Condensed concepts

Due to emergence, reality is stratified. This is reflected in the existence of semi-autonomous scientific disciplines and subdisciplines. A ...

Life is truly amazing! Life is beautiful! ...and it involves quantum many-body physics... There is a beautiful (short) review Heme: Fro...

What is spin ice ? What its definitive and experimental signatures? A good place to start is the lucid discussion by Roderich Moessner and...

The past few years has seen Hollywood make movies about famous scientists and mathematicians, including A Beautiful Mind (John Nash), The Th...

For Christmas (two years ago) my sister-in-law gave me a copy of Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary by Mina Carson , a histor...

A basic question that comes up in introductory solid state physics is: Why does the Sommerfeld model for metals work so well? It assumes t...

Andrew Zangwill contacted me because he is working on scientific biography of Phil Anderson. I think this is overdue. I would argue that Ph...

A more appropriate metaphor is Jacob wrestling with the angel (God). This point was made in a nice talk that Mike Gillan gave last week at...

Today I visited the Linus Pauling Archives  at Oregon State University. [I was actually on vacation in Corvallis visiting my sister-in-...

In an article The Nature of the Chemical Bond - 1992 , Linus Pauling makes the following fascinating statement: The concept of quantum mec...

Electronegativity is a simple and profound concept for understanding and giving a semi-quantitative description of broad classes of chemical...

Take a deep breath. You just created an entangled quantum state! There is a really interesting paper on the arXiv Quantum entanglement a...

I first heard of the term "Pauling point" in a chemistry seminar that Fritz Schaefer gave at UQ several years ago. He asked the au...

A landmark contribution of Linus Pauling was to show the intimate connection between molecular structure and the spatial arrangement of elec...

A small part only of the body of contributions of quantum mechanics to chemistry has been purely quantum-mechanical in character; only in a ...

Hydrogen bonds are ubiquitous in biomolecules and a key to understanding their functionality. This was first appreciated by Pauling and expl...

The Linus Pauling archive at Oregon State University has lots of nice resources including original manuscripts, videos, quotes, and photos....

I was intrigued and impressed that the Belgrade airport is called Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport . This the only case I have encountered of a...

The data in the Figure above changed the face of medical research. It showed for the first time that disease can have a molecular basis. It...

Roald Hoffmann , Philippe Hiberty , and Sason Shaik are probably my three favourite theoretical chemists. They write beautiful papers which...