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Chemistry discussion

Anonymous
timer Asked: Apr 19th, 2014

Question Description

What is the pKa of formaldehyde? I know that after deprotonation, the lone pair will be left in an orbital orthogonal to the pi system, so it can't be resonance-stabilized. However, the orbital is still an sp2 orbital, and there is some stabilizing effect from inductive withdrawal from the oxygen. I don't get why this proton's so hard to remove.

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