Exploring Chemistry in Four Dimensions
Simulations and speculations on what chemistry would be like in 4D space. The term “4D” gets abused a lot, but in this case I mean literally 4D, an imaginary sort of space in which sets of four mutually perpendicular directions can exist. I’d suggest starting reading in chronological order, because there are some dependencies between the posts.
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Meta: Thoughts On Blogging
This post will be even more rambley and less on topic than my normal posts, so beware. I wouldn’t go as far as to advise you to not read it, but I will say that for the sort of person I imagine as my target audience, I expect it to be much less interesting than…
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Nuclei
The internal details of the nuclei are mostly not very relevant to chemistry, since they are so much smaller than normal electron orbitals that they can usually be treated as point-like. However, nuclear physics is what determines which elements exist at all, and in what quantities, so I’ve been thinking a bit about how it…
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Magnetism
Magnetism behaves rather differently in 4D, both because it must be described as a bivector, and because it is one area where the electrons’ chirality is most apparent.
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Parameters
I said previously that the theory of chemistry kind of doesn’t have any free parameters. Here’s a more detailed explanation of what I mean by that. Also, this is another difference between 3D and 4D chemistry, since in 4D, there are parameters. Let’s start, as usual, with Schrödinger’s equation (for a 3D atom), in this…
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Scale
The differences in the way scale affects a system’s behaviour are some of the most important differences between 3D and 4D chemistry.
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Start at the Very Beginning
Deriving the spin states of electrons from QFT and representation theory.