. This article is simply saying that *computer simulations* show that in *extreme conditions* a standard assumption used in chemistry no longer holds. Such a discovery does not invalidate the concept of valence electrons (did you even bother to look up what that means?), because standard chemistry explains the vast majority of things we have already observed. If this work is confirmed, it means you have to work harder to understand chemistry at extremely high pressures.
-1, Irrelevant truism
You just got troll'd!
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was any 'dogma' really overturned? My understanding was always that the basic chemical rules were first order approximations, not a comprehensive description of how everything must behave. For example, xenon is an 'inert' element, with the outer shell full, but xenon tetra-fluoride (XeF4) is a stable compound. I learned that in high-school in the 1980's.
I read that headline and did the ping-pong in my head.. IANC or any scientist, but it would seem that theoretically, if you could change the base of an atom you could effectively create a new matter type. If capable to control this, perhaps even create specific matter on request.. Star Trek anyone?
The amount of argument in the comments about "scientific dogma" demonstrates how much power the article summary has in shaping the way posters will approach the topic. Instead of talking about high-pressure chemistry, we're off rehashing arguments about suppression of scientific ideas, and "faith vs. reason" bullshit.
This is the under-appreciated power the editors have over us. By accepting articles on interesting topics with stupid summaries, they lower the quality of discussion.
...than religion, which is a sort of self induced sensory deprivation (a horse with blinders on).
Science generates "wakes" of truth in the waters of knowledge in its path, while religion only leaves "still" water and goes nowhere.
Said another way... "The difference between those who truely believe and those who doubt is that those who doubt leave a wake of truths in their path." - Anonymous
Chemistry is just fancy physics. Biology is just fancy chemistry.
All science is either Physics or stamp collecting. Chemists and biologists need to stop collecting stamps and start doing physics.
For supposedly trying to be neutral, a lot more posts negative of religion or the right get modded up.
Who promised you "neutrality"? Good posts that are negative of religion or the right are just easier to write. You see more of them modded up because more of them are posted.
Instead of whining that everyone is biased, why don't you just mod up posts you agree with if you don't like it, or start writing posts "positive of religion or the right" that are actually insightful or interesting?
Plasma, gas, liquid, solid, ????
it's always been accepted that matter in conditions like these did not follow "normal" rules
Chemistry's rules exist because they functionally explain chemistry in an accessible manner. Physicists have known that there are more accurate models for a while. Unfortunately, these models are too complex to be useful to someone trying to synthesize a chemical. If this has any significant applications, we will still be seeing classical chemistry for at least a century to come (barring the singularity.)
I mean, it's been almost a century since relativity and quantum mechanics came on the scene, but for the majority of engineering tasks, they remain useless. Between processors hitting the atomic scale and more probes hitting the atmosphere, that may change. However, I don't see chemistry getting to the point where we even begin to see practical chemistry that doesn't rely on classical models. The new ones are simply to complex to use.
What if all the retard 'what if'-posts on slashdot are just a figment of my imagination? Perhaps slashdot was paradise till my brain messed it up?
Let's not forget that Lithium only has 3 electrons, 2s1 and 1s2. With this is mind it's not all that surprising.
IAAC (I am a chemist)
Honestly this result is not unexpected. The interactions of electrons and nuclei depend on several factors: distance, energy, and charge. There is also the factor of election-electron interaction, which is where the idea of valence electrons comes about.
Normally the outermost electrons of an atom are far enough from the nucleus that the distance from the nucleus and the repulsion from the other electrons on the atom allows them to more easily interact with other atoms. This is how bonding works, an electron gets "shared" between two atoms or the electron completely jumps off the atom and turns the atom into an ion which is attracted to other, oppositely charged, ions. Yes, I'm oversimplifying quite a bit for the layman.
Every electron in an atom can interact with another atom, it's just MUCH less likely to happen for the inner electrons of an atom and the interactions of the inner electrons to other atoms are much weaker than those of the outer electrons. Increasing the pressure allows the inner electrons to interact more strongly with other atoms.
Under higher pressures and energies two things happen. First of all atoms are pressed closer to each other. This means that all of the electrons are closer to other atoms. This increases the likelihood that an electron will interact with another atom, forming a bond. The second effect is that the increased energy tends to cause the electrons in atoms to jump to higher energy states which are further out from that atom's nucleus. This means less crowding which means less repulsion from other electrons which means that each atom's nucleus is more exposed to interaction with other atom's electrons. Again, I'm oversimplifying for the layman.
The extreme of this is when the pressure is great enough that each nucleus gets close enough for the nuclear force to overcome the electrostatic repelling force between the two positively charged nuclei. When this happens you get neutronium, the core of a neutron star. Obviously you don't normally see these levels of pressure on Earth!
What is really in question is the exact numbers of the interactions. At what pressure does a certain phase of atom to atom interaction appear? How does the increased pressure affect rates of reactions between atoms? Scientists are trying to measure hard numbers of the effects of pressure on chemistry. There already is a good deal of theoretical work but the experimental work is a bit tough to do given the conditions needed.
Sapere aude!
"Researchers have found that the long-held belief that only the outer, valence, electrons of an atom interact may be false.
Take Chemistry 101 and 102 in a college today. They no longer believe this. Though I guess it is unusual for lithium. However the center of the Earth is as hot as surface of the sun, and is essentially a ball of plasma, which is so hot nucleons congregate together and all the electrons dance around it.
This just goes to show that just because something is done scientifically and according to the scientific method doesn't mean it's right. (if I dare say, the scientific method _is_ scientific "dogma"--religious people get "burned at the stake" on the comments every day for not adhering)
For instance, you can scientifically prove that God doesn't exist all you want given the small amount of information we know about our universe. Just because it's "done right", doesn't mean you aren't completely wrong and that you're not missing something.
Religion isn't meant to explain how the world around us works. Religion defines who we are and our purpose here--something science is hard pressed to find. In other words, science can't explain everything. It is to find out about the world around us. Anything outside the world around us (aka: God) is, by definition, not bound by the rules of science. Let the burning begin.
Website coming soon.
known unknowns > unknown unknowns.
"Unknown unknowns" by definition is unquantifiable. You cannot compare it to what is known.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This explains why Vista is so slow...
... i mean it's either that or the code is like balls
This experiment isn't some sweeping revolution in chemistry. It doesn't say "chemistry was wrong" - it only says "chemistry was wrong above 1.5 million atmospheres." It affects geologists and geochemists who attempt to run processes and/or simulations at those pressures, and no one else.
The large majority of chemistry and chemists will be completely unaffected by this discovery, because it doesn't matter to anyone not working in the Earth's core or working on artificial gemstone synthesis. Most pertinent of all, any effects discovered at these conditions can't be exploited in any sort of device or process, because the pressures necessary to bring them out are nearly impossible and astronomically expensive to reproduce.
It's a reasonable statement. Anyone in the business (chemical engineering) would be likely to make it. Supercritical CO2 is much more advanced tech than supercritical H2O. Arguably it's more useful, too, since you probably get better interaction with nonpolar substances, the critical pressure for CO2 is a lot lower than for H2O, and the critical temperature is near room temperature (as opposed to nearly 300 C for water). Supercritical H2O undoubtably has applications, but so far as I know supercritical CO2 has many more applications at present.
You have to wonder why they decided to throw this much CPU power at lithium. The fact that hydrogen bombs work in part by compressing lithium-6 deuteride to almost exactly these conditions couldn't possibly have anything to do with it, I'm sure.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Hardly "Dogma", simulations predict that under pressure, hexavalent carbon is produced, which means that inner orbitals not normaly involved in bonding have to be involved.
Then there are HeBeO compounds, metallic hydrogen, and the weird phases of ice under extreme pressure.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/7m14576m226l30j7/
Journal: Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry
Article title: Effect of nonvalence interactions on the orientation of the phenyl ring at the tricoordinated phosphorus atom
Article date: 28 December 1981
Life would be easier if I had the source code.
A fair amount of high pressure research has been going on in Physics for years, especially in Solid State Physics, where phase changes are of interest. And of course there's the high temperature. In this light, it's hardly a surprise that pressure changes the game because all the essential bits (electrostatic potentials, energies) are different than at STP.
They ran out of opium. After they booted out the moors they were effectively screwed. They had addicts and no drugs and it was such a pain in the ass to run drugs through Muslim territory. A fool's bet for three ships isn't that bad.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
fuck! the editor uses the word Dogma and everybofy goes ballistic with politics, philosophy, science, the electric universe ....
gee what a succesful troll.
Shit! if things continue to get this bad I will have to RTFA just to have some insight on the lithium thing ...
relax
WOuldn't this lead us to another state of matter, since molecules/atoms woudl interact in an entirely different way than they do when their non-valence electrons pretty much keep it in the family?
New Results Contradict Long-Held Chemistry Paradigm
There, fixed it for you.
Is this a rhetorical question?
314159 is conveniently the region-unlock remote code for most LG DVD players.
What idiot modded that post 5, Interesting? I just Googled each of his points and they are all bogus, either because what he says is completely false or fabricated or because he puts a twist on things to completely misrepresent the facts and people's opinions about them. So I ask again, what idiot modded that post 5, Interesting? Has Slashdot lost the ability to do a simple web search? For crying out loud.
Industrial uses of both are pretty limited at the moment. scCO2 is mainly limited to extractions (decaffeination for example) and dry cleaning. scH2O is used for the total destruction of toxic waste (nerve gases for example). Research into each is pretty balanced too.
scH2O is actually a better solvent as it will dissolve most organic matter. scCO2 on the other hand is pretty poor and you generally need an traditional solvent present to help solvate things. The conditions used for both are well within what is known and used industrially, but it turns out that scH2O is pretty efficient as it is easier to recover the energy because of the greater extremes needed. Also, a huge amount of energy is used to pressure up CO2.
It's a new form of lithium, in which more electrons can participate in bonds, potentially achieving a higher oxidation state. So the name would actually be neolithic.
Then anyone who disagrees with you is a denier
I recall being taught at university over twenty years ago that neither the ionic bond nor the covalent bond were real; rather, that they were occasionally convenient approximations of how some linear combinations of atomic orbitals often behaved.
The idea that for some elements, especially the lighter ones, electrons other than those in the outermost shell do contribute significantly to LCAO should surprise nobody competent.
At one time they thought the sound barrier was impenetrable too!
Actually, the "sound barrier" was considered to be a problem of engineering difficulty and not a fundamental "speed limit" imposed by nature. As an aircraft approaches Mach 1, a formerly inconsequential drag effect called wave drag begins to increase faster with velocity than parasitic drag. Aerodynamicists of the late war- and early post-war period knew about this from theoretical development and actual data from high-speed testing. It is difficult to design an aircraft that has good flight characteristics in subsonic, transonic, and supersonic drag regimes, but even though it had never been done before (never been "proven" if you like), engineering studies showed that it was possible in principle.
But these engineering studies revealed another big problem (given contemporaneous technology): it would require a *way* more powerful engine to overcome wave drag than was either available in the first-generation jets or their descendents. The dissemination of both German jet and rocket technology changed this outlook; the Bell X-1 was a rocket plane. (Remember; the German V-2 reached 3500mph during its development and deployment in 1944, and was still supersonic when it hit the ground at half that speed.) It wasn't until the huge advance of the General Electric J-57 (and the Pratt & Whitney J-79) during the 1950s that routine supersonic flight (of aircraft, anyway) became practicable.
So the "sound barrier" was just thought of as an engineering problem that was "barrier"-like because the design problems were hard and nobody thought there were going to be suitably powerful engines in the forseeable future. It was never thought of as a barrier imposed by nature; that is a popular misconception held by people who are unfamiliar with the subject matter, which is most people.
I know I've encountered this on the web before, but I don't have a link presently. The book "Mach 1 and Beyond" by Larry Reithmaier is very light on the pertinent aerodynamics, but does describe the history correctly (for the most part).
The speed of light is a different kind of "barrier" altogether; examining nature through observation and experiment indicates that the speed of light in vacuum is a bound of nature. If you have mass, you cannot go from sub- to superluminal or vice versa. This is an observation of how nature works, not a "mere theory" in the creationists' pejorative, popular understanding. Further, we know by Bell's theorem that relativity and quantum theory do not create a paradox (the so-called "EPR paradox). Saying "Scientists sure are stoo-pid" or "Scientists sure are arrogant" is just so much hot air from the relativity deniers who 1) don't understand relativity theory, and 2) think that a naive and/or intuitive understanding of nature must be right, uh, just because!. Humanity has tried intuition for a long time on a lot of things, and with physics, it just didn't pan out.
I find the whole "everything that can be discovered has been discovered" attitude of certain sects of the scientific community equally exhausting and detrimental to scientific progress.
It is presumptuous, naive and cocksure of you to assert that "certain sects" ("cosmology", perhaps??) are wrong, you're right, and above all ignorant to assert that that they (cosmologists, of course) claim already to have discovered everything that can be discovered.
A relativity-denying rant might have been intellectually defensible as late as the 1880s, when people started reallizing the problems in reconciling electromagnetism and the Lorentz transformation with a "luminiferous ether", or even as late as about 1915-1920 (because Even though Einstein had made elegant sense of it, this elegant sense could still have been in conflict with nature itself, and the tests were about to be made). Similarly for quantum mechanics and the standard model.
But that is no longer a reasonable posit
It's not just a smokescreen because actually, he's wrong outright. I do have a source, and I know there are others. My response:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=634067&cid=24461067/
He's probably moved on, back to reading Thunderbolts and trying to convince everyone he meets on the internet that modern science is junk and there's a conspiracy to suppress "real" [crank/fringe] knowledge, but perhaps you or others will appreciate it.
Dogma?
If it was dogma the priests of chemistry would be denying the evidence and punishing its discoverers.
A Dogma is simply any commonly (even formally) held belief.
You need not be dogmatic about a dogma, but leaders being dogmatic about a dogma can result in actions such as are cited above.
You need not, however, be dogmatic about a dogma.... Relativity, for example, can be considered a dogma for (and by) many, nonetheless, there are a good number of theoretical physicists who are doggedly (same root) looking for improved alternatives.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Chemistry is a very simplified, yet extremely useful (since the circumstances where it fails are usually not encountered very often) model of a part of physics.