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One Number to Describe a Chemical Bond
After hundreds of years, chemistry returns to the occult — thanks numerology!
Talk to any scholar, read any text, hell, scroll down a bit and read my article, and you’ll quickly note that chemistry has its roots in alchemy, which many associate with the occult. While new looks at the alchemical texts have revealed some insight that alchemists weren’t as kooky as initially thought, there is some … strangeness to those writings. In a weird twist of irony, the field of chemistry, during its course of developing theory on the nature of the chemical bond, takes a turn toward the occult again when numerology seems to float to the surface.
It all begins with patterns emerging in ionic compounds in the early 20th century. Experiments conducted nearly century prior showed that certain compounds exhibited electrostatic character — that’s just a fancy way of saying that there was a positively charged component and a negatively charged component in a compound, and that the resulting attraction between those two is how a chemical bond is formed. At the time, chemists thought this dichotomy played out indefinitely for all chemical compounds, and this (partially incorrect) line of thinking served as the bedrock for chemical combination for quite some time.
