Joel M Williams
Joel M. Williams | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Los Alamos, NM, United States |
| Nationality | USA |
| Alma mater | College of William & Mary (BS); Northwestern University (PhD) |
| Known for | Atomic Structure; MCAS electron orbital model |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Chemist |
| Institutions | Los Alamos National Laboratory; E. I. du Pont de Nemours; University of Minnesota |
Joel M. Williams is an American chemist and independent researcher based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. A former staff member of Los Alamos National Laboratory, he is known within dissident-science circles for proposing the MCAS electron orbital model, an alternative particulate description of atomic and molecular electronic structure that departs from the conventional quantum-mechanical treatment of orbitals.
Biography
Williams earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1962 from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and a PhD in physical organic chemistry in 1966 from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He held an NIH fellowship (1963–1966) and an NSF fellowship (1966–1967).
He served briefly as an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Minnesota (1967–1968) before joining E. I. du Pont de Nemours as a research chemist in Waynesboro, Virginia (1968–1972). From 1972 to 1993 he was a staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where his research spanned sulfone and mechanistic organic chemistry, high-density graphites and composite materials, space-shuttle thermal-protection systems, cellular foams and emulsions, coal-waste and uranium-tailings characterization, oil-shale microscopy, and cosmic-dust capture. After leaving the laboratory he continued as an independent consultant through JMC Williams Consultants. Over his career he authored or coauthored roughly 80 citable publications.
Scientific contributions
Williams is the originator of the MCAS electron orbital model, which he began developing after finding conventional electronic models inadequate for explaining some of his own experimental results. MCAS is an acronym for the orbital shapes the model employs — Multilobed (tetrahedral), Cubic, Anticubic, and Square-faced cubic. In place of the spherical s-orbitals and spin-paired electron cohabitation of the standard spdf scheme, the model describes electrons as particles occupying distinct three-dimensional lobes arranged so as to minimize their mutual repulsion, and it seeks to account for atom–atom interactions without invoking orbital hybridization or spin reversal to effect pairing. Williams has extended the approach from atomic orbitals to molecules and to a reconstruction of the periodic table's electron-filling order.
The MCAS model lies outside the mainstream of accepted quantum chemistry and has not been adopted by the wider scientific community. Williams has presented it chiefly through self-published works and preprint archives rather than peer-reviewed journals.
Honors
- Life Member of Sigma Xi
- Listed in Marquis Who's Who
Abstracts
- 1999 - "Modeling the MCAS Way" (Read in full)
Books
- 2005 - "Challenging Science: Simple Explanations to Some Complicated Science Enigmas" (Read in full)