Description
With all due respect to Feynman (one of the towering figures of twentieth century misses the point: it would be better to say that “everything animals do, molecules do”. And as Wald certainly knew, physicists are better understood as collections of molecules than as collections of atoms.
Of all of the remarkable scientific achievements of the late twentieth century, none is more spectacular than the transformation of biology into molecular biology and its associated subdisciplines. This transformation occurred only because, time and time again, fundamental advances in theoretical physics drove the development of useful new tools for chemistry. The chemists, in turn, learned how to synthesize and characterize ever more complex molecules, and eventually created a quantitative framework for understanding biology and medicine. We chemists like to describe our field as the central science, and indeed it is. Our job as educators is to help students understand the interconnections.
This small book grew from my supplementary lecture notes during the ten years I have taught advanced general chemistry or honors general chemistry at Princeton University. It is mainly intended as a supplement for the more mathematically sophisticated topics in such courses. I have also used parts of it as background for the introductory portions of a junior-level course, and it has been used elsewhere as an introduction to physical chemistry. For example, an introduction to biophysical chemistry or materials science should build on a foundation which is essentially at this level. Most of the students become science or engineering majors, and they have a broad range of interests, but the strongest common denominator is interest in and aptitude for mathematics. My intent is not to force-feed math and physics into the chemistry curriculum. Rather it is to reintroduce just enough to make important results understandable (or, in the case of quantum mechanics, surprising).
This book can be used to supplement any general chemistry textbook. It lets the instructor choose whichever general chemistry book covers basic concepts and descriptive chemistry in a way which seems most appropriate for the students. Of course descriptive chemistry is an essential component of every freshman course. My own class includes demonstrations in every lecture and coverage of a very wide range of chemical applications. The challenge to us was to keep the strong coverage of descriptive chemistry characteristic of the best modern texts, yet elevate the mathematical level to something more appropriate for our better students. Many important aspects of chemistry can only be memorized, not understood, without appeal to mathematics. For example, the basic principles behind classical physics are quite familiar to most of these students. Almost all of them have used F = ma, potential energy, and Coulomb’s law; many molecular properties follow simply from an understanding of how charges interact. When these students move on to study organic reaction mechanisms or protein folding, much of their comprehension will depend on how well they understand these basic concepts.