Quite a few threads have developed in this series of posts, and following each leads in rather different directions. In this previous post the comment was made that coordinating a carbon dication to the face of a cyclopentadienyl anion resulted in a monocation which had a remarkably high proton affinity.

The previous posts have seen how a molecule containing a hypervalent carbon atom can be designed by making a series of logical chemical connections.

The previous post talked about making links or connections. And part of the purpose for presenting this chemistry as a blog is to expose how these connections are made, or or less as it happens in real time (and not the chronologically sanitized version of discovery that most research papers are). So each post represents an evolution or mutation from the previous one.

Science is about making connections. And these can often be made between the most unlikely concepts. Thus in the posts I have made about pentavalent carbon , one can identify a series of conceptual connections.

In the previous two posts, I noted the recent suggestion of how a stable frozen S _N 2 transition state might be made. This is characterised by a central carbon with five coordinated ligands.

In this follow-up to the previous post, I will try to address the question what is the nature of the bonds in penta-coordinate carbon ? This is a difficult question to answer with any precision, largely because our concept of a bond derives from trying to define what the properties of the electrons located in the region between any two specified atoms are.

The bimolecular nucleophilic substitution reaction at saturated carbon is an icon of organic chemistry, and is better known by its mechanistic label, S _N 2 . It is normally a slow reaction, with half lives often measured in hours.

Chemistry can be very focussed nowadays. This especially applies to target-driven synthesis, where the objective is to make a specified molecule, in perhaps as an original manner as possible. A welcome, but not always essential aspect of such syntheses is the discovery of new chemistry.

The science journal is generally acknowledged as first appearing around 1665 with the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London and (simultaneously) the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. By the turn of the millennium, around 10,000 science and medical journals were estimated to exist.

One of the many clever things that clever people can do with the Web is harvest it, aggregate it, classify it etc. Its not just Google that does this sort of thing! Egon Willighagen is one of those clever people. He runs the Chemical blogspace which does all sorts of amazing things with blogs.

Chemical bonds can be assembled from components which chemists know as σ, π and δ. The blog poses the question whether any bonds can be constructed which use a fourth type of component, the φ.