The Decision-Based Approach to Organic Chemistry

If you were planning a road trip across the US, you would need a map of the highways. It would allow you to see all routes from your starting city to your goal city. You would then choose the best route for what you wanted to see and the time you had for the trip. This is exactly the process you want to go through for understanding organic chemistry. We need a map and the ability to choose the best route. Our maps of problems are called problem spaces and are often shown as trees, with a decision to be made at each branch point. 

Measurement Common for Organic Other Examples Upper Bound 

Another important aspect of control knowledge is the use of the reactivity trends of reactants to select the hottest site for reaction in a molecule. This allows us to focus on only the most important part of the molecule and not be distracted by differences in parts of the molecule that do not matter, like the unreactive hydrocarbon skeleton. In this way you won t slip on the grease when the hydrocarbon section changes but the hot spot remains the same. Also, the stability trends of intermediates can be used to predict the lowest-energy route when two or more intermediates are possible. Since energy is often limited, the lowest-energy route is the fastest and often the predominant route. Stability trends of products determine the route in reversible systems, as the most stable product is the one formed. More complex decisions involve multiple factors, which contribute to a tipping point for the decision, as discussed in Chapter 9. 

Since favorable organic reactions usually break weak bonds and make stronger ones, we need to understand the different types of bonding, and how to represent both the strucmre of molecules and the process of bond breakage and formation. 

To be able to judge the most favorable route, we must understand qualitatively both thermodynamics and kinetics. Therefore we need to understand the process of bond making and breaking, what makes bonds strong or weak, and how the energetics of a process makes some more favorable than others. 

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Section 1.1 The Decision-Based Approach to Organic Chemistry 5... 

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