Talk:Chemical bonding of water

Title
Why not "Chemical bonding of water"? That would avoid the need for title formatting. --Khajidha (talk) 01:51, 23 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I thought about that when I executed the move to lower-case "bonding". I decided to avoid "water" insofar as one might say that water is what it's called in its liquid state, while, when it's solid, it's ice; whereas it's always . But I can imagine a consensus leading the other way. Largoplazo (talk) 02:41, 23 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Water is the common name for the molecule, as so as per WP:COMMONNAME it would be more appropriate to use water in the title rather than H2O. As Properties of water states, one of the IUPAC names is water. For example, we can speak of water vapor, water ice, or Properties of water. Klbrain (talk) 13:24, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

Anything to back this up?
"In short, valence bond theory and MO theory are at core, a manifestation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. When treating electrons in localized orbitals (VB theory), one can fairly accurately predict and measure its shape, geometry and position, but cannot accurate predict its energy and momentum. When treating electrons in delocalized orbitals (MO theory), one gains more measurements on its energy and momentum, but loses accuracy on its position. In other words, MO and VB theory should be used appropriately depending on what one wishes to measure."

Is there anything to back this statement up? Although I am not a computational chemist, I am almost certain this is not the right way to look at things. Both VB and MO based ab initio methods have been able to reproduce essentially all ground state properties of molecules (and can be as accurate as desired, in principle). Both MO and VB are ways that humans choose to apportion electron density into "boxes". They have nothing to do with the uncertainty principle, to my knowledge. Would a computational chemist chime in?

Alsosaid1987 (talk) 07:11, 8 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Given that VB and MO theories are just that theories, I think we should question their proofs. I think MO theory is based upon spherical harmonics and VB theory was a clever variation of a spherical harmonics model to match physical structure. VB theory at least has the advantage of approximating structures. I am uncertain either rises to the level of proof.
 * I would argue that neither is true. You may continue to use them if you find them to be useful tools. These are not the only discrepancies in chemistry and physics. Bohr and Pauling could not have been more wrong, but their ideas were too good to not believe and are still widely taught despite this. Petedskier (talk) 17:28, 29 November 2023 (UTC)