Philosophical perspectives on the emergence of molecular structure

In philosophical discussions of emergence and reductionism in chemistry, molecular structure has received significant attention and debate. Sometimes molecular structure is used to justify strong emergence, i.e., that molecular cannot be predicted, even in principle, solely from quantum theory.Primas was one of the first to claim that molecular structure could not be reduced to quantum physics. Consider the following statements.“From a physical point of view the crucial point of a Born–Oppenheimer description is not a simplification of the mathematical problem, but the replacement of the basic theory by a related but qualitatively new one…[the structure of benzene] does not exist in a full quantum-theoretical description since electrons and nuclei are entangled by Einstein-Podolsky–Rosen correlations. The concept of molecular structure does not follow from first principles - all molecules with the same empirical formula have the same Schrödinger equation, so that, at this level, the…