Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, man.

Oh, my.

And so, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 119,

Computational Chemistry, Part 1.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

In this episode, we're going to look at methods for determining chemical structure.

So this falls into under the rubric of computational chemistry.

And as part of that, we're going to discuss how chemists

basically solve Schroding's equation from quantum mechanics to determine the structure and other

chemical properties of molecules. And this is a really interesting part of chemistry that doesn't

necessarily get discussed very much in introductory courses or in popular science outlets, at least,

as far as I've seen. But I think it's extremely interesting. So basically, we're looking at

sort of real-world quantum mechanics. A lot of the time when you read up on quantum mechanics,

or it's discussed in the popular literature. It's very simple systems, you know, electron in a box

and a single electron atom and things like that, which are obviously important

for understanding the concepts, but they're not really very useful for practical applications

to real materials. And so computational chemistry and molecular structure is where sort of the

rubber hits the road, if you like, and we actually apply some of these methods to understanding

and predicting the structure and other properties of molecules.

Now, this is going to be a fairly technical episode, or actually two-part episode, this is part

one. And so you're strongly encouraged to listen to the prerequisite, which is episode 14,

principles of quantum mechanics. And generally, somewhat of a background in chemistry and

...