An Exclamation Mark in a Scientific Paper

In my early days of grad school, I was going to look at the mechanism of reactions with silicon and gemanium triple bonds. Of course, it eventually became clear that my chemistry talents lay in spectroscopy, computational, data analysis and actually writing the paper and not at all in the actual synthesis. But in the course of attempting the first project, I did come across one of my favourite sentences in a scientific paper ever. Specifically: The first time I ever saw an exclamation mark in a scientific paper.

Stranger things can happen

And you thought those times I blogged about footnotes  were weird. Today it’s punctuation!

The Convention

Scientific writing is generally very formal. We have a dreadful habit of discussing everything in the passive voice. Needless to say, exclamations marks are generally right out. And while scientific writing is lightening up a bit, the exclamation mark thing is still pretty common wisdom. Sometimes you might see an exclamation mark in a title, but the actual body? That is simply Not Done.

Unless, apparently, you’re really mad.

The Controversy

Getting the heavier group fourteen elements to do what carbon does is a long standing area of main group chemical research. A little limiting, when you think about it, but someone had said it was impossible to have multiple bonds between the heavier elements and main group chemists do so love the word impossible. So for a long time, they were trying to make a silicon-silicon triple bond to mimic the oh so common alkynes.

Though of course it would never actually happen with hydrogen

Finally, in 2004, Sekiguchi et al pulled it off. The geometry wasn’t identical to an alkyne, but given that silicon isn’t carbon, that was really no surprise. But even after it was published, there was still controversy. Including a computational chemistry paper titled “Disproving a Silicon Analog of an Alkyne with the Aid of Topological Analyses of the Electronic Structure and Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics Calculations”. A title that could never further stir up controversy. The authors claimed that “a careful and comprehensive study of the chemical bonding is possible and can lead to an unambiguous and quantitative characterization”.

The Response

Not every journal has a Correspondence section. But the ones that do can get rather entertaining. Usually when something is “hotly debated” in science, the debate only really gets ferocious at conference. But Sekiguchi et al’s response to the computational paper… well, first of all they referred to the study as “neither careful nor comprehensive”. Which would have been worth a chuckle all by itself. If it wasn’t outshone later in the very same paper.

“But compound 1 does not have an electronsharing s bond as (SiH3)3SiSi(SiH3)3 has!”

An actual exclamation mark. They had an excellent point about the different nature of bonding in the silicon analogue. But really, I was more impressed with the sheer punctuation chutzpah. I’ve seen a few more exclamations marks in titles and abstracts, but this is still the only one I’ve seen in the body of the text. If anyone else has examples, I would love to hear them.