Word: kuppermann
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...Most chemical reactions," says Caltech Chemical Physicist Aron Kuppermann, "are unholy messes." The neat formulas and precise equations of the textbooks may be all right as far as they go, but they present an incomplete picture of what is really "a large number of processes, some of which are not fully understood...
...effort to clear up the confusion, Kuppermann and Chemist John White have taken an impressive step toward making chemistry exact and predictable: they have made the first direct measurement of the minimum energy required to cause one of the simplest chemical reactions known to science. An absolute minimum of one-third of an electron volt is needed, they discovered, to split a hydrogen molecule into two hydrogen atoms and to combine one of them with a deuterium atom to form deuterium hydride. An addition of any less energy and the reaction will not occur...
...Kuppermann and White, this suggested that the wave length of light used in the previous exposure provided the minimum energy needed to cause the reaction. They then determined the energy carried by a photon at that wave length and calculated how much of it had been imparted to the deuterium atom when the deuterium iodide molecule was split. Their result: one-third of an electron volt...
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