Re: [Phys-l] internal/external conservative/nonconservative forces!?!?

[William Robertson <wrobert9@ix.netcom.com>]

On the other hand, chemistry texts sometimes avoid QM where it can be  
extremely helpful. I just finished helping my daughter through two  
semesters of organic chem. When she got to molecular orbital theory,  
she was completely confused. The text, which was quite good in many  
respects, discussed bonding and anti-bonding molecular orbitals and  
their associated energies, but never gave an underlying picture of  
what led to these two kinds of orbitals. I spent a half hour with my  
daughter, explaining basic concepts of wave functions and constructive  
and destructive interference. That's all it took for her to gain an  
understanding of molecular orbitals, while her classmates just  
memorized the material.

Bill



On Dec 15, 2010, at 6:58 PM, John Clement wrote:

> Working from QM descriptions of orbitals to explain
> many chemistry effects is like doing kinematics of race cars using the
> relativistic equations.  It is possible, but not what you want to do.