The Catalytic Cracking of Cumene

Science, by its very nature, aspires to the orderly arrangement of knowledge in a way which will allow predictive interpolation and even cautious extrapolation into unstudied regions of performance on the basis of known data. So it is that in the study of kinetics many sophisticated attempts have been made to calculate the rate parameters for some of the simplest gas-phase reactions from basic physical measurements. Most such attempts have so far ended in failure, and kinetics remains basically an experimental science.