What is the difference between the Molecular Workbench and other molecular visualization tools?
Most molecular visualization tools display molecular structures without letting users change them. MW is designed with the goal of not only visualizing structures, but also constructing structures (existing or non-existing) and simulating the physical and chemical processes they will undergo. In a typical visualization, students have to infer what is going on between static frames of structures. Whereas in MW, phenomena just emerge from dynamical simulations, and thus the gap can be filled (we hope). The model is artificial — atoms are not spherical. We agree that atoms are not spherical. More than ten years ago, IBM had manipulated atoms and shown nice STM images, which reveals that the atomic world is by no mean composed of ball-like hard spheres. However, many chemistry educators have long used static ball-and-stick models, physical or computer, to teach chemistry. Those models traditionally use color balls to represent atoms. In our study, we also suspect that non-science majors
