A significant trend within experimental nuclear physics over the past two decades has been the study, with ever‐increasing precision, of the properties of nuclei under various extreme conditions. While such experiments have tended to bring the relatively unstructured many‐body features of nuclear systems into the foreground, they have occasionally shown evidence of remarkably simple patterns of motion, even in situations differing drastically from those characterizing the nuclear ground state. We will here consider one such excitation, the quasimolecular mode, in which the nucleus appears to have the form of two smaller nuclei orbiting about each other.