β Scribed by William H. Pirkle
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The Russian Bear and the American Eagle have not always seen eye to eye. However, on this matter, Professor Davankov and I are in perfect accord!
In showing you a series of colorful computer-generated slides, our opponents have endeavored to appeal to your sense of esthetics. I now appeal to your sense of logic. Consider me as an observer in a void. Now, consider the cap on this bottle to represent a point in space. As I observe this point at some instant in time, I establish a spatial relationship between it and myself. I am looking from this direction and from no other. I now place an inverted drinking glass, a second point, above the cap. I now have an ability to differentiate between top and bottom. Not until I add a third point, this paper doily, to one side of the other two points can I tell left from right. As an observer out of the plane containing the three points, I differentiate front from back. If I now establish some priority sequence for the three points and proceed from one to the other according to the sequence, I proceed in either a clockwise or a counterclockwise direction. What have I done? If the three points represent different structural units arranged about the stereogenic center in a chiral molecule, I have gained the ability to specify the molecule's absolute configuration.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES