Friday, August 12, 2011

Polymer Drone

The Polymer Drone is a musical act, not a chemist so I'm probably being a little harsh in picking on his chemical structure, specifically,
  1. it's not a polymer
  2. it has two Texas carbons (carbons with more than 4 bonds - name comes from the saying "Everything's bigger in Texas")
  3. the unpaired electrons are shown as being inside the heterocylic ring, not outside as they normally are.
Tetramethylfuran?

Update: Sure, I can count to 4. Heavens, what an embarrassment. Blame it on the patent application

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kinda picky - while I agree it's not a polymer, not so sure on the other two criticisms - unless I missed something.

The dR and the Ne are not actually attached to the ring through bonds, so it doesn't look, to me at least, as if the carbons are pentavalent. The oxygen has two lone pairs, one of which is in the ring and involved in the aromatic sextet. So while perhaps incomplete, it is not wrong.

John said...

I think you and I have different perspective on the drawing. I didn't (and still don't) see the letters as part of the bonded structure. I was just looking at the bonds (lines) in the picture, and was assuming that the red lines were part of a double bond to the 2-, and -5 atoms.

Anonymous said...

John, the structure is fine then. Furan, the parent molecule has double bonds between C2 and C3, and between C4 and C5. All this structure has that is different from furan is that the hydrogen atoms on furan are replaced by methyl groups, giving as you correctly name it - tetramethylfuran. It is a completely reasonable structure and molecule.