For generations, chemists have treated the Irving-Williams series as a fixed law of nature — copper, by virtue of its atomic structure, simply bonds more strongly than its neighbors. A team at KAIST in South Korea has now shown that this hierarchy is not destiny but circumstance, demonstrating in September 2026 that by reshaping the hydrogen bonds surrounding a copper complex rather than the metal bonds themselves, copper's dominance can be dismantled entirely. The finding suggests that stability in chemistry, as in so many domains of life, is less a property of the thing itself than of the en