Part of the problem is that the difficulty curve becomes, like, superexponential if you try to do the actual math. Fairly elementary atoms require the full theory of quantum mechanics to justify rigorously, and anything more complicated than that requires huge bodies of specialist knowledge on approximation schemes (I assume; I haven't studied them, but given that helium already requires approximations I'm assuming the trend continues..)

Of course, they could still do a much better job useful providing pointers into this knowledge, instead of just handwaving over it and insisting on rote memorization.

At upper undergrad and grad levels, it probably would have improved a lot. The issue is that a lot of the why requires quantum mechanics to really explain and even that becomes intractable extremely quickly. Like you can probably do the analytic solutions for hydrogen atoms and electrons but once you get to helium or past that, you basically need to use a computer to do numeric calculations and even there, you are very quickly using approximations instead of solving the quantum equations directly.

I think this lines up with my experience. The way chemistry is often taught its very abstract, borderline magical.

I also had an amazing physics professor who was able to tie literally everything we learned back to real practical and observable events. There is an art to teaching these subjects. This is all undergrad level though, and it wasn’t my major.

“Physical chemistry” is the search term for what you’d be interested in.

General physics and chemistry take different approaches forced by the subject matter. Physics abstracts to problems over concepts with details abstracted away, but at higher levels of education you learn to apply these corrections.

Chemistry starts with practical reality and a lot of rote memorization. Only at the higher levels do you get the unifying theory. Since the unifying theory is quantum electrodynamics (in this case, relativistic QED), that makes sense.

I don't know, I'm not very chemical, but fwiw: a friend and I were favorably impressed with Linus Pauling's general chemistry textbook. It tries to supply enough of the physics for the chemistry to make sense. We only studied for a few weeks before moving on, though, and it's a big fat book.

Chemistry fundamentally is about producing a result. Physics, especially when you get into particles, is about explaining a result. Ultimately, chemistry, electronics,even civil engineering, is applied physics, but we are a long way from consolidating and closing the gaps. Empirical results stand in for complete understanding in the vast majority of engineering disciplines, both because complete understanding is not needed and also because we don’t have it yet. Fundamentally, chemistry is a variety of engineering discipline, being mostly an applied science.

Yes and no. It depends which branch of chemistry you world have chosen to go down. Physical Chemistry certainly improves a fair amount of the hand waving, but even there the underlying physics is simplified fairly often (as I understand it — I went straight Physics and dabbled in Chemistry from the other side).

Not in undergraduate chemistry at least. Maybe chem majors had it different. Organic chemistry 1 was basically rote memorization of various reactions and catalysts and their required conditions. Exam questions would be some organic molecule start and some organic molecule end result and you'd have to draw out each and every intermediary step to get to that end result. Organic chemistry 2 was exactly the same just more reactions to memorize. Biochem was a little easier since the exams didn't ask for full pathways but still pretty much pure memorization.

I hated these sorts off classes, where if you had your notes with you, you'd ace the exam and be able to explain everything. Passing or failing depended not on understanding, but simply whether you cram all the specifics and covered edge cases all into your head at once, given the rest of your present courseload preventing you from actually digging in to the best you could. Wrong answers didn't come from not knowing how to solve something, but not remembering exactly how to solve something.

The wild thing is that the understanding of electron arrangement made a _huge_ difference in chemistry texts where overnight they went from myriad descriptions of reactions being commented as "...and this is not well understood" to quite thorough and rigorous explanations of chemical interactions.

I had the same issue! I absolutely destroyed AP Physics (first person in the history of the school to get a 5 on the AP and 100 on the NYS Regents) but got a D in AP Chem one semester, my lowest grade ever!!

I hated chemistry in school as well for the same reason. I studied physics afterwards... Oddly, once I was looking for information about some experimental physics problem with electron orbitals and found some very well-written theoretical chemistry lecture notes :P

Pi and sigma bonds fall out of thinking of it from a physical/symmetrical/statistical perspective. There's not too much hand waving in the modeling of atomic and molecular orbitals.

Yes its like cooking or music. You start just by learning whats in the kitchen and on repeating steps. This creates latent or tacit knowledge that helps with the Why questions down the road.

that's because chemistry is heavily involved in describing the nature of how elements and molecules interact with each other. There has to be some element of understanding that nothing is quite as clear because we use experiments and their conclusions to slowly but surely eliminate some theories while keeping others until disproven.

The waving, and the resulting need to memorize a zillion special cases, put me off Chemistry for life.

this was my experience as well. "here's a trend, it's not true in these cases for reasons we won't explain." I only had two semesters and the second was much better than the first.

Chemistry is very empirical. While we today can explain nearly everything from physics, you still always have check how things will work in experiment, unlike in physic where you often can calculate the outcome of experiments very precisely from first principles.

To not have to resort to rote memorization you first have to have the interest. That way you accumulate the knowledge over time, then the patterns feel logical at some point. The logic isn't very precise, maybe that's where you have problems? Some molecules are similar in some molecules in this regard and other molecules in another regard. You will get a feel how stuff behaves. You certainly have a lot of chemistry knowledge you are not aware of.

For example, I'm sure you have a good intuition how things burn and you probably know the basics of why it burns. The invisible oxygen in the air is the main chemical insight to explain why stuff burns. You can explain the whole process to whatever detail you like with physics, but many chemists lack the math and physics knowledge to do much of that.

One of the disappointing realisations I got from my physics degree was that as you move into the real world with non-spherical cows you can no longer solve any of the equations.

The physics that predicts chemistry is about 100 years old. Almost nothing people study up to high-school is that recent, and that modern physics tends to be really hard.

No.

We have answers. It’s called physical chemistry. The problem is that it takes a shit ton of math

> If I would have stuck with it, would things have improved?

Yes.

I have a B.Sc in Chemistry (Honours) from late 1980s and it was not until the final year that things finally began to click. The main catalysts were the books "Concise Inorganic Chemistry by J.D.Lee" and "Mechanism in Organic Chemistry by Peter Sykes". Both beautifully written and try to give a framework within which to think viz. the former based on the periodic table and the latter on carbon valence bond properties. I think i need to revisit these (and other books) to justify my degree in Chemistry :-)

For background and inspiration, consult Linus Pauling's classics; The Nature of the Chemical Bond and General Chemistry - https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Pauling+Linus%...

Linus Pauling (the only scientist in history to be awarded two undivided, unshared Nobel Prizes) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling