Dec
29
Whay are all organic, inorganic and physical chemistry textbooks wrong?
Filed Under Physical Chemistry
All organic, inorganic and physical chemistry textbooks (that I have gotten my hands on) have been wrong about orbital theory. Valence shell electron pair repulsion (VSEPR) theory includes the hybridization rules we all learned (sp^3 hybrids, etc), but they don’t exist. Worse, no textbooks give a disclaimer that VSEPR theory is a simplification that help visualize and solve problems, but hybrids don’t exist in nature. If you study carbon-carbon bonds (i.e., photoemission spectroscopy) you will clearly resolve separate p and s orbitals for carbon; you won’t see a mix like reasoned in hybridization theory. So why do we still teach this? VSEPR came about in the late 50s, and this contradiction has been know about since the late 60s, but every textbook remains wrong. Why?
Comments
4 Responses to “Whay are all organic, inorganic and physical chemistry textbooks wrong?”
Leave a Reply
mainly for a lack of a better alternative, it still portrays the basic concept fairly well, its really just a name. And I’m sure there are issues in semantics on just about every subject. (and if I cared enough I’d research and find some examples =p)
Omg thats very complicated man..
Hmm, yeah for me i think some of the textbooks are wrong in their theory.. they only provides basic theory for students.
In practical, most of the chemical reactions are not perfect..
I learnt about Carbon-Carbon and Carbon=Carbon bonds… yeah and those were just basic knowledge bout them..
It’s a good way to represent a “truth” that nobody wants to explain for those level chem students. Organic chem students and most inorganic people don’t need to know the details of bond theories to understand their lessons, so it is put off until later.
You’re right. They are essentially outdated compared with something like Molecular orbital theory. Still though, not one theory truly represents the entire picture; VSEPR works great for explaining molecular geometries of a lot of molecules but it lacks in explaining sufficiently d-orbitals while MO theory is good in explaining how electrons bond and certain phenomena (e.g. why oxygen is paramagnetic). Still though, MO theory has its problems which I won’t get into.
In short, all of these models are explained because the one part that they were originally designed for, they do it somewhat decently that using more sophisticated and “correct” models would utterly fail at.