Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows • Hacker News Board

Re: Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

#41

Post by whattheheckheck » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 2:05 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #22

nomel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had incredible difficulties with Chemistry, more than any other subject, because most everything was hand waved away, requiring mostly rote memorization. I could never get an intuitive understanding, partly because my profs seemingly refusing to think about things from a physics perspective. My physics prof was able to help with some of it. It was very odd. If I would have stuck with it, would things have improved?

Not in undergraduate chemistry at least. Maybe chem majors had it different. Organic chemistry 1 was basically rote memorization of various reactions and catalysts and their required conditions. Exam questions would be some organic molecule start and some organic molecule end result and you'd have to draw out each and every intermediary step to get to that end result. Organic chemistry 2 was exactly the same just mor…

And people clutch their pearls at ai not really understanding anything when people describe university experiences and lessons like this...

Re: Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

#42

Post by marcosdumay » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 2:17 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28

marcosdumay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that people simulate chemistry on computers, right?

Yes. We also simulate cosmology and quantum systems and play Sims.

The difference being that the chemical simulations get the correct answers on most conditions. And probably the few they miss are because of the simulation limitations, not of the underlying model.

Those other simulators aren't there to tell you the result. Instead people put the result in to find how the simulation behaves in cosmology, and don't care about them in Sims.

Re: Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

#43

Post by andsoitis » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 2:20 AM UTC

nerdsniper wrote: post #12

aaaronic wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. It depends which branch of chemistry you world have chosen to go down. Physical Chemistry certainly improves a fair amount of the hand waving, but even there the underlying physics is simplified fairly often (as I understand it — I went straight Physics and dabbled in Chemistry from the other side).

As a chemical engineer, one of the signs of maturity was myself and each of my classmates individually coming to accept and embrace the inevitable “magic coefficient”. The curious always wanted to know why some magic coefficient was there. Where did it come from? How is it measured / calculated? How to derive the magic coefficient? Eventually you learn that it’s turtles all the down. You can pick apart the magic coef…

That’s a wonderful way express that idea. Thanks for that!

Re: Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

#44

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 2:28 AM UTC

deadbabe wrote: post #38

nanolith wrote: post #14

Wait... wasn't it already understood that relativity influences electron orbits of heavy elements? I clearly remember being taught some of this in physics, in the mid-noughties. For instance, we know that gold gets its color from relativistic effects. https://physics.aps.org/articles/v10/s3

I don’t get it, someone explain? Doesn’t everything get color from relativistic effects?

[deleted]

Re: Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

#45

Post by nine_k » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 2:32 AM UTC

compass_copium wrote: post #29

nerdsniper wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a chemical engineer, one of the signs of maturity was myself and each of my classmates individually coming to accept and embrace the inevitable “magic coefficient”. The curious always wanted to know why some magic coefficient was there. Where did it come from? How is it measured / calculated? How to derive the magic coefficient? Eventually you learn that it’s turtles all the down. You can pick apart the magic coef…

Are "magic coefficients" not just a result of the units you are using? Like how h-bar is 1 if you are using natural units

It's a different kind. Say, some reaction should run 1.23x faster theoretically. But the theory is approximate (in order to be tractable at all), and so are its predictions. This particular element is special in its own way, diverging from the theory a bit, even though its neighbors fit well. That particular bond requires a bit less energy to break than the theory predicts, due to a complex interplay of bonds nearby, understood only qualitatively. Etc, etc.

A general theory of everything might describe all of it from first principles, without magic coefficients. But likely computing it would take a decade with current methods.

Re: Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

#46

Post by 14 » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 2:45 AM UTC

I had a couple drinks so having one of those moments. I am always so fascinated by the science and experiments done to prove what we know. I consider myself at least of average intelligence probably slightly above but the things scientists research and solve always blows me away.

My guess to the Fermi paradox is that there actually are intelligent life across the universe but just like in Star Trek they stay quiet until we reach a certain level of knowledge.

Re: Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

#47

Post by isomorphic_duck » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 2:59 AM UTC

DiscourseFan wrote: post #34

ajkjk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that the difficulty curve becomes, like, superexponential if you try to do the actual math. Fairly elementary atoms require the full theory of quantum mechanics to justify rigorously, and anything more complicated than that requires huge bodies of specialist knowledge on approximation schemes (I assume; I haven't studied them, but given that helium already requires approximations I'm assuming t…

But oftentimes theoretical chemistry is not as important as what we get out of experiments because unlike physics, which attempts to derive general laws of nature, chemistry has to deal with the nitty gritty of the diversity of actual miscroscopic interactions of things. Any theory that is not entirely rigorous or even has slight room for an exception will be ignored by necessity, and physics is chock full of such ex…

how does biology depend on "dogma and mysticism"? I am really curious - a Google search yielded nothing much relevant.

Re: Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

#48

Post by waldrews » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 3:08 AM UTC

Very farsighted, after working as a patent clerk, to lay claim on such a foundational technology. Back in the day, they must've been like, oh, so Mercury blocks the sun at the wrong time, but where's the commercial value - and now every chemical company throughout the universe is about to get a bill every time they make something more complex than hydrogen gas.

Meanwhile, Galilean relativity has long gone out of patent, and people on board planes and other vehicles just move around like they were in a stationary reference frame paying no royalties.

Re: Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

#49

Post by chanakya » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 3:10 AM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #10

nomel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had incredible difficulties with Chemistry, more than any other subject, because most everything was hand waved away, requiring mostly rote memorization. I could never get an intuitive understanding, partly because my profs seemingly refusing to think about things from a physics perspective. My physics prof was able to help with some of it. It was very odd. If I would have stuck with it, would things have improved?

Part of the problem is that the difficulty curve becomes, like, superexponential if you try to do the actual math. Fairly elementary atoms require the full theory of quantum mechanics to justify rigorously, and anything more complicated than that requires huge bodies of specialist knowledge on approximation schemes (I assume; I haven't studied them, but given that helium already requires approximations I'm assuming t…

As you move up levels starting from physics (eg. physics-> chemistry-> biochemistry-> biology), each layer has several "laws" which are generally pretty established, but a causal connection between the layers is hard to provide satisfactorily. And that is how I think it'll always be, else we'll be expecting to explain Shakespeare's plays using physics.

Also, this is where Rutherford's "all science is either physics or stamp collecting" holds a lot of water. As you move up the science layers, the laws themselves become less mathematically rigid until by the time you get to the social sciences, explanations are all hand-waving, and all "laws" are statistical at best and empirical.

Re: Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

#50

Post by zkmon » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 3:27 AM UTC

In general, anything that is observed to be true at a smaller scale or context can't be extended to much larger scales. That involves assumptions on logic and mathematics to be homogenous across all scales. A pure theoretical extrapolation without bounds is quite common in mathematics, such as proof by induction etc.

Also, the foundational axioms of logic themselves could be valid only at a scale that is familiar to humans. For example, the strict bounday between true and false might get blurred and things could be true and false at the same time at other scale.