How many times did you get stuck while studying different chemical theories?
Have you ever had a feeling that you know everything on the topic but you can’t accept just a small exception of a rule because this exception destroys your understanding of all the rest of the theory which you are trying to grasp?
Unlike other natural and mathematical sciences, chemistry is full of deficient ideas which are not able to explain all of the details of an issue. Yes, the subject that you have adored for all of the education period is imperfect. But fortunately when a theory is not working we can use another one instead. To explain it better let me give some examples.
Till 1930s nobody could explain why oxygen was a diamagnetic gas with the help of usual theory of atomic orbitals. No atoms in the oxygen molecule have unpaired electrons so it was supposed to be absolutely paramagnetic. Eventually scientist could conclude that using atomic orbital theory to understand this phenomenon is unsuccessful. Instead, it is better to consider oxygen via molecular orbitals. According to this idea oxygen has two unpaired electrons on its outer shell. Using another mathematical approach and way of representing of molecular structure helped scientists to solve the problem.
The way scientists try to converge and combine different theories to describe phenomenons in nature is similar to the way designers … sew clothes! Have you ever seen a dress made of a squared cardboard box? Of course, not. Human’s body has a very complicated shape and you cannot cover it with just a single cloth. Designer should be very smart to manage to sew all the pieces of textile together so that it will represent all the beauties of the human body. That’s why I think that chemistry is close to design & technology. When the issue of a research is too confusing and one theory is not capable to cover all of it, chemists take another idea, put it near the first one, stretch them together and sew it into the one entire principle!
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