The Quiet Period of Chemistry

Chances are, you’re not like me: you cringe when someone says the word “chemistry.” Your memory of it vaguely harkens back to an undergrad class whose knowledge you flushed once you finished the final. That’s okay — my goal for this series is to change that paradigm, make it understandable to all, and provide some entertainment.

After Mendeleev’s Jedi mind trick where he accurately predicted the existence and properties of then-unknown elements (mid-1860's), chemistry entered a “quiet” period. It wasn’t really quiet because there was plenty of development taking place, but nothing earth-shattering/monumental was really happening.

Well, some people might argue that the creation of physical chemistry may have been monumental/earth-shattering, but the mere mention of those two words together just made me throw up in my mouth a little. While aspects of p-chem had been researched for quite some time, it was officially recognized in 1887. Despite p-chemists being responsible for finding absolute zero (William Thomson, aka Lord Kelvin, 1848) and the first calculation of Avogadro’s Number (Lochschmidt, 1865), due to the sheer volume of obscure math involved, most chemists have the same reaction as I did to hearing the term “p-chem.”

P-chemists are single-handedly responsible for about 90% of the math that is done in Gen Chem I and II (refer to your textbook chapters on Equilibrium and Kinetics — we will not get into those here because… pleh). If you like math, and you like chemistry, p-chem might just be for you!