MARGINALIA
Bonding to Hydrogen
The simplest molecule, made for connection
Roald Hoffmann
Treat Me Right
I had a small, almost disastrous encounter with the molecule again, right after earning my Ph.D. Well, spiritually, not materially. An approximate molecular orbital method I and some fellow theoreticians working with W. N. Lipscomb had devised, called the “extended Hückel” theory, did well on some larger, organic molecules, giving reasonable geometries and relative energies. But when I tried it on dihydrogen, the molecule collapsed—the calculated internuclear distance going to zero. That was a shock. It took some courage to go on with a method that could not get right (for good reasons, as we found out) the simplest molecule in the world.
Or, just maybe, this small apparent disaster helped. For it made me and my students rely less on numbers than on understanding. On we did go, and got a lot of chemistry with this deficient method.
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