Sharpening chemical intuition

When chemists talk about intuition, they’re referring to the knowledge and practical knowhow they’ve accumulated over years that helps them make the right call. It’s a condensed set of rules of thumb that enables ‘good enough’ decisions to be made without having to resort to lengthy explorations of the underlying physics. In recent years, however, chemists have started to make these qualitative hand‑waving descriptions much more rigorous. Two studies we’ve written about recently illustrate that shift. One revisits the long-debated anomeric effect; the other offers a new way to quantify steric repulsion. Together, they point towards a more disciplined way of reasoning about cause and effect in molecules.