Killing My Darlings

In literature there is a phrase “killing one’s darlings”.

You kill your darlings when you decide to get rid of an unnecessary storyline, character, or sentences in a piece of creative writing—elements you may have worked hard to create but that must be removed for the sake of your overall story.

This is what happened to me. And my darling was a very dear darling indeed! I had labored with mathematics and turned equations over and over and came up with a very credible shape for the hydrogen molecule. You see, my quest for the theory of everything began with the concept of the hydrogen orbital being comprised of strings folded into simple shapes. And the simplest shape that I could fathom was this:

This is the figure that I’ve been dragging along with all the different versions of the Theory of Everything manuscript. The figure that I thought would surely be correct because it was so simple and elegant. But as sometimes happens, something even simpler and more elegant can come along that changes everything. And this something simple is the helical petal/teardrop orbital that I derided in my last post.

Just a day ago I was saying that this shape cannot stay folded, which is why it cannot be what I was looking for. Except when I started looking at the structure, it started making much more sense than the original shape. You see, the one thing that had been bothering me for a very long time was that the original structure had circular arcs with two curvatures. I couldn’t for the life of me come up with a good explanation of why there was this shift. I had always hand-waved it away.

However, if I take two petal/teardrop orbitals and fuse them together, something wonderful happens: I get the same logic as the original shape, but this time with a helical orbital with always the same curvature.

I can color the two orbitals in a way where it becomes obvious that the two orbitals, when fused are separate, but comprised of two loops that are compressed together.

In fact, I should display the orbital as a succession of these helical spherical loops, but I’m currently having some issues with Blender freezing when working with these structures, so you can settle for a simpler structure.

There is still a possibility that the helical equation is only true in the case of a supramolecular shell of hydrogen molecules and that the more complex structure with circular arcs is still true when hydrogen is present momentarily as a free H2 molecule. As far as I understand, free H2 molecules can exist, at least briefly.

However, I think I will just lose the more complex structure from the manuscript, as getting rid of it simplifies the manuscript considerably. You avoid a ton of uncomfortable questions from the reviewers this way. The only slightly annoying thing about this is that I need to yet again change both the main Theory of Everything -manuscript and its supplementary information.

But it’s going to be worth it. Simplicity is king, and this is as simple as it can get.