Chemistry as Real Physics as RealQM

Chemists Model of Protein Molecule 

This is a comment to the previous post on the relation between physics and chemistry. 

Looking at the pictures and 3d models of molecules used by chemists, we understand that chemistry for real chemists is real physics in 3d space. 

Physicists trained in textbook Standard Quantum Mechanics StdQM have a different abstract formalistic view without pictures and 3d models, in terms of wave functions $\Psi (x)$ depending, for an atomic system $S$ with $N$ electrons, on a $3N$-dimensional spatial coordinate $x$ in configuration space, which is physical 3d space only for $N=1$. 

The wave function $\Psi (x)$ satisfies a linear Schrödinger Equation SE with a Hamiltonian describing $S$. After forming SE in 1926 physicists told chemists that $\Psi (x)$ represents "all there is to say" about $S$ which in principle includes chemistry, but then left to chemists the big job to find the information by computing wave functions for molecules. 

This created a gap lasting into our days between chemistry as real physics and StdQM as abstract formalistic physics, which has been filled with computational quantum chemistry using massive super computer power because of exponential computational complexity. 

RealQM Chemistry is an alternative to StdQM based on real quantum physics in 3d, for which there is no gap to chemistry and where computational complexity is linear. 

Basic approaches to science are realism (ontology) and formalism (epistemology), where formalism takes over when realism as ideal fails. Chemistry based on StdQM struggles with realsim, which has given room for formalism of chemical bonding such as Lewis structure. RealQM opens to real physics of chemical bonding thus reducing need of formalism.