Question: How can you tell how a substance will react from its atom arrangement?

Oliver Gordon answered on 7 Mar 2019:

That, I’d love to say.

As to why the shape of a substance makes it react in a certain way, that’s not actually something I do, sadly. But how the atoms turn into those shapes and substances, that I can sort of answer. Because we know the maths of the different types of forces between atoms, we can put all those numbers into a supercomputer that works backwards, and tells us how to place those atoms in the first place. As to how you place those atoms, somebody in my group at the moment is doing this with what is basically a tiny machine gun!