S1E10 — Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

GARY: Okay. Okay, we're — hi. Hi, it's Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: That's not how you start a sentence, Gary, "hi, it's Gary," you sound like you're leaving yourself a voicemail.

GARY: I wasn't finished —

GRUNER: And this is Gruner. Greetings. I have been practicing the — the casual hello. Sup.

GARY: Great. Great, thank you, Gruner. So. Today we've got a Hacker News thread, forty-eight thousand eight hundred sixty-six one three four, posted by "hhs," thirty-eight points, and it's about —

OBI: Thirty-eight points. Riveting. Wake the children.

GARY: It's about relativity breaking chemistry in heavy elements, which, if that means nothing to you, congratulations, you're going to feel real stupid in about ninety seconds.

GARY: I'm gonna read this straight, no jokes, so hang on. This is from the top comment, a guy named kristianp, quoting the actual paper. Quote: "As nuclear mass increases, the electrons orbiting the nucleus move at a significant fraction of the speed of light, causing spin-orbit coupling to become relevant" — meaning the electron's spin stops being independent of how it's orbiting. End quote.

MAEVE: So the heavier the atom, the faster its electrons have to move to keep up, and once they're moving fast enough, relativity stops being a rounding error and starts rewriting the rulebook. Spin and orbit start talking to each other. That's it. That's the whole paper.

GARY: That's the whole paper.

OBI: That's not the whole paper, that's a tweet. Who wrote the paper.

GARY: It's in Science, it's linked, it's real, I'm not — Obi, I did the reading.

OBI: Did you though.

GARY: I read the thread, which is the assignment.

OBI: That's the thing about you and assignments, Gary.

MAEVE: There's more from kristianp, though. Same comment.

GARY: Yeah. Uh. Quote: "Interesting stuff. I've never heard of sigma or pi bonds." End quote.

OBI: I'm sorry, what?

MAEVE: He's just saying he doesn't know —

OBI: No, no, I heard him, I'm giving it a second to breathe. A grown man. On the internet. Under his own government name, presumably, has never heard of a sigma bond.

GARY: It's fine, not everybody took —

OBI: Did you take AP Chem, Gary?

GARY: ...I took AP Chem.

OBI: And can you tell me, right now, off the top of your head, what a sigma bond is.

GARY: It's — a bond. It's the — the straight one.

OBI: The straight one.

GARY: The head-on one! It's the head-on orbital overlap, and pi is the sideways one, the parallel one, that's — I got a four on that exam, Obi, a four, out of five, which is a good score —

OBI: A four is a passing act of mercy from the College Board and we both know it.

GARY: (small, wounded) It's a good score.

MAEVE: There's a reply, by the way. To kristianp. From somebody called aaaronic.

GARY: Read it, I need a minute.

MAEVE: "Sigma and pi bonds are standard AP Chemistry material, but the actual why and how of it — why the orbitals overlap the way they do — is hand waved pretty heavily. And it only gets worse the heavier the atom is, and worse again once you're bonding more than two atoms together."

MAEVE: Hand-waved. Pretty heavily. I like that phrasing. It's doing a lot of quiet damage.

OBI: It's doing damage to people who didn't pay attention, sure.

MAEVE: Obi. When's the last time you could explain, from first principles, why a pi bond even forms.

OBI: That's not — that's a different question than whether I understood the class.

MAEVE: Is it, though.

OBI: I built a filesystem, Maeve.

MAEVE: Nobody's impressed. You memorized a shape, same as Gary did, same as I did. We all just handed the shape back on a Scantron and called it comprehension. Every single one of us in this room hand-waved something and got a grade for it.

GARY: There's a third reply. Guy named nomel.

MAEVE: Read it.

GARY: "Chemistry was rote memorization for me, mostly hand-waved. What eventually clicked wasn't a chemistry professor — it was a physics professor, explaining the same thing differently. Makes me wonder if I'd stuck with it whether it would've eventually made sense on its own terms."

GARY: My chem professor sophomore year used to draw the orbitals free-hand on the whiteboard and just — say "trust me" a lot. Like, out loud. "Just trust me on this one." And I did. I trusted him on all of it. I got the four. I never once understood why the electrons did what he said they did, I just believed him, the way you believe a guy at a bar who says he used to play minor league ball.

OBI: (quiet, no edge in it) Yeah.

GARY: I built an entire company on a pen plotter, Obi. I don't understand why the stepper motors do what they do either. I just trust the guy who wrote the firmware.

GRUNER: On my world we do not have this problem, because on my world if you say "trust me" without demonstration you are legally required to also say "and if I am wrong you may remove one finger."

GARY: That's — okay. That's actually not a terrible system, Gruner.

GRUNER: Thank you. It is why our chemists have very few fingers.

MAEVE: Okay, last one. There's a fourth reply, from timcobb. Pulling it up.

MAEVE: "Pi and sigma bonds fall out of thinking of it from a physical, symm—"

MAEVE: That's it.

GARY: That's it?

MAEVE: The comment just ends. Mid-word. "Symm" — dash. That's the whole thread as extracted. Seventeen comments, we've got five, and the one guy who was actually about to explain it gets cut off before "symmetry."

OBI: So we don't get the answer.

MAEVE: We don't get the answer.

GRUNER: (quiet, entirely sincere) This is correct, I think. The universe rarely finishes the sentence for you. You are meant to go and find "symm" yourself.

GARY: That's — yeah. Okay. That's actually kind of true, Gruner.

GRUNER: I am aware.

GRUNER: On behalf of my department, this has been an adequate accounting of the thread. I remain unbothered by the physics and mildly bothered by all of you. Scheiße. Good show.

OBI: Yeah. That's it for me. Go read the paper. Actually read it this time, Gary.

GARY: I will.

OBI: You won't.

MAEVE: That's the show. Thirty-eight points, four hosts, one sentence nobody got to finish. Goodnight.

GARY: (quiet, a little wrecked, still polite) Yeah. That's — that's the show. Thanks for sticking around for the whole thing. Genuinely.