Subject: 100 years of E=hv : a late contribution

From: "Alexandre Hocquet" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 14:11:30 +0100

Dear CCLers,

To complete the thread on quanta celebration, you can check out the
conference "Le Siècle des Quanta"  organized by the Société Française de
Physique at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, at the following website.

http://webcast.in2p3.fr/pif6/programme.html

 The sessions have been filmed and are available on the web.
 The contribution by Peter Atkins is in English.
His viewpoint on what he defines as chemical physics is certainly debatable
but still interesting for our computational chemistry community.

I would be very happy to hear your comments about his talk.

I will summarize if there is sufficient interest.

happy anniversary !

Alexandre Hocquet
Laboratoire de Physicochimie Biomoléculaire et Cellulaire
UPRESA CNRS 7033
Case courrier 138, 4 Place Jussieu, F-75252 Paris Cedex 05, France.
Enseignement : [email-masked]
Recherche : [email-masked]
Personnel : [email-masked]
fax : 33 1 44 27 75 60

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From: Eric Scerri <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 11:58:35 -0800

Thank you Alexandre for the reference to the Atkins lecture.

I just listened/watched it.  Apart from being mildly entertaining 
because of Atkins' irritation with the projectionist and apart from 
giving a historical overview of the field (much of it well known) the 
lecture offers nothing new.

I have an article on Atkins' views on electronic structure and his 
views on the periodicity of the elements
which was published in "Foundations of Chemistry".  I would be happy 
to send this to anyone who might be interested.  It is a pdf file. 
The last time I did this I was informed that many people use Unix and 
so could not read it.  In case you can here it is.  Atkins informs me 
that me might reply to this if he can find the time!

I was also amused by the cavalier style in which Atkins declares that 
as a result of the accurate calculations on He in 1958 "That was it 
for atoms" and we could then move on to molecules.

Also his equally cavalier mention of Clementi's introduction of small 
'refinements' such as correlation energy.

And this was after making the standard jokes about the remark by 
Dirac whereby all of chemistry is in principle solved.

regards,

-- 
Eric Scerri ,
Visiting Professor,
UCLA,
Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry,
607 Charles E. Young Drive East,
Los Angeles,  CA 90095-1569
USA

E-mail :   [email-masked]
tel:  310 206 7443
fax:  310 206 2061
Web Page:    http://www.chem.ucla.edu/dept/Faculty/scerri/index.html

Editor  of  Foundations of Chemistry
http://www.wkap.nl/journalhome.htm/1386-4238

Also see International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry
http://www.georgetown.edu/earleyj/ISPC.html