Molecular Geometry Quotes

On my return to Pittsburgh, I resolved to go back to the fundamental problems of electronic structure that I had contemplated abstractly many years earlier.

Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.

It is more likely that more than a century will pass before we know the structure of the chemical atoms as thoroughly as we do our solar system.

I started my scientific work by putting forward a hypothesis on the arrangement of atoms in nitrogen-containing molecules.

The citation for the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry reads, 'for contribution to the knowledge of electronic structures and geometry of molecules, especially free radicals,' and therefore implies that the Prize has been awarded for a long series of studies extending practically over my whole scientific life.

It does not seem, however, that organic chemists were much worried about barriers to rotation in organic molecules in general at that time because there was no technique available to demonstrate the phenomenon experimentally.

It turned out that the buckyball, the soccer ball, was something of a Rosetta stone of an infinite new class of molecules.

The main thread of my work is structure property relations and materials. If you have certain atoms, why do they attract each other? Why do they make compounds? Why do they do what they do?

For polyatomic free radicals and ions, one is dependent both for the ground states and the excited states on the study of electronic spectra to obtain the shapes and the geometrical parameters.

The detailed geometry of the coenzyme molecule as a whole is fascinating in its complexity.

Diamond, for all its great beauty, is not nearly as interesting as the hexagonal plane of graphite. It is not nearly as interesting because we live in a three-dimensional space, and in diamond, each atom is surrounded in all three directions in space by a full coordination.

Many transition states have a well-defined preferred geometrical requirement.

The essential principles of the three-dimensional structure of organic molecules had been correctly formulated by the first Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Jacobus van't Hoff, as early as 1874.

We may, I believe, anticipate that the chemist of the future who is interested in the structure of proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides, and other complex substances with high molecular weight will come to rely upon a new structural chemistry, involving precise geometrical relationships among the atoms in the molecules and the rigorous application of the new structural principles, and that great progress will be made, through this technique, in the attack, by chemical methods, on the problems of biology and medicine.

The chemist, whose science is immediately concerned with the combinations of atoms, has rarely found it necessary to discuss their shapes, and gives them no particular forms in his diagrams. That does not mean that the shapes are unimportant, but rather that the older methods could not define them.

This simple idea served to provide information on the geometrical shape of reacting molecules, and I was able to make the role of the frontier orbitals in chemical reactions more distinct through visualization, by drawing their diagrams.