This might be seen as cranking a handle by producing yet more examples of acids ionised by a small number of water molecules. I justify it (probably only to myself) as an exercise in how a scientist might approach a problem, and how it linearly develops with time, not necessarily in the directions first envisaged.

Chemistry rarely makes it to the cover of popular science magazines. Thus when this week, the New Scientist ran the headline “ Forbidden chemistry. Reactions they said could never happen ”, I was naturally intrigued. The examples included Woodward and Hoffmann’s “ symmetry-forbidden ” reactions, which have been the subject of several posts here already.

The (hopefully tongue-in-cheek) title Mindless chemistry was given to an article reporting[cite]10.1021/jp057107z[/cite] an automated stochastic search procedure for locating all possible minima with a given composition using high-level quantum mechanical calculations. “Many new structures, often with nonintuitive geometries, were found”. Well, another approach is to follow unexpected hunches.