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Chapter 3
Nazmul Islam
University of Kalyani, India & Techno Global-Balurghat, India
Dulal C. Ghosh
University of Kalyani, India
Commonality in the Origin
and the Manifestation
in the Real World of
Electronegativity and Hardness
ABSTRACT
The electronegativity and the hardness are two different fundamental descriptors of atoms and molecules,
and this chapter describes how the authors have logistically discovered the commonality between the
heuristic and basic philosophical structures of their origin and also the manifestation in the real world.
Also, the chapter demonstrates that the physical hardness and the chemical hardness with evolution
of time have converged to one and the same general principle– the hardness. The authors also try to
expose the physical basis and operational signifcance of another very important descriptor–the elec-
tronegativity. The chapter also explores whether the hardness equalization principle can be conceived
analogous to the well established electronegativity equalization principle. The authors hypothesize that
the electronegativity and the absolute hardness are two different appearances of the one and the same
fundamental property of atoms, and the Hardness Equalization Principle can be equally conceived
like the electronegativity equalization principle. To test this hypothesis, the authors have made several
comparative studies by evaluating some well known chemico-physical descriptors of the real world,
such as hetero nuclear bond distances, dipole charges, and dipole moments of molecules. The detailed
comparative study suggests that the paradigm of the hardness equalization principle may be another
law of nature like the established electronegativity equalization principle.
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1607-3.ch003