I saw Roald Hoffman speak tonight.

[NNadir]

It was a talk on the chemistry of extremely high pressures.

There was this really, really, really cool part about how at extremely high pressures 1s electrons are literally squeezed out of lithium metal.

There was some really great stuff about hexacordinate silicon and even octacoordinate silicon.

He was a wonderful speaker too, funny, urbane, gracious.

He gave a great little side lecture on the importance of chemical sense vis a vis physical sense.

It was a very pleasant evening.

[Catshrink]

1. Wow!

I show his World of Chemistry series to my students. I'd love to see him live. You lucky dawg.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. 1s electrons??? Not 2s ??

OK, that's got to be really, really, REALLY high pressure.

[NNadir]

3. If I recall correctly, he said 1s.

He's published a lot of this work though. I'll check.

Maybe there isn't much distinction at that pressure. I don't know.

There was no mention in his talk of orbital symmetry, except when he related that Woodward insisted that he include the famous line "Excpetions: There are none."

Don't forget that at the core of collapsed stars of certain mass, the electrons are pressed so close to nuclei that they become neutrons.

He was quite good natured about asking questions. After the talk I wished I thought to ask him if there was, in his view, a pressure at which electrons behave like bosons rather than fermions.