British system, physical chemistry

I shall share the kind of thoughts that go through my head when planning the presentation of physical chemistry. Although my background is in the British system, I have immersed myself for decades in the American system, and will focus on that. However, it may be of interest at the outset to describe very briefly what I perceive as the distinction between the two. 

Whereas the American system is horizontal, the British system is vertical. That is, the American system arranges courses in sequence, with what (to be honest) is introductory physical chemistry in the freshman year, then, typically, a physical chemistry course in the junior year. There are modifications of that, of course, but that is the broad picture. By contrast, in the British system, there is not (or at least, until recently, there has not been) a freshman course, on the grounds that high school chemistry is a serious course that in some respects goes beyond an American freshman course. As soon as the college course begins, all three branches are taught in comparable depth and that parallel development continues for all three or four years of the course. 

The author thanks the organisers of the Third European Workshop on Quantum Systems in Chemistry and Physics for the opportunity to present this work at the Granada meeting Prof.F.M.Harris for many useful discussions during a collaboration of long standing the British Mass Spectrometry Society for its financial support of this... 

Unfortunately all such acts of bravado, at least on my part, came to an end the following year because we were expected to choose just three subjects to pursue at Advanced level and I chose chemistry, physics and mathematics. This meant that from the tender age of fifteen I was destined to never again study history. As for philosophy, this would not even have been an option had I chosen to go the way of the humanities. Unlike in the French system where philosophy is almost synonymous with the humanities, the study of philosophy in the British system was completely unheard of at least in the vast majority of secondary schools. 

New Scientist (Rouvray 1994), Scientific American (Scerri 1998), and probably other magazines for the same reading audience have carried articles making some mention of periodic systems of molecules. The 1989 McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia Yearbook carries a short section featuring some physical molecular systems (Hefferlin 1989b), as does the 1997 McMillan s encyclopedia of Chemistry (Scerri 1997). Babaev has dramatized periodic charts and systems on programs for Russian and British television. 

Whenever scientists are presented with a useful pattern or system of classification, it is only a matter of time before they begin to ask whether there may be some underlying explanation for the pattern. The periodic system is no exception. Attempts to produce explanations of the periodic system have led to major advances in areas of science other than chemistry, especially theoretical physics. The notion that the atom consists of a nucleus with electrons in orbit around it, which is taken for granted in modern science, originated when British physicist... 

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