Abstract
The 1916 paper of Lewis [1], which introduced the concept of the electron pair, is one of the most important papers to be published in chemistry in this century. It is a revelation to read this paper and realize the extent to which his ideas continue to dominate chemical thinking. It is a major challenge to find that physical basis for the electron pair model and direct, rather than inferred evidence, of the presence of such pairs in a molecular system. This is a difficult task. Nowhere does Lewis nor anyone else give a physical definition of an electron pair. An operational approach to this problem is to find a property of the electronic charge or pair density of a system that yields an explicit parallelism with the number and relative orientations of the electron pairs assumed to exist in the model. The word explicit is used to exclude such properties as molecular geometry which can be rationalized if the electron pair model is first assumed. Assuming the model and ascribing properties to the electron pairs, one can predict observed geometries of many molecules (the VSEPR model of Gillespie [2], for example). One cannot turn this model around and argue that the observation of a certain geometry demonstrates the existence of the electron pairs. Besides, such circularism begs the question as to what the electron pair is.
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands
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Bader, R.F.W. (1989). The Physical Basis of the Lewis Electron Pair Model. In: Maruani, J. (eds) Molecules in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Topics in Molecular Organization and Engineering, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2853-4_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2853-4_4
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