Modern Chemistry Beyond Human Understanding

The book The History of Valency by C. A. Russell from 1971 tells the story how the revolution of modern physics in its canonical form of Standard Quantum Mechanics StdQM clashed with classical chemistry in particular concerning the nature of chemical bonding:

• The Schrödinger wave-equation is now accepted as one of the foundations of modern theoretical chemistry. Yet its immediate impact upon chemistry was small, mainly because of the enormous difficulties in solving it.
• With the discoveries that followed in mathematical physics the pictures of the atom that emerged looked progressively less and less like mechanical models. 
• In its turn valency moved steadily away from the position in which it could be happily imagined in terms of spring-like “bonds”. 
• The analogies changed to the unmechanical ones of “‘clouds’’. Even electrons, after a short-lived existence as “‘particles’’, are now often “delocalized” in a way that no mechanical model could possibly permit. 
• And this is only half the story, because the ionic “‘bond’’ has now been stripped of all mechanical accretions, and is now no longer visualized but accepted as another case of action-at-a-distance. 
• It is eminently amenable to mathematical treatment but quite incapable of being represented pictorially. 
• C. A. Coulson observed: I described a bond, a normal simple chemical bond; and I gave many details of its character (and could have given many more). Sometimes it seems to me that a bond between two atoms has become so real, so tangible, so friendly that I can almost see it. And then I awake with a little shock: for a chemical bond is not a real thing: it does not exist: no one has ever seen it, no one ever can. It is a figment of my own imagination.” 
• Thus the wheel has turned full circle. From a hesitantly produced metaphor the concept emerged as an intricate mechanical model. Thence it has been sublimed into a solution to an equation in mathematics, and with this has come, hesitantly, no doubt, the conviction that all visualizations must be incomplete. 
• What we once suspected we now know: the limitations of our understanding of the external world.

This is where today RealQM comes in as an alternative to StdQM as a form of small scale classical continuum mechanics unifying physics from macro to micro-scales, described in this lecture:

• Structural Mechanics of the Atom

Russell describes how StdQM twisted chemistry away from a classical paradigm of meaningful realism, which could be visualised even if did not tell the whole story, into a new modern paradigm of abstractions beyond visualisation and human understanding. This is a strange story from Enlightenment to Mysticism. How could this happen? What role did Niels Bohr play?

It appears that today all physicists claim and most chemists accept that chemistry in principle is reducible to quantum mechanics, including Peter Atkins stating that there is no chemistry, only quantum mechanics and David Deutsch, Klaus Ruedenberg and Martin Head-Gordon, but there are also a few chemists doubting this idea including Robin Hendry and Hans Primas.   

The New Clothes of Quantum Mechanics