The Fedorov–Groth law revisited: complexity analysis using mineralogical data

Abstract

The Fedorov–Groth law points out that, on average, chemical simplicity corresponds to higher symmetry, and chemically complex compounds usually have lower symmetry than chemically simple compounds. Using mineralogical data, it is demonstrated that the Fedorov–Groth law is valid and statistically meaningful, when chemical complexity is expressed as the amount of Shannon chemical information per atom and the degree of symmetry as the order of the point group of a mineral.