I delighted to find yesterday that the 91st edition of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics is online (to subscribers). I think looking at the data is great anti-dote to the hubris of theorists, particularly reductionists. For example, how many of the listed properties (or even trends therein) can we accurately calculate, whether it is melting temperatures of simple solids or electron affinities of organic molecules?
The fact that spectroscopic properties of diatomic molecules are parametrised in terms of the Morse potential shows how good that empirical potential is!
Now the meaning of "handbook" becomes even stranger. Many editions ago the book ceased to be something you could hold in your hand! Now, in some sense it isn't even a book!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Elastic interactions and complex patterns in binary systems
One of the many beauties of condensed matter physics is that it can reveal and illuminate how two systems or phenomena that at first appear ...
-
This week Nobel Prizes will be announced. I have not done predictions since 2020 . This is a fun exercise. It is also good to reflect on w... -
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro... -
Nitrogen fluoride (NF) seems like a very simple molecule and you would think it would very well understood, particularly as it is small enou...
No comments:
Post a Comment