Referee Reports Foundations of Chemistry: RealQM

Below is the response form Foundations of Chemistry FoC in the form of referee reports on essentially this article submitted on the invitation by chief editor Eric Scerri. 

Dear Dr Johnson,

Your manuscript "Alternative Computational Foundation of Chemistry" has now been assessed. If there are any reviewer comments on your manuscript, you can find them at the end of this email. Regrettably, your manuscript has been rejected for publication in Foundations of Chemistry. Thank you for the opportunity to review your work. I'm sorry that we cannot be more positive on this occasion and hope you will not be deterred from submitting future work to Foundations of Chemistry.

Kind regards,
Fernando Cortes-Guzman
Editor
Foundations of Chemistry

Reviewer 1

The purpose of the manuscript is to present a new version of quantum mechanics, RealQM, which would physically explain covalent bonding, the formation of H and He in the early universe, the difference between He, Orthohelium and Parahelium, the weak reactivity of Au, and the organizations of the elements in the Periodic System.
In Real QM, electrons are conceived as charge densities occupying non-overlapping regions in space and meeting with continuity, such that each electron seeks to minimize its contribution to the total energy under Coulomb interaction from the atom nucleus and the other electrons.
According to the author, RealQM provides a physical account of the formation of molecules and offers a new tool for ab initio computational quantum chemistry.

The work has several shortcomings that prevent it from being considered a fundamental article on chemistry. For example, it mentions the existence of problems in accounting for covalent bonding but does not discuss what they are (nor does it mention any bibliography on the subject), it uses rhetorical questions instead of arguments to support RealQM, it does not explain why spin plays no role, the physical meaning of organizing and subdividing the “electronic” shells to recover the periodic system is unclear, and the advantages of RealQM over QTAIM, which is also formulated in 3D, are not explained. Above all, the work does not engage with the extensive bibliography on the fundations of chemistry that currently exists (see the scarce references).

However, the stronger obstacle to publishing the manuscript is that FOCH is not a journal for presenting new scientific results but rather for discussing fundamental issues in chemistry in the context of knowledge shared by the scientific community. The manuscript, by contrast, presents a very ambitious proposal that aims to replace the quantum theory used in chemistry, but the proposal has not been validated by the scientific community. Therefore, this work should be submitted to scientific chemistry journals so that its content can be validated by specialists in the field, and only after this has occurred can a work on foundations be developed that argues in favor of the RealQM approach over other theoretical perspectives, such as standard quantum mechanics or QTAIM.  

Reviewer 2

The "Alternative Computational Foundation of Chemistry" is interesting and definitely provocative. Several results are shown that indicate the approaches efficacy.  Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.  As such for this to be publishable the following must be addressed:
1) What is a case where RealQM and StdQM differ?  Can it be demonstrated that RealQM is more accurate with quantitative values?  
2) It is reasonable to compare to experiment and standard QM a triplet state the two electron systems: H2 and/or He with quantitative values
3) How does the work differ from a typical local-Schrödinger equation approach using linear coefficients?
4) Express the connection with QTAIM more directly (if they exist, the key equations)
5) There are a few typos that should be corrected such as: ist, etc

Comment to referee reports

Reviewer 2 is essentially positive and raises a number of questions which can be answered.

Reviewer 1 claims that FoC is "not a journal for new scientific results" which is used as motivation for rejection. It seems that FoC can only accept science already fully "validated by the scientific community" which can then be subject for "discussion of fundamental issues in chemistry". Maybe FoC has primarily served such a mission, but it seems to me to be a very retracted defensive position. It is clear that RealQM can contribute new material to a discussion of fundamental issues in chemistry" and why then close this discussion? 

I have prepared a new version with more limited scope taking the comments of the reviewers into account.