Synthetic path, choice

Figure 9.8 Magic triangle choice of synthetic path depends on three main...

It is a common experience in synthetic chemistry that a truly optimal ordering of a synthetic route may not be possible in the planning stage, but may have to determined experimentally. The precise information necessary for the complete and unambiguous evaluation of each step in a possible synthesis is hardly ever available. Nonetheless it is clearly wise to try to optimize a synthetic plan on the basis of available information before the experimental approach begins. Such an effort may suggest certain preliminary or "model" experiments that can be helpful in the choice or refinement of a synthetic plan. It is also obviously desirable to devise and consider alternate or bypass paths for each problematic step of a synthetic sequence. 

Because the objective of this treatise is to form a uniform nomenclature that spans all of chemistry, many of the starting premises that are the foundation of the disparate subdivisions of chemistry have been re-examined. These premises were mainly of a historical, rather than a rational, origin, and, in many instances have been shown to be inconsistent. In their place, choices have been made with a global, rather than a local, and with an analytic, rather than a synthetic, approach in mind. Beginning with the selection in Chapter 1 of a "primary path", the nomenclature being developed eliminates ... 

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