Where did Chemistry go wrong

The art of chemistry developed from the practice of alchemy, which was aimed at the production of certain potent agents, which in their pure form, were believed to transmute base metals into gold and hold the key to human immortality. The theories behind alchemy were closely linked to the occult and recognized sympathetic links between a special number of gods, and the same number of heavenly bodies, metals, minerals and the manipulations of alchemy. As a working hypothesis matter was considered made up of the three elements mercury, sulphur and salt, subject to the activity of spirits, such as fire. 

In modern science there are three distinct theories of general applicability and although not always obvious they have a common root. All of current science can be understood on the hand of the theory of general relativity, quantum theory and the periodicity of matter. The first of these is commonly associated with physics, the latter with chemistry, and quantum theory features in different guises in both physics and chemistry. However, this distinction is completely arbitrary and artificial. It can be argued that the three theories separately find common ground in the structure of space-time, also known as the vacuum. 

This conclusion opens up the intriguing possibility that all of science can be reduced to a single fundamental concept. The philosophy of reductionism makes exactly this assumption. It implies that the facts of biology can be reduced to the properties of chemical molecules, which in turn reduce to the atoms of physics, the nuclei of nuclear physics, to elementary particles and eventually to the symmetry of space-time or the vacuum. 

Although the reductionist argument is of obvious validity, the inverse process of constructionism is impossible. This philosophy assumes that the properties of more complex systems can be predicted from those of a simpler one. By this logic theoretical chemists of the 20th century have persistently tried to reconstruct chemical behaviour from the fundamental equations of wave mechanics. To date the most powerful computers on the planet have failed consistently to reconstruct even the most fundamental property in all of chemistry, namely the structure of a molecule. Computations, known as quantum chemistry, all have to rely on the kick-start of an assumed molecular structure. 

Even the layout of the periodic table of the elements cannot be derived from quantum theory without assuming an empirical concept, known as the Pauli exclusion principle. An alternative derivation (4.6.1) through number theory predicts the correct periodicity, without assuming the exclusion principle. In fact, the operation of an exclusion principle can be inferred from this periodic structure and reduced to a property of space, but it remains impossible to reconstruct or predict from more basic principles. 

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