Inorganic Chemistry
I have a book titled “Descriptive Inorganic, Coordination, and Solid-State Chemistry” and I think it is a perfect title for the book. The teacher who taught our class started with Chapter 1 and moved to Chapter 9, and it was probably the best way to start. Chapter 9 is a sort of reintroduction of General Chemistry, dealing with the commonest elements found in nature, Group I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII, from alkali metals to the nobel gases, excluding the transition elements (those that add d or f orbitals).
After reaching the end of the book, for the second quarter, we went to Chapter 2, to discuss what our teacher called “the deep dark forests of the transitions elements.” Unlike the eight groups, in which all the elements can be defined in periodicity--the transitions metals are all different and behave in strange ways. If we were able to name lithium, sodium, and other elements down the group as alkali metal, beryllium, magnesium, and other elements as alkaline earth elements, and boron and carbon groups as unique mainly for the step-wise metal-nonmetal boundary, the pnictogen elements, the chalcogen elements, the halogen elements, and the nobel gases, we cannot easily name the transitions elements as anything other than transitions. We get elements as varied as copper and gold, plutonium and uranium, manganese and molybdenum, and others.
Chapter 9 onwards dealt with inorganic chemistry, even carbon. Chapter 2 to 5 dealt with coordination chemistry, unique because the transitions metals are coordinated by various ligands that can be charged or polar. Solid-state chemistry, which we are getting into, is about how crystals are arranged at microscopic size.
It is all descriptive, and infrequently do we get into the nitty gritty details of calculations or energy or physics. I see why this is a capstone class for general chemistry undergraduate majors, and I wished I had the opportunity to take this class earlier.
After reaching the end of the book, for the second quarter, we went to Chapter 2, to discuss what our teacher called “the deep dark forests of the transitions elements.” Unlike the eight groups, in which all the elements can be defined in periodicity--the transitions metals are all different and behave in strange ways. If we were able to name lithium, sodium, and other elements down the group as alkali metal, beryllium, magnesium, and other elements as alkaline earth elements, and boron and carbon groups as unique mainly for the step-wise metal-nonmetal boundary, the pnictogen elements, the chalcogen elements, the halogen elements, and the nobel gases, we cannot easily name the transitions elements as anything other than transitions. We get elements as varied as copper and gold, plutonium and uranium, manganese and molybdenum, and others.
Chapter 9 onwards dealt with inorganic chemistry, even carbon. Chapter 2 to 5 dealt with coordination chemistry, unique because the transitions metals are coordinated by various ligands that can be charged or polar. Solid-state chemistry, which we are getting into, is about how crystals are arranged at microscopic size.
It is all descriptive, and infrequently do we get into the nitty gritty details of calculations or energy or physics. I see why this is a capstone class for general chemistry undergraduate majors, and I wished I had the opportunity to take this class earlier.
posted by Alan at March 07, 2010
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