Physical chemistry and theoretical chemistry have advanced over the past 50 years from being largely qualitative to having a mature status based firmly on the principles of quantum and statistical mechanics. My interest in the chemical elements and their compounds has prompted me to learn more about the nature of matter through the measurement and interpretation of optical, electric, and magnetic properties of molecules. In addition to holding intrinsic interest, such properties tell us about charge and current distributions and form the basis of electro-optics, magneto-optics, and nonlinear optics. They also help us understand the nature and strength of long-range intermolecular forces, the hydrogen bond, and molecular biology-topics that are apparently forever young.
STUDENT DAYSWhen I was an undergraduate in the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney in Australia, in 1948, there was an emphasis on bulk properties, thermodynamics, aqueous solutions, electrochemistry, and chemical kinetics. Quantum theory was for physicists rather than chemists, who were expected to have only sufficient acquaintance with quantum mechanics to enable them to read books such as Pauling's The Nature of the Chemical Bond (1). Yet chemistry is essentially a quantum phenomenon, and quantum mechanics had reached maturity 20 years earlier. , and me). I had a love from boyhood for the elements and their physical and chemical properties, so I decided to concentrate on chemistry. My older brother, Michael, favored physics, and I learned through him the importance of mathematics and fundamentals. MJ Buckingham made significant contributions to low-tempterature physics and to the theory of critical phenomena (6, 7). He was Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Western Australia from 1965 to 1992. An honours degree in science at Sydney takes four years and permits the study of several subjects. I took mathematics, physics, and chemistry for two years, and in my third year I took mathematics and chemistry while the organic chemists took chemistry and organic chemistry.In my fourth undergraduate year I joined the research group of RJW Le Fèvre, who was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Sydney from 1946 to 1970. He had an international reputation for his studies of physical properties of organic molecules (8-11). His most significant contribution to research was the experimental exploration and utilization, in cooperation with his wife, of a simple tensor-additivity model of anisotropic bond polarizabilities (Figure 1) (10). Atomic, bond, or group isotropic polarizabilities had previously been shown to be approximately additive, thereby providing a method for estimating the mean polarizability of a molecule (12). But the tensor addition of anisotropic bond polarizabilities provided a more demanding test of the assumption of additivity. Silberstein (13) had shown as early as 1917 that for two interacting spheres, classical dipolar interaction leads to an induced anisotropy in the polarizability, which var...