Physical Organic Chemistry – A Personal Perspective

AbstractPhysical organic chemistry plays a unifying role in chemistry by combining a large variety of experimental and theoretical techniques to create simplified, intuitively understandable concepts of chemical processes. The concept of “antiaromaticity” is used to demonstrate how complex experiments may result in general models that allow chemists to predict the chemical and physical properties of difficult to access molecules and even of transition states. Cyclooctatetraene and the fluorenyl cation are used as examples to illustrate some working methods of physical organic chemistry.