Thesis · Chapter 2
The elements
Chemistarum studium in sensualibus insensualem illam veritatem a suis compedibus liberare.
“The pursuit of chemists is to free, within sensible things, that insensible truth from its fetters.”
— Dorneus
This is the theoretical backbone. It moves from a history of quantum mechanics, through my own proposal — Quale Mechanics, a reading of the qualitative, metaphysically-loaded content of the theory — to a careful primer on computational chemistry: molecular mechanics, the wavefunction, Hartree–Fock, density functional theory and beyond.
Its heart is the exchange interaction. The argument is that the covalent bond is not something added to chemistry but a consequence of the antisymmetry the electronic wavefunction must obey — a local, stabilized Fermi heap. The chapter also draws the parallel pictured here: the wavefunction’s collapse from Hilbert space into the real world set beside the metaphysical passage from Being to Entity.
