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."

Comments

Poor choice of words

[Angst Badger]

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.

Re:Poor choice of words

[Adambomb]

Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding

Right. That's called the scientific method.

It's kinda the whole point. Do what you can with what you have where you are, and when you find out how you're wrong you adapt.

Re:Poor choice of words

[Vellmont]

Really? For science I rather find the more we understand, the more we realize we don't understand.

This is true. But this also increases our understanding, not decreases it. known unknowns > unknown unknowns.

Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding.

To a degree, yes. But a new theory doesn't usually completely obviate the old one. Newtons F=MA still works for the vast majority of the time for things us humans are likely to come into contact with, it just begins to break down as you approach the speed of light. Special relativity only becomes relevant in special cases.

Re:Poor choice of words

[Aglassis]

Really? For science I rather find the more we understand, the more we realize we don't understand. Science is full of unexplained holes that theories postulate answers for. 500+ years ago scientists thought the earth was flat. Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding. My 2 cents.

There was a brief period after the loss of Greek natural philosophy from ~500 to ~1000 CE that some (but not all) Western natural philosophers thought the Earth was flat. Other than that, the only time that some prominent Western natural philosophers thought the Earth was flat was prior to Socrates. On the other hand, Chinese philosophers believed the Earth was flat until the 17th century.

It is important to note that Platonic and Aristotelian natural philosophy had a significant effect on people believing that the Earth was a sphere. It is not an understatement to say that Aristotelian cosmology and its derivatives were the dominant cosmologies over the last 2,500 years of human history. And those forms of cosmology cannot work without a spherical Earth.

This entire flat-Earth argument was invented in the 19th century to try to make it look like our ancestors were idiots during the "Dark Ages." It has been discredited many times. I strongly suggest you read this entry as well as studying Aristotelian cosmology (and how medieval scholars and clergy interpreted it) to understand how many of ancestors thought about the universe.

Re:Poor choice of words

[Adambomb]

Well, i'm not sure where you were going with all of that.

In any field where we cannot be reasonably certain of the tests we're doing let alone the results, it's going to involve a lot of conjecture. The scientists who refuse to say "We just don't know" are on the path to dogmatic thought not scientific thought. I would expect any field on the fringe of our knowledge to involve a lot of uncertainty and a lot of people being shown wrong....constantly. If they weren't being shown to be wrong constantly, that'd be about as likely as coding a huge project on the fly once with no debugging and have it work the first compile.

I don't see how that aspect of human nature has any bearing on the scientific method though.

Re:Poor choice of words

[ericferris]

Good points. You don't really have "dogmas" in science, just hypotheses and results that you better not question because then you might piss off someone, lose you grants and be blackballed in peer reviews.

Sadly, the peer review system does not shield scientists from flaring egos and grant sucking. It's a great system where it works, and surely beats the old ways of taunting competitors with results they couldn't reproduce as was the case during the Renaissance. But it still breaks sometimes when seniority, ego and money are involved.

And of course, politics now play a role. Take something that should be as neutral as cosmology, namely, climate study. Now it's tainted with politics. That's rather disquieting.

The motto of the Royal Society -- the 500-year old British academy of sciences -- is "Nullius in Verba", meaning you are not compelled by the word of someone else, only by truth. I wish it were the case.

Re:Poor choice of words

[Goaway]

If science weren't dogmatic, there would be organizations and grants who would say "yeah we don't really think this Electric Universe idea is true, but let's devise ways to put it to the test anyway".

That is because there is nothing to test. It's up to the electric universe people to come up with actual, verifiable experiments. But they don't do that, they just make vague claims and complain about conspiracies against them.

Goes against chemistry dogma?

[MagusSlurpy]

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."

"It leans far left and toward science"

[MillionthMonkey]

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?

Not news.

[FlyingBishop]

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.