I use today’s post as a writing exercise. That is, I’ll try to explain to you, my dear reader, that all gases are Van der Waals molecules. And I’ll also try to convince you that the formation of these curious Van der Waals molecules isn’t caused by anything describable by the wave equation, the workhorse of quantum mechanics, but rather that the wave equation treats these entities as a single particle. And so should it, because the elementary particles (dots) in the Van der Waals molecules are fully shared, with a shared orbital, where the elementary particles move in circular arcs in the scale of a single atom, but also along the surface of the supramolecular shell.
But just rereading what I wrote, I know I have to try to be clearer to have any chance to make anyone understand the concept. Perhaps we need to begin with what I’m not trying to say. Rather than trying to explain the orbital of the elementary particles being an electron orbital, I claim that what is orbiting is all of the molecules: both the electrons and the protons (with the quarks that make up the proton are splitting artefacts, when the atom is smashed) being continuous pieces of arced strings, where the string continues seamlessly from one atom to another.
I’d be tempted to compare this approach to the existing understanding of electrons and protons, but having looked at these old interpretations of what elementary particles are, I’ve had to ditch the idea. The current way to describe matter makes it impossible to imagine there to be elementary particles that make up both light and matter and is thus, in effect too vague. Rather, I make the bold assumption that the well-known mass-energy equivalence means that both matter and light are made up of the same elementary particles. From the property of light, we can then know that these elementary particles move at the speed of light and cannot be slowed down. Next, we just make the leap of faith that there are only one size of elementary particles. At the moment this is still a postulate: that is, I cannot prove this. For the next step, we don’t need a leap of faith, just common sense. We assume that the elementary particles cannot go through each other. That is, when in contact, the elementary particles must move aside. This causes the elementary particles to not move in a straight line, but either in arced trajectories (in matter), or in helical trajectories (in light).
But don’t I need more evidence for this? Well yes I do, but the evidence is just about everywhere. I just have to pick an instance and see whether this interpretation has good (or better) predictive powers than existing theories. Now we should go back to the definition of a Van der Waals molecule.
A Van der Waals molecule is a weakly bound complex of atoms or molecules held together by intermolecular attractions such as Van der Waals forces or by hydrogen bonds.[1] The name originated in the beginning of the 1970s when stable molecular clusters were regularly observed in molecular beam microwave spectroscopy.
You might recognize this definition as what I’ve been talking about in the past posts. Here the only difference is that these clusters are comprised of relatively small number of molecules, such as 100 water molecules used in the illustration of the Wikipedia article.
So what is the difference between the above Van der Waals molecule and the Van der Waals molecule of almost 3 μm in size, that I describe in the counterevidence paper? The answer is nothing. The only reason why I didn’t refer to this structure in the original paper was that I didn’t know these structures were already known. It’s amazing that no one working on them didn’t put two and two together and come up with the concept of supramolecular shell themselves. But I guess the reason is that to do so would need one to reject the probabilistic interpretation of matter and the concept that gas molecules move freely.
Now that we know that the lowest energy state of hydrogen could be explained by a large Van der Waals molecule, we can begin to evaluate whether the dot-string model makes sense in this context. As I noted in one of the earlier posts (I’m too lazy to check in which one), the assumption of the Van der Waals bonding of two hydrogen molecules is the formation of rigid quasi-linear (quasi, being ‘almost’ in science jargon) rods. My current hunch is that it is the role of the electron to make the structure bend, or to introduce the ‘quasi’-part into the linearity. As I don’t know exactly how this happens, I’m hoping that the reviewers won’t require a proper explanation for this electron-caused bending.
I would so wish to not need to hand-wave the next steps. I’ve already mentioned the Sidney Harris cartoon below. But being a chemist, I’m not that good at mathematics. If I really try, I can get there in the end (hopefully), but pretty simple math, from a theoretical physics perspective, stumps me.
But today was productive. Before I started writing this post, I didn’t know that Van der Waals molecules were a well-known entity. This means that I don’t really have to invent anything new for the counterevidence paper, apart from the new elementary particle. Everything regarding the supramolecular chemistry of the structures is perfectly within the existing theoretical framework.
So, easy-peasy. How hard could it be to introduce a new elementary particle and claim that all previous elementary particles are only quasi-elementary? Perhaps I should revisit the miracle part before submitting a revised manuscript.
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