Feb 9, 2005

Jonathan Goodman

Posted in Chemistry at 7:19 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment

Jonathan Goodman tells me that “Most highly strained molecules have small rings, and most explosive molecules have nitrogen and oxygen atoms close to carbon and each other so they can rearrange easily.” However, when he asks chemists if they can think of a molecule which would spontaneously fall apart, even though it contains only carbon and hydrogen, there are four bonds to every carbon and one to each hydrogen, there are only single bonds, and there are no rings, the usual response is that all such molecules should be stable. His paper shows that this is incorrect, even for rather simple molecules.” Check out his paper on this in J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2005, 45, 81-87 (DOI: 10.1021/ci0497657) You can access the paper by pasting the DOI into the sciencebase DOI lookup tool

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