Saturday, January 5, 2013

Cereal Clusters

My younger daughter started finding clusters in her chocolate-flavored puffy round cereal today.  We did not keep rigorous records, but as the picture suggests the dimers were more common than the trimers, which were in turn more common than the tetramer (this tetrahedron was the only one we saw).  This brings to mind some different ideas.  For example it might make a good science fair project to survey the cluster populations and show that the bigger the cluster, the more rare it becomes.  This in turn leads me to think about probabilities of bimolecular and termolecular collisions in kinetics and wonder if some connection can be made to these clusters.  Well, at the very least, the clusters remind me of groups of hybridized orbitals associated with an atom.  The dimers remind me of two sp hybridized orbitals, the trimers remind me of three sp2 hybridized orbitals, and the tetramers remind me of four sp3 hybidized orbitals.

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