Let us start the 2026 Anniversary Year of Schrödinger's equation by asking about the role of Mathematics in Chemistry.
August Comte in his Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830-42) stated
- All attempts to bring chemical questions into the domain of mathematics must be regarded as profoundly irrational, and antipathetic to the nature of these phenomena.
This cannot be true today, right? Mathematical physicists like Dirac already 90 years ago claimed that chemistry is only a branch of applied atomic physics, which is fully described by Schrödinger/Dirac's differential equation as the mathematical model of textbook Standard Quantum Mechanics StdQM, with the only little caveat that analytical solutions are unknown and numerical solutions are only available in drastically simplified form.
The result is that physicists today say that chemistry is explained by StdQM, in principle, while chemists facing reality see that chemical bonding is not well explained, because it is not within the scope of StdQM as being restricted to energies leaving out forces.
If you want to find some hope as a chemist or layman, take a look at this new article:
where computational mathematics and real physics are seen to merge into explanations.
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