I once heard someone give starting with the periodic table as an example of starting at an excessively fundamental level in worldbuilding. I’m starting before that anyway. The information represented by the periodic table, its set of elements, their valencies, electronegativities and sizes, isn’t really enough to deduce the rest of chemistry from. To do that, you need Schrödinger’s equation. From it (or the relativistic version it’s an approximation of, Dirac’s equation), the periodic table and everything else follows.
What I find fascinating about this, apart from the enormous amount of complexity that follows from such a simple basis, is that it makes it possible to simulate how chemistry would work if the underlying theory were changed. Schrödinger’s equation, as it applies to chemistry, kind of doesn’t have any free parameters to tweak though. There are the masses of the nuclei, which affect the thermal properties of substances, and the fine structure constant, which is important when relativistic effects appear (mostly heavy elements and magnetic effects), but the most basic properties, like which molecules are stable, are kind of unaffected by any numerical parameters. This means the only way to change how chemistry works is to change something more fundamental.
I have some other ideas which I may explore at some point, but the main alternative model of chemistry that I’ve spent the most time on is four-dimensional. This turns out to affect much more than just the possible shapes of molecules. My current plan for this blog is to explain what I’ve found about this model of 4D chemistry, and how I found it out. This is just an interesting mathematical/worldbuilding exercise, and I’m pretty sure it has no actual applications, but I’ve learnt a lot about real chemistry and physics from it, and maybe you will too.
Comment Policy
I’ve been getting some comments I’m genuinely not sure whether they’re spam, so generally I will be deleting any comments that don’t seem clearly related to what they’re commenting on. I know modern AIs could clear that bar, but it seems at least my spammers aren’t putting in that much effort.