The Importance of Learning Chemistry

A knowledge of chemistry is usefui to aimost everyone—chemistry occurs aii around us all of the time, and an understanding of chemistry is usefui to doctors, lawyers, mechanics, businesspeople, firefighters, and poets, among others. Chemistry is important—there is no doubt about that. It iies at the heart of our efforts to produce new materiais that make our lives safer and easier, to produce new sources of energy that are abundant and nonpoiiuting, and to understand 

One of the hottest fields in the chemical sciences is environmental chemistry—an area that involves studying our environmental ills and finding creative ways to address them. For example, meet Bart Eklund, who works in the atmospheric chemistry field for Radian Corporation in Austin, Texas. Eklund s interest in a career in environmental science started with chemistry and ecology courses he took in college. The diverse nature of environmental problems has allowed Eklund to pursue his interest in several fields at the same time. 

Bart Eklund s career demonstrates how chemists help solve our environmental problems. It is how we use our chemical knowledge that makes all the difference. 

Spending a winter month doing air sampling in the Grand Tetons, where he also met his wife and learned to ski  

Driving sampling pipes by hand into the rocky ground of Death Valley Monument in California  

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In the first chapters we spend considerable time guiding students to an understanding of the importance of learning chemistry. At the same time, we explain that the complexities that can make chemistry frustrating at times can also provide the opportunity to develop the problem-solving skills that are beneficial in any profession. Learning to think like a chemist is useful to everyone. To emphasize this idea, we apply scientific thinking to some real-life problems in Chapter 1. 

Another important area is the use of photochemistry—chemistry that results from light absorption—to perform transformations that are not otherwise possible. The practical applications of photosynthesis were based on fundamental work to learn the new pathways that light absorption makes possible, but the work on these synthetic methods has also added to our basic understanding of the reaction mechanisms. The important natural process of photosynthesis also inspires some work in photochemistry, where the challenge is one of producing artificial photosynthetic systems that could use sunlight to drive the formation of energetic materials. 

According to a survey, the development of concepts is considered the most important outcome of a laboratory program and learning factual information is the least important (Abraham et al 1997). Even given that, the exposure of undergraduate students to solvents and their use is a critical link to the goals of green chemistry (see table 6.4). 

The heart of modern chemistry is the correlation of the properties of substances with the structures of the atoms, molecules, ions, and crystals of which the substances are composed. As chemists have learned more and more concerning the structure of matter and the manner in which the structures of materials determine their properties, the science of chemistry has correspondingly moved steadily from the empiricism of a new and immature discipline toward the deductive character of a well-developed and mature science. For this reason and because of the excellence of Professor Ryschke-witsch s treatment of the subject, we are pleased to present Chemical Bonding and the Geometry of Molecules55 as an important addition to our series Selected Topics in Modern Chemistry. 

As a consequence beginning students typically concentrate on the beginning and end of a chemical reaction, that is, what reactants are converted to what products. There is also the need to learn what reagents cause these conversions. Such knowledge is an indispensable first step in the study of organic chemistry. In addition to learning what happens, however, it is also very interesting and important to understand how and why these transformations proceed. 

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