Peter Edwards has just given the 2015 Hofmann lecture here at Imperial on the topic of solvated electrons. An organic chemist knows this species as “e–” and it occurs in ionic compounds known as electrides; chloride = the negative anion of a chlorine atom, hence electride = the negative anion of an electron.

Recollect this earlier post on the topic of the Baeyer-Villiger reaction. In 1999 natural abundance kinetic isotope effects were reported and I set out to calculate the values predicted for a particular model constructed using Quantum mechanics. This comparison of measurement and calculation is nowadays a standard verification of both experiment and theory.

Open principles in the sciences in general and chemistry in particular are increasingly nowadays preached from funding councils down, but it can be more of a challenge to find innovative practitioners. Part of the problem perhaps is that many of the current reward systems for scientists do not always help promote openness.

The university sector in the UK has quality inspections of its research outputs conducted every seven years, going by the name of REF or Research Excellence Framework. The next one is due around 2020, and already preparations are under way! Here I describe how I have interpreted one of its strictures;

In the preceding post, I discussed the reaction between mCPBA (meta-chloroperbenzoic acid) and cyclohexanone, resulting in Baeyer-Villiger oxidation via a tetrahedral intermediate (TI). Dan Singleton, in whose group the original KIE (kinetic isotope measurements) were made, has kindly pointed out on this blog that his was a mixed-phase reaction, and that mechanistic comparison with homogenous solutions may not be […]

I have blogged before about the mechanism of this classical oxidation reaction. Here I further explore computed models, and whether they match the observed kinetic isotope effects (KIE) obtained using the natural-abundance method described in the previous post.

My PhD thesis involved determining kinetic isotope effects (KIE) for aromatic electrophilic substitution reactions in an effort to learn more about the nature of the transition states involved.

I am on a mission to persuade my colleagues that the statistical analysis of crystal structures is a useful teaching tool.

As I have noted elsewhere, Gilbert N. Lewis wrote a famous paper entitled “the atom and the molecule“, the centenary of which is coming up. In a short and rarely commented upon remark, he speculates about the shared electron pair structure of acetylene,  R-X≡X-R (R=H, X=C). It could, he suggests, take up three forms.

A lunchtime conversation with a colleague had us both bemoaning the distorting influence on chemistry of bibliometrics, h-indices and journal impact factors, all very much a modern phenomenon of scientific publishing.

The Bürgi–Dunitz angle is one of those memes that most students of organic chemistry remember. It hypothesizes the geometry of attack of a nucleophile on a trigonal unsaturated (sp2) carbon in a molecule such as ketone, aldehyde, ester, and amide carbonyl.