Transmuting Quantum Mechanics Into Chemistry

APPLICATION OF RESULTS OBTAINED FROM THE QUANTUM MECHANICS AND FROM A THEORY OF PARAMAGNETIC SUSCEPTIBILITy TO THE STRUCTURE OF MOLECULES By Linus Paxhano 

The Interaction of Simple Atoms.— The discussion of the wave equation for the hydrogen molecule by Hdtler and London, Sugiura, and Wang showed that two normal hydrogen atoms can interact in either of two ways, one of which gives rise to repulsion with no molecule formation, the other 

FIGURE 323. The first article in the series The Nature of the Chemical Bond by Linus Pauling (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 53 1367, 1931). These articles formed the foundation of his book of the same title (Ithaca, 1939), in turn the core of twentieth-century structural chemistry. 

Although the title has an almost magical sound to it, the nature of the chemical bond was truly the domain Pauling began to explore. He formulated the concept of hybridization to explain how localized atomic orbitals best overlap to form two-electron bonds. The Kossel-Lewis-Langmuir picture explained ionic and covalent bonding in terms of the octet rule. An interesting question was 

Pauling s audacious scientific career included the use of first principles and molecular models to intuit the structure of the protein a-keratin. He also was the first to characterize the basis for a disease at the molecular level—sickle-cell anemia—the result of a substitution of one amino acid for another in hemoglobin. 

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