Professor Dunitz questions the usefulness of ascribing crystalline structural stability to individual atom-atom intermolecular interactions viewed as bonding (hence stabilizing) whenever linked by a bond path. An alternative view is expressed in the present essay that articulates the validity and usefulness of the bond path concept in a crystallographic and crystal engineering context.
Keywords: bond paths in crystals; crystal binding; crystal stability; electron density; high-resolution X-ray diffraction; quantum theory of atoms in molecules (QTAIM); synthons.