THE CHEMISTRY BETWEEN THEM

When I learned chemistry half a century ago, it was as mostly collection of underivable accidents like geography or botany I hated it and have remained a chemical illiterate.

But things have changed in half a century. Today chemistry built on the structure of the atom as revealed by quantum mechanics, and while there still is no good reason why Tokyo is in Japan, there now are excellent reasons why certain elements combine under what conditions. Even we were taught that oxidizer (donors of oxygen) combine with reducers (robbers of oxygen) but no element other than perhaps oxygen itself could be a oxidizer because it had no oxygen to give.

Not any more. There are now oxidation numbers, oxidation states, oxidation potentials and other solved puzzles, available in modern chemistry books (I used L. P. Eblin, The Elements of Chemistry, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965). These days an oxidizer is something that has a negative oxidation number, connected with the electron pair it shares with another element. This generalizes the old definition, and makes chlorine an oxidizer, be cause it shares two of its outer 7 electrons with sodium, which have only one.

As pointed out by subscriber Howard Hayden, professor of physics at the U. of Connecticut the critical reaction touted by the ozone Maharishis, the combination of ozone with chlorine, is not a natural one, because both are oxidizers (ozone clearly so even by the old definition). This type of chemical homosexuality is not. lmpossible and can be produced in the lab. But there are 50 to 70, different possible photochemical reactions in the stratosphere (see, e.g., table in P. J. Crutzen, U. Schmailzl, "Chemical Budgets of the Stratosphere," Planet. & Space Sci., vol. 31, pp. 1009-1032, 1983), and the ozone Maharishis have furnished no proof that this unusual reaction is important among them.

Prof. Hayden incidentally, also points out a genuine connection between CFCs and skin cancer: CFCs (air conditioning) have enabled millions to move to Florida, where they sunbathe too much.