00:00:00 Edited in just a shot of you nodding your head, listening, that's something.

00:00:08 I was shaking my head. I don't remember.

00:00:12 Well, one thing that you mentioned just in passing, and I didn't want to ask you about it on camera,

00:00:20 but you said that some of your biggest boo-boos came from internal rotations.

00:00:24 Are there any anecdotes you'd like to tell us about that?

00:00:27 No.

00:00:28 We're not taping this.

00:00:31 The one paper that is inexcusably bad,

00:00:36 I mean, while I was just saying that that nickel carbonyl assignment was all wrong,

00:00:43 but I make no apologies for that.

00:00:45 That was made at the time when I think I did get some KBR prisms,

00:00:50 but we didn't have the low frequency infrared, you see.

00:00:54 It was a respectable try at the time, even if it was all wrong.

00:00:59 But the one paper that is inexcusably bad, and it was my own damn stupidity,

00:01:06 is one on hindered rotation, and we just won't talk about it.

00:01:11 I'll admit it, but I'll be damned if I'm going to give you the quote.

00:01:14 I'll tell you a story about Linus Pauling that's appropriate to this sort of thing.

00:01:19 I was out at Caltech.

00:01:21 I took a split sabbatic when I spent half the year out at Caltech,

00:01:26 and so I sat in on Linus's lectures.

00:01:28 He's a good lecturer, by the way.

00:01:30 You have to sort of check up on him as he goes along, but that's all right.

00:01:36 But there was one lecture, and he sort of set the lecture aside

00:01:42 because who was the X-ray crystallographer out at Caltech?

00:01:47 There was an older man than Linus who was Dickinson.

00:01:50 Yeah, Roscoe Dickinson.

00:01:52 Roscoe Dickinson had passed away,

00:01:57 and Linus was spending half the lecture period, I think,

00:02:01 telling us about Dickinson and the work that he did in really early X-ray crystallography,

00:02:09 chemical X-ray crystallography anyway,

00:02:12 and what a remarkably good job he did.

00:02:16 He said, you know, Dickinson is the only crystallographer I know

00:02:21 who has never published an error, an erroneous paper.

00:02:26 And you know those Caltech students.

00:02:28 One of them was right on it, you see.

00:02:30 Dr. Pauling, did you say that Dr. Dickinson was the only crystallographer

00:02:35 who's never published an error?

00:02:37 And, of course, Linus was right with it too,

00:02:39 and he kind of smiled and says, that's right, the only one.

00:02:43 And, of course, when class adjourned, it just adjourned to the library

00:02:46 and started going through all of Linus' published papers, you see.

00:02:50 They found it.

00:02:53 We all of us have something wrong in the literature somewhere,

00:02:56 all of us who've ever done anything.

00:02:58 Oh, of course.

00:02:59 The only thing is that, you see, you have your CH2,

00:03:02 but you went back and corrected it.

00:03:04 So you can laugh about it.

00:03:06 The same way I can laugh about my ethylene paper that I was filling you in on

00:03:11 because I had a totally wrong idea,

00:03:13 but it came out with one of the nicest papers I've done, you see.

00:03:17 But I didn't correct my paper on hindered rotation.

00:03:23 That scoundrel Ken Pitzer corrected it.

00:03:26 Oh, the Ken Pitzer?

00:03:27 Mm-hmm.

00:03:28 Oh, yes.

00:03:29 Ken is a very good guy, you know,

00:03:31 and he told me well in advance that he didn't agree and that he had this paper,

00:03:36 and I said, well, what's wrong with my paper?

00:03:38 Well, he couldn't find out.

00:03:40 And to this day, he never has spotted one.