Sometimes a (scientific) thought just pops into one’s mind. Most are probably best not shared with anyone, but since its the summer silly season, I thought I might with this one.
Archive for July, 2020
Question for the day – Einstein, special relativity and atomic weights.
Saturday, July 25th, 2020The Willgerodt-Kindler Reaction: mechanistic reality check 1.
Tuesday, July 21st, 2020The Willgerodt reaction[cite]10.1002/cber.18870200278[/cite], discovered in 1887 and shown below, represents a transformation with a once famously obscure mechanism. A major step in the elucidation of that mechanism came[cite]10.1021/ja01157a034[/cite] using the then new technique of 14C radio-labelling, shortly after the atom bomb projects during WWII made 14CO2 readily available to researchers. Here I am going to start the process of applying the far more recent technique of quantitative quantum mechanical modelling to see if some of the proposed mechanisms stand up to its scrutiny.