Mystery Molecule: have I given away too much?

In many detective novels the murderer makes a fatal mistake. Sometimes they don’t realise this, sometimes they try to cover their tracks. On the Internet you can’t cover your tracks –

“The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

So there is an inadvertent half a line in the history (actually less) that I cannot wash out and is a glaring pointer to the solution. I’ve only just spotted it.
However I promised that if people wrote comments I might publish more clues. So here is the latest comment:

  1. Propter Doc Says:
    November 10th, 2006 at 5:12 pm eWell I spent a good bit of last night trying to figure things out, but never got anywhere close enough to post a comment. I would say that there was very little logic in my approach which ranged from guessing ‘orange stuff we’d encountered as undergrads’ and looking up wikipedia, to searching web of science for your previous papers to see if there were any clues there.
  2. I replied
    November 11th, 2006 at 12:34 am e(1)Thanks very much for posting. Although everything I reported in the original post was correct, the molecule is a bit of a chameleon and dark red is not its commonest colour which is yellow. I’ve probably acted like too many murderers, priding themselves on their undetectability, while gradually giving away more information. There is now enough information on these pages to solve it, given all that has been written and to know that the result is almost certainly correct

So, to confirm this statement here is a picture of a crystal of the mystery molecule (not real size). I am not breaking copyright by posting this (though I can’t say why as that would give more clues). It’s much more beautiful than this suggests.
mystery.PNG
I can’t think of any more clues at present. But if I get more mail I might – or I might not.

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One Response to Mystery Molecule: have I given away too much?

  1. Dan Sheppard says:

    Dear Peter,
    I’ve been guessing the molecule on Peter Corbett’s livejournal, and I think I have it now. I’m sorry that I didn’t do this anywhere more public, but it’s difficult to do without spoiling the fun for other people. I did it on the basis of the first post. I made one wrong guess, and then got it.
    [clues that show that Dan has got the right answer deleted… PMR :-)]
    Dan – I would be very interested in private email to know what your thought processes were…
    Dan (dan@caret.cam.ac.uk)

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