Talk:Nitrogen inversion

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Clarify

What is "optically stable" and why is it called that? Does it refer to the polarizing effects on light?

Also, how fast does the interconversion occur?

Finally, how is the "width" of the barrier defined, and in what units? 178.38.41.220 (talk) 18:20, 3 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

how can this work - a pyramid has no handed-ness (chirality) AFAICS

If ammonia is a symmetric pyramid then just looking at it upside-down inverts it, so I don't get it. 92.24.35.68 (talk) 18:06, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have difficulty picturing the process? We could make some graphics to illustrate several intermediate structures if you think that would help. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmKFEiWg9XY for an animation. --Ben (talk) 18:16, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the snappy reply. I am not, even remotely, a chemist (work in IT) so I suspect my understanding of what chirality is may be flawed. The video described perfectly what I expected, but <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_%28chemistry%29> says "A chiral molecule/ion is non-superposable on its mirror image". Ok, and if you look at the accompanying image, left-hand and right-hand amino acids, I get it - if you mirror-reflect one of the amino acids you can't wrangle it back to it's non-reflected form by any kind of rotation. Just can't. However if you take the ammonia molecule and its inverted form, you can trivially rotate one back to superimpose on the other perfectly, AFAICS. So it's not chiral per the wiki definition. What am I missing? 92.24.35.68 (talk) 21:12, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]