Introduction It’s no secret that humans are not always rational. Although innately possessing the capacity for complex and abstract reasoning, strongly-held beliefs and cognitive biases often lead people to use that ability selectively and/or to employ it in the defense of unfounded ideas via specious motivated reasoning.[1][2][3] One of the […]
This is a little something I wrote examining some of the relatively recent research on the role of quantum coherence in the energy transfer process in photosynthesis. My original target audience was the director of the Center for Quantum Information and Control (CQuIC), and as such, it’s written at a […]
Introduction Whether one’s principle area of engagement happens to be science, politics, social issues, executive decisions in business, or some combination of those, one of the first things most people learn about the art of logical argumentation is the existence of several informal logical fallacies. Given the frequency with which […]
Six families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting won a legal victory against internet and radio personality, Alex Jones, the conspiracy shock jock host of Infowars: the platform on which Jones alleged that the shooting at Sandy Hook was staged by crisis actors as a ploy to motivate […]
Van der Waals forces Another set of intermolecular interactions is the Van der Waals forces, which are primarily associated with non-polar molecules. They arise because of short-lived induced dipole moments which occur even in non-polar molecules. These are also sometimes referred to as London Dispersion Forces. The repulsive forces between […]
Hydrogen Bonding A particularly important type of dipole-dipole interaction is hydrogen bonding. It’s the main reason for the stability of the double-helix secondary structure of DNA, the unusual phase diagram of water, and the secondary structure of proteins in our bodies. Strictly speaking, hydrogen bonds are a special case of […]
Ion-Dipole Interactions and Hydrophilicity Ion-dipole forces are generally stronger than dipole-dipole interactions because at least one of their participants is an ion, which means it has a net electric charge, whereas dipole-dipole forces involve polar molecules with no net electric charge. These interactions explain why ionic compounds tend to be […]
Dipole-dipole interactions Many covalently bonded molecules have a net neutral electric charge, but do not distribute their charge evenly. Some parts of their structure have greater electron density than others. This is again a result of differences in electronegativity. For example, chlorine is more electronegative than carbon. Consequently, bonds between […]
Ion-ion interactions Recall that ions are atoms or molecules that have lost or gained one or more electrons with respect to their electrically neutral counter-parts, such that they have a net electric charge. As a result, two or more ions can exert electrostatic forces on each other. This is the […]
Electrostatics Recall that electrostatics is the study of stationary electric charges. Charged particles are characterized as either positive or negative. Like charges repel, whereas opposite charges attract. Symmetries in the laws of electromagnetism imply that these roles could be reversed with minimal consequence to our theoretical understanding or its pertinence […]
