I’m quite frankly disappointed in this one. The idea that you could get unusual compounds at pressures high enough to distort the outer electron orbitals should be more than trivially obvious to anyone with even a smidgen of P-chem, and further should be modelable with computers these days. This is what happens when you need to get papers published to advance your career, instead of doing research that’s actually important.
[edit] And classical chemistry? This guy is talking about ‘classical’ chemistry in a 3 million PSI environment? There is nothing at all remotely classical about that, and for the researcher to even mention the octet rule borders on fraudulent. Recommend title change to “Invented Truth” instead.
Indeed! The notion of the octet rule being a “foundation of chemistry” when boron compounds typically have an incomplete octet and phosphorus and sulphur compounds (like SF_6) often exceed the octet… I guess you could call this “classical chemistry” in the sense of “classical physics”—a lie that covers most of the bases and gets corrected a couple years later for those who are interested enough to keep studying.
At the most trivial level, look at wikipedia’s article on diamond, the phase change diagram in particular. Diamond starts to be thermodynamically preferred over graphite at around 100k atmospheres, and has been known about for a century.
For a 2012 paper, there’s this. Note that the first thing in the paper is the unquestioned statement “High pressure can fundamentally alter the bonding patterns of light elements and their compounds, leading to the unexpected formation of materials with unusual chemical and physical properties.”
Here’s a 2006 paper from Germany that directly looks at how high pressures affect the chemistry of alkalai metals, including sodium.
And a 1998 reference book containing five hundred pages of high pressure chemistry notes, including a handful of sodium compounds.
Seriously, nothing new here. Vastly overblown and irresponsible hype.
Thanks. I’m wondering now if there are no (more? diamonds are good for something) useful compounds to made under high pressure, or if it’s just a matter more time being needed for research.
There’s plenty of neat new stuff to be discovered in high pressure regimes, and I’m sure there will be reseach on it for quite some time.
I wasn’t objecting to the paper itself, I object to the vastly overblown hype. The research itself is probably valid if relatively uninteresting, but it certainly does not live up to the claims given.
I’m quite frankly disappointed in this one. The idea that you could get unusual compounds at pressures high enough to distort the outer electron orbitals should be more than trivially obvious to anyone with even a smidgen of P-chem, and further should be modelable with computers these days. This is what happens when you need to get papers published to advance your career, instead of doing research that’s actually important.
[edit] And classical chemistry? This guy is talking about ‘classical’ chemistry in a 3 million PSI environment? There is nothing at all remotely classical about that, and for the researcher to even mention the octet rule borders on fraudulent. Recommend title change to “Invented Truth” instead.
Indeed! The notion of the octet rule being a “foundation of chemistry” when boron compounds typically have an incomplete octet and phosphorus and sulphur compounds (like SF_6) often exceed the octet… I guess you could call this “classical chemistry” in the sense of “classical physics”—a lie that covers most of the bases and gets corrected a couple years later for those who are interested enough to keep studying.
A lot of things seem obvious after they’ve been thought out and demonstrated.
Do you have any earlier sources for the idea?
At the most trivial level, look at wikipedia’s article on diamond, the phase change diagram in particular. Diamond starts to be thermodynamically preferred over graphite at around 100k atmospheres, and has been known about for a century.
For a 2012 paper, there’s this. Note that the first thing in the paper is the unquestioned statement “High pressure can fundamentally alter the bonding patterns of light elements and their compounds, leading to the unexpected formation of materials with unusual chemical and physical properties.”
Here’s a 2006 paper from Germany that directly looks at how high pressures affect the chemistry of alkalai metals, including sodium.
And a 1998 reference book containing five hundred pages of high pressure chemistry notes, including a handful of sodium compounds.
Seriously, nothing new here. Vastly overblown and irresponsible hype.
Thanks. I’m wondering now if there are no (more? diamonds are good for something) useful compounds to made under high pressure, or if it’s just a matter more time being needed for research.
There’s plenty of neat new stuff to be discovered in high pressure regimes, and I’m sure there will be reseach on it for quite some time.
I wasn’t objecting to the paper itself, I object to the vastly overblown hype. The research itself is probably valid if relatively uninteresting, but it certainly does not live up to the claims given.