Fields
Orbitals
A one-electron wavefunction, drawn as a contour surface at a level somebody chose. Nodes, signs, and what the picture is a picture of.
Where the atoms go
VSEPR as a repulsion minimisation rather than a table, the angles that fall out of it, and the case where five sites are not all alike.
Bonding models
Valence bond, molecular orbital, and hybrids — three descriptions of one thing, related by transformations that change no observable.
What symmetry decides
A molecule's point group follows from its coordinates, and it settles whether the molecule can be polar or chiral with no reference to bonding.
Beyond the octet
Hypervalency without d orbitals, delocalisation, aromaticity, and the structures the first-year rules quietly cannot describe.
What a spectrum settles
A spectrum is a list of positions, and how many there can be is decided by the shape before any of them is measured. Counting them, and reading a structure back out.
When the molecule does not stop
A chain of two hundred atoms is a molecule and behaves like a solid. Bands, gaps, metals, defects and surfaces, every one of them out of a finite matrix — and a clear account of what that route cannot reach.
What the shape is for
Coordination compounds, where the shape decides a colour, a magnetic moment and a bond length — and where the one-electron picture used everywhere else in the collection stops being enough.
What is taught wrongly
The explanations that are confident, memorable and false — stated fairly and then tested against a calculation rather than an opinion.
Other ways through
a field is the coarsest of them
A field says what an essay is about, and every essay has exactly one. The other organisations cut across it. A series follows one idea essay by essay, from the question that introduces it to the ones that assume it — depth on one idea rather than breadth across a subject; several run through four or five fields at once. Threads are the motifs that recur in places with no business being related. Every orbital drawn here is listed by the fraction of the density its contour encloses, which is the axis the whole collection is organised around. Refutations collect every wrong explanation tested here, under four verdicts, each with the computation that settles it.