Linus Pauling and The Nature of the Chemical Bond: A Documentary History All Documents and Media  
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Sir William Lawrence Bragg
James Bryant Conant
Roscoe Dickinson
Samuel Goudsmit
Roger Hayward
Werner Heisenberg
Walter Heitler
Arthur Lamb
Irving Langmuir
G. N. Lewis
Fritz London
Robert Millikan
Robert Mulliken
A. A. Noyes
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Wolfgang Pauli
Linus Pauling
Erwin Schrödinger
John Slater
Arnold Sommerfeld
J. Holmes Sturdivant
Richard Tolman
Max Theodore Felix von Laue
Don Yost

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Portrait of John C. Slater
Portrait of John C. Slater, 1952.
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John Slater

1900-1976

John Clarke Slater Papers
Location: American Philosophical Society
Address: 105 South Fifth Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106-3386
Size: 81 linear feet, 50,000 items
Finding Aid: http://www.amphilsoc.org/mole/view?docId=ead/Mss.B.SL2p-ead.xml;query=John%20Slater;brand=default
Phone: 215-440-3400  Fax: 215-440-3423
Email: manuscripts@amphilsoc.org  Web: http://www.amphilsoc.org/library

 

Correspondence

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Quotes

"I published a paper with Jack Sherman on the calculation of some of these overlap integrals with a simplification.... It's in The Nature of the Chemical Bond, the results are -- with a simplification of some sort; it's like taking Slater functions, I don't know what it was, but actually evaluating the overlap integrals. Our conclusion was that the bond strength function giving angular dependence alone is really pretty good -- not perfect but pretty good."

Linus Pauling. AHQP (Archive for the History of Quantum Physics), interview transcript part 2. Interview by John Heilbron. March 27, 1964.

"The theory of quantum mechanical resonance of molecules among several valence-bond structures constituted a major addition to the classical structure of organic chemistry. This theory was developed in the period from 1931 on by a number of investigators including Slater, E. Huckel, G. W. Wheland and me."

Linus Pauling. "Fifty years of progress in structural chemistry and molecular biology," Daedalus, 99 (Fall 1970): 988-1014. 1970.

"Just as evolution is inseparably connected with Darwin (and not with Wallace, whose paper on evolution prompted Darwin to write The Origin of Species), so too Pauling and the chemical bond are tightly associated, and Slater's position, though important, is secondary and supportive."

Robert J. Paradowski. The Structural Chemistry of Linus Pauling, pg. 333. 1972.

"One could say that Pauling's 'failure' was to plant a lot of seeds, basic ideas, without working them out fully.... As soon as Slater gets an idea he works it out to the end before he gets a new one. But that is also dangerous, of course because you look at the trees and you don't see the forest...[Pauling] looks at the forest and lets other people...work out the specific individual things in detail; he has a terrifically lively intellect, reading [Pauling's] paper, the information here is just tremendous, the ideas flow out of the pen, and there are several lifetimes of work...to be done."

Sten Samson. Interviewed by Anthony Serafini for Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science. 1984.

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