I’ve been playing around with various “This X Does not Exist” sites, including this one, for chemicals. Each time you visit and/or refresh that link, it will generate some new tinkertoy-type 3D model of some molecule that doesn’t exist in real life and display it for you in a window that lets you manipulate it a bit to see it from all sides.
I barely passed high school chemistry, and I have a few questions. I hope someone more knowledgeable can try refreshing that page several times and extrapolate after a decent sampling.
What do the colors mean? Hydrogen and carbon are obvious, white and grey respectively, but I’ve got no clue about the rest.
Are all the molecules it generates theoretically possible by known chemical laws?
Can the physical properties of these chemicals be predicted in advance?
For those molecules that are within the realm of possible, Is it displaying the atomic bonds at the correct angle in 3D space?
Did you find any that can’t work because it gets the 3D angles wrong and if it got it right, there would be an intersection or some other problem?
Roughly what fraction of the configurations can modern chemical engineering produce?
How often would there be problems like “It’s gonna take a huge amount of time” or “Your yield will be tiny” or “It will cost more than you could ever afford” or “That’s gonna go BOOM right after you finish making it.”
Thanks for any time an expert might want to spend poking at that site.
You can guess most of them. You can see that blue has valence 3, must be nitrogen. Yellow and red have valence 2, most common would be oxygen and sulphur - obviously sulphur is the yellow one.
I looked at 10 of them. They are all organic molecules. As far as I can tell (and I’ve made molecular models) they look entirely plausible.
Several are not that complex. I would actually be surprised if they do not exist.
To some extent. Many of them are aromatic compounds which have some properties in common. You can also predict some characteristics based on the functional groups they have.
You could probably also come up with a simple model for their polarization, and hence their rough solubility in water or oil. And of course molecular mass will influence a lot of things, and that’s trivial to determine.
Total bonding energy will depend somewhat on bond angles, and that can in principle be tough to predict, but you could at least get a pretty good estimate there, too.
The book is arranged into two parts, the first part being a fictionalized autobiography of the couple and the second part describing 179 different psychedelic compounds (most of which Shulgin discovered himself), including detailed synthesis instructions, bioassays, dosages, and other commentary.
If you hover your mouse over the atoms, it shows some information about them, including the element’s symbol. It will be numbered something like “H18”, which is the 18th hydrogen according to its list. Just going by the color can be difficult, since for example bright red is oxygen while dark red is bromine.