Talk:Physical chemistry

Confusing sentence

The last sentence of the first paragraph doesn't make much sense to me. Is it missing a crucial word? Could someone who knows the topic rewrite it? Jessica Pierce 14:37, 2 April 2007 (CDT)

New introduction

In a single bold stroke, I have moved the old introduction to the talk page and replaced it with a new introduction, which draws upon a description of physical chemistry provided by the ACS (here) and a synthesis of introductions from multiple P-chem texts (available online here).

In my view the previous introduction did not adequately achieve the goal of providing a lucid, concise introduction to physical chemistry to the casual reader. The long list seems contrary to the CZ recommendation of having a compelling, narrative voice. I have preserved the original text below, however, because the concepts therein may guide future development of the article.

Old Introduction

Physical chemistry is a combined science of physics, chemistry and mathematics, resulting in areas as thermodynamics, electrochemistry, biophysics, macromolecular chemistry, polymer chemistry, polymer physical chemistry, biochemistry, Theoretical chemistry, computational chemistry and quantum chemistry. Physical chemistry tries to describe observed chemically macroscopic phenomena by molecular-level explanations. Typically these are changes in temperature, pressure, volume, heat, and work done by or on systems in the solid, liquid, and or gas (but seldom plasma) phase are correlated to microscopic atomic and molecular interactions on chemical and not physical or nuclear level.

The relationships that physical chemistry tries to resolve include the effects of:

1. The behavior of elements according to the periodic table of elements.
2. The behavior of atoms and molecules on a physical scale.
3. Chemistry and temperature, thermodynamics.
4. Reaction kinetics on the reaction rate.
5. Chemistry and quantity, statistical chemistry, from order to chaos, entropy.
6. The chemistry of solids in solid state chemistry, crystals, radiation diffraction.
7. The molecular theory of solutions.
8. The behavior of colloids.
9. Tensile strength.
10. Chemistry of surfaces and boundaries.
11. Surface tension.
12. Plasticity and rheology.
13. Electricity, magnetism and chemistry.
14. Conductivity.
15. NMR.
16. Rotation and vibration in chemistry.
17. Spectroscopy.
18. Macromolecular chemistry.
19. Computational chemistry or theoretical chemistry.
20. Quantum chemistry.
21. Polymer chemistry.
22. Materials science.
23. Error analyses and data reduction.

New introduction

Within the discipline of chemistry, physical chemistry is an area of specialty which seeks to understand macroscopic chemical properties and reactions in terms of microscopic atomic and molecular phenomena. Towards this end, physical chemistry draws heavily on principles of physics and mathematics. Physical chemistry is comprised of three key areas of study: thermodynamics, kinetics, and quantum chemistry.

Comments welcome Jacob Jensen 17:47, 4 April 2007 (CDT)