Plot Your Own Quantum Gravity

 In today’s post I’m showing all of my calculations and most of the measurement data for my Quantum Gravity manuscript. The calculations showing the curvature of space-time due to steric constraints. Actually, the closest term in the literature is Van der Waals strain, or:

strain resulting from Van der Waals repulsion when two substituents in a molecule approach each other with a distance less than the sum of their Van der Waals radii. 

This isn’t exactly the same thing as steric drag, so I think I’ll still keep that term.

I’m not sure whether you, dear reader, have noticed it, but as soon as I chose not to pretend to be a physicist, but rather approached Quantum Gravity through the eyes of a chemist, the theory has become more intelligible. That is, a physicist requires equations to describe phenomena, but chemists often use equations to describe structures. And when I tried to begin with an elementary particle of energy and tried to explain my experimental results through that was too big of a step.

Rather, when I began with my experiments and tried to find the simplest equations describing the structures that I saw, I finally had the skills to do that. When I didn’t have to worry at all about phenomena, apart from steric effects. And steric effects are something a chemist learns very early on in their academic studies.

So, this is what the equations below represent: rotational motion around two axes caused by Van der Waals strain. And here Is the Excel file where you can test this by yourself:

All excels for CLP-NH3-EGDE manuscript 2025_10_25-v4.xlsx

Download XLSX • 1.39MB

Most of the interesting stuff can be found on the first three sheets. The rest of the sheets are experimental results: two of my own and one from the literature. I’m still working on adding the last two graphs from the manuscript into the Excel document. I think me not just doing it explains how disorganized I can be. I’ve been working on the one manuscript for five years, so I don’t have all the data neatly organized in one place, where I can just find what I need. I have the data all over the place and even though I have just accessed it a couple of days, or weeks, ago, I still don’t remember exactly where the data is. It won’t take too long, I hope, but just the fact that I can’t do it in second says something.

And as I’m talking about the same old manuscript, I’m running out of images to show, so for today’s image, I show an illustration from the steric effect page from Wikipedia:

The molecule you see above is tri-(tert-butyl)amine, an apparently theoretical compound, that is currently sterically too hard to make.