I'm thinking about a butterfly shaped CO4, with each oxygen atom linked with the carbon and another oxygen, or a cyclic O3 (instead of the unstable, but existing, ozone molecule) ?
Reminds me of a story about a physics professor who asked a chemist if he could synthesise CCl4. 'I can give you a bottle of it' says the chemist. But, says the physicist, the samples you have are tetrahedral in shape... I want it flat!
Daniel,
Instead of playing with the ball & stick models of molecules, I suggest you play with a good toy model of the molecular orbitals themselves,best in a computer (perturbation theory calculations can be derived easily by computation for small molecules). You will see that these theoretical molecules have very improbable molecular orbitals and are expected to relax (if they will ever occur) almost immediately to their natural existing forms.
Another idea would be, for instance, to compare the physically existing cyclic C-C-O and the physically non-existing cyclic O-O-O.
Reminds me of a story about a physics professor who asked a chemist if he could synthesise CCl4. 'I can give you a bottle of it' says the chemist. But, says the physicist, the samples you have are tetrahedral in shape... I want it flat!
what do you mean ? even the stick&ball model + basic symmetry considerations say CCl4 should be tetrahedral... by the way since I got the attention of so many eminent physicists, does any of you know what the colour of di-oxygen (or di-hydrogen) crystal is ?
Daniel; I think you didn't actually understand the CCl4 joke? (And H2 has to be colourless).
The joke was ( Michael is right) that physicists can construct an unreal situation... like a planar CCl4. Chemists live in the real world. Sorry if that was lost on you... Most chemists would have found it funny. I will not bother you with 'anti-body jokes'
Michael ..you asked for this....
So.. how do you catch a lion in the Sahara desert? Well there are loads of answers from different types of scientists. The Zoologist says.. 'there aren't any Lions in the Sahara'. To which the Statiscian replies ' But a circus has to travel there sometime.. and a lion might escape' Then the Mathematican devises a plan... and builds a cage ... (logic says that the lion is in the cage, or out of the cage). So if the lion isn't in the cage the mathematican simply has to invert the set of the cage with that of the desert and.. voila.. lion in cage. But the Physical Chemist has another approach and designs a membrane permeamble to sand but not to lions and decides to sweep the desert.
This could be an endless joke
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