The Emergence of Physical Chemistry

This thumbnail sketch of where chemistry had got to by 1860 is offered here to indicate that chemists were mostly incurious about such matters as the nature and strength of the ehemieal bond or how quickly reactions happened all their efforts went into methods of synthesis and the tricky attempts to determine the numbers of different atoms in a newly synthesised compound. The standoff between organie and inorganie ehemistry did not help the development of the subjeet, although by the time of the Karlsruhe Conference in 1860, in Germany at least, the organic synthetic chemists ruled the roost. 

Early in the 19th century, there were giants of natural philosophy, such as Dalton, Davy and most especially Faraday, who would have defied attempts to categorise them as physicists or chemists, but by the late century, the sheer mass of accumulated information was such that chemists felt they could not afford to dabble in physies, or viee versa, for fear of being thought dilettantes. 

In 1877, a man graduated in ehemistry who was not afraid of being thought a dilettante. This was the German Wilhelm Ostwald (1853 1932). He graduated with 

Academy of Sciences felt confident enough to award a chemistry prize overtly for prowess in physical chemistry, upstart that it was.) 

Servos gives a beautifully clear explanation of the subject-matter of physical chemistry, as Ostwald pursued it. Another excellent recent book on the evolution of physical chemistry, by Laidler (1993) is more guarded in its attempts at definition. He says that it can be defined as that part of chemistry that is done using the methods of physics, or that part of physics that is concerned with chemistry, i.e., with specific chemical substances , and goes on to say that it cannot be precisely defined, but that he can recognise it when he sees it Laidler s attempt at a definition is not entirely satisfactory, since Ostwald s objective was to get away from insights which were specific to individual substances and to attempt to establish laws which were general. 

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One of the defining features of a new discipline is the publication of textbooks setting out its essentials. In Section 2.1.1, devoted to the emergence of physical chemistry, I pointed out that the first textbook of physical chemistry was not published until 1940, more than half a century after the foundation of the field. Materials science has been better served. In what follows, I propose to omit entirely all textbooks devoted to straight physical metallurgy, of which there have been dozens, say little about straight physics texts, and focus on genuine MSE texts. 

V. Past, The emergence of physical chemistry the contribution of the University of Tartu , in Estonian Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, ed. R. Vihalemm, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2001, pp. 35-50. 

A.A. Green, M.C. Hersam, Emerging methods for producing monodisperse graphene dispersions, The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 1 (2010) 544-549. 

After those first attempts to establish analytical applications of electrospray, it took more than ten years for the first bona fide electrospray mass spectrometer to emerge [14]. Yamashita and Fenn published the first electrospray MS experiment in a 1984 paper which was appropriately part of an issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry dedicated to John Bennett Fenn [15]. They electrosprayed solvents into a bath gas to form a dispersion of ions that was expanded into vacuum in a small supersonic free jet. A portion of the jet was then passed through a skimmer into a vacuum chamber containing a quadrupole mass filter. With this setup, a variety of protonated solvent clusters as well as solvent-ion clusters (Na+, Li+) could be de-... 

In this section, we will comment on how the general cultural background in the Weimar republic and the USA influenced the relation between chemistry and physics and with it the emergence of quantum chemistry in Germany and its subsequent... 

Dolby RGA (1976) The case of physical chemistry. In Lemaine G, Macleod R, Mulkay M, Weingart P (eds) Perspectives on the emergence of scientific disciplines. Mouton Co., The Hague... 

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