The reaction of hydrogen with uranium-molybdenum alloys

Imperial Users onl

Economists writing history: American and French experience in the mid 20th century

If one considers the fortunes of economic history in the 20th century U.S., the 1940s, 50s and 60s stand out as a particularly vibrant time for the field and economists’ contributions to it. These decades saw the creation of the main association and journals - the Economic History Association, the Journal of Economic History for example – and the launching of large research programs – Harvard’s history of entrepreneurship, Simon Kuznets’ retrospective accounts, cliometrics for example. Why did American economists write so much history in the decades immediately following WWII, and why and how did this change with cliometrics? To answer these questions I use interviews with scholars who were active in the mid 20th century, their publications and archival material. The bulk of the analysis focuses on the U.S., yet it relies in part on a comparison with France where economic history also experienced a golden period at this time, though it involved few economists. Instead it was the domain of Annales historians. This comparison sheds light on the ways in which the labels “economist” and “historian” changed meaning throughout the period of study. Economists’ general interest for history is best understood as a part of an ongoing debate on scientific method, specifically about whether and how to observe and what constitutes reliable empirical evidence. These debates contributed both to draw social scientists to history, and change the way they wrote history. In the U.S. the mid 20th century surge in economist-history was principally due to the post-war demand for knowledge about growth and development. The sense of urgency that came with this task increased scholars’ willingness to work with estimated (as opposed to found) data. This was reinforced by American economists’ experience in war planning and ensuing spread of an operations research mentality among graduate students. The issue of whether or not to estimate became a new demarcation line between “historians” and “economists”. By the late 1960s, scholars who wanted to turn to the past to observe economies evolve over several decades, and let these facts “speak for themselves” had largely been replaced by researchers who used modern economic theory to frame historical investigation, and relied on quantification and estimation as their main empirical inputs

Note on PI and Szeged indices

In theoretical chemistry molecular structure descriptors are used for modeling physico-chemical, pharmacological, toxicologic, biological and other properties of chemical compounds. In this paper we study distance-based graph invariants and present some improved and corrected sharp inequalities for PI, vertex PI, Szeged and edge Szeged topological indices, involving the number of vertices and edges, the diameter, the number of triangles and the Zagreb indices. In addition, we give a complete characterization of the extremal graphs.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Dihedral symmetry of periodic chain: quantization and coherent states

Our previous work on quantum kinematics and coherent states over finite configuration spaces is extended: the configuration space is, as before, the cyclic group Z_n of arbitrary order n=2,3,..., but a larger group - the non-Abelian dihedral group D_n - is taken as its symmetry group. The corresponding group related coherent states are constructed and their overcompleteness proved. Our approach based on geometric symmetry can be used as a kinematic framework for matrix methods in quantum chemistry of ring molecules.Comment: 13 pages; minor changes of the tex

From the Mendeleev periodic table to particle physics and back to the periodic table

We briefly describe in this paper the passage from Mendeleev's chemistry (1869) to atomic physics (in the 1900's), nuclear physics (in the 1932's) and particle physics (from 1953 to 2006). We show how the consideration of symmetries, largely used in physics since the end of the 1920's, gave rise to a new format of the periodic table in the 1970's. More specifically, this paper is concerned with the application of the group SO(4,2)xSU(2) to the periodic table of chemical elements. It is shown how the Madelung rule of the atomic shell model can be used for setting up a periodic table that can be further rationalized via the group SO(4,2)xSU(2) and some of its subgroups. Qualitative results are obtained from this nonstandard table.Comment: 15 pages; accepted for publication in Foundations of Chemistry (special issue to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Mendeleev who died in 1907); version 2: 16 pages; some sentences added; acknowledgment and references added; misprints correcte

Storing the wisdom: chemical concepts and chemoinformatics

The purpose of the paper is to examine the nature of chemical concepts, and the ways in which they are applied in chemoinformatics systems. An account of concepts in philosophy and in the information sciences leads to an analysis of chemical concepts, and their representation. The way in which concepts are applied in systems for information retrieval and for structure–property correlation are reviewed, and some issues noted. Attention is focused on the basic concepts or substance, reaction and property, on the organising concepts of chemical structure, structural similarity, periodicity, and on more specific concepts, including two- and three-dimensional structural patterns, reaction types, and property concepts. It is concluded that chemical concepts, despite (or perhaps because of) their vague and mutable nature, have considerable and continuing value in chemoinformatics, and that an increased formal treatment of concepts may have value in the future

Classical Morphology of Plants as an Elementary Instance of Classical Invariant Theory

It has long been known that structural chemistry shows an intriguing correspondence with Classical Invariant Theory (CIT). Under this view, an algebraic binary form of the degree n corresponds to a chemical atom with valence n and each physical molecule or ion has an invariant-theoretic counterpart. This theory was developed using the Aronhold symbolical approach and the symbolical processes of convolution/transvection in CIT was characterized as a potential “accurate morphological method”. However, CIT has not been applied to the formal morphology of living organisms. Based on the morphological interpretation of binary form, as well as the process of convolution/transvection, the First and Second Fundamental Theorems of CIT and the Nullforms of CIT, we show how CIT can be applied to the structure of plants, especially when conceptualized as a series of plant metamers (phytomers). We also show that the weight of the covariant/invariant that describes a morphological structure is a criterion of simplicity and, therefore, we argue that this allows us to formulate a parsimonious method of formal morphology. We demonstrate that the “theory of axilar bud” is the simplest treatment of the grass seedling/embryo. Our interpretations also represent Troll's bauplan of the angiosperms, the principle of variable proportions, morphological misfits, the basic types of stem segmentation, and Goethe's principle of metamorphosis in terms of CIT. Binary forms of different degrees might describe any repeated module of plant organisms. As bacteria, invertebrates, and higher vertebrates are all generally shared a metameric morphology, wider implications of the proposed symmetry between CIT and formal morphology of plants are apparent

Mechanical Bonds and Topological Effects in Radical Dimer Stabilization

While mechanical bonding stabilizes tetrathiafulvalene (TTF) radical dimers, the question arises: what role does topology play in catenanes containing TTF units? Here, we report how topology, together with mechanical bonding, in isomeric [3]- and doubly interlocked [2]catenanes controls the formation of TTF radical dimers within their structural frameworks, including a ring-in-ring complex (formed between an organoplatinum square and a {2+2} macrocyclic polyether containing two 1,5-dioxynaphthalene (DNP) and two TTF units) that is topologically isomeric with the doubly interlocked [2]catenane. The separate TTF units in the two {1+1} macrocycles (each containing also one DNP unit) of the isomeric [3]catenane exhibit slightly different redox properties compared with those in the {2+2} macrocycle present in the [2]catenane, while comparison with its topological isomer reveals substantially different redox behavior. Although the stabilities of the mixed-valence (TTF2)^(•+) dimers are similar in the two catenanes, the radical cationic (TTF^(•+))_2 dimer in the [2]catenane occurs only fleetingly compared with its prominent existence in the [3]catenane, while both dimers are absent altogether in the ring-in-ring complex. The electrochemical behavior of these three radically configurable isomers demonstrates that a fundamental relationship exists between topology and redox properties