Nobel Prize season is coming, and the Physics Prize will be announced on October 6. I just hope it goes to machine learning again so we can watch physicists collectively lose their minds for another year.
@AtDuckling12 That would make sense. Heterogeneous catalyzed reactions are hard to fit into the typical orgo paradigm, one of the cases where I found it better to just memorize instead of trying to understand the mechanism
@AtDuckling12 You probably know this already but with epoxide reactions you also see the more substituted carbon being attacked in ring openings (under acidic conditions)
@AtDuckling12 Catalyst reactions are weird, but generally you can think of them as sort of sn1-like. So the raney nickel coordinates with the epoxide oxygen and will weaken the C-O bond, creating a partial positive charge on the carbon. This is stabilized on the more substituted carbon so…