The physical laws underneath chemical behaviour.
11 topics · 16 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Water: The Fountain of Youth, Christmas Lectures
Peter Wothers (The Royal Institution) · 2012
Uses water to show that a substance's familiar behaviour is anomalous — its expansion on freezing and high boiling point follow from hydrogen…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Photochemistry of the Future
Giacomo Ciamician · 1912
Argues that industrial chemistry should learn to run on sunlight the way plants do, anticipating solar photochemistry roughly a century before it…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Experimental Researches in Electricity
Michael Faraday · 1839
Establishes, from his own electrolysis experiments, that the amount of chemical change at an electrode is strictly proportional to the quantity of…
+8 more at this level
12 of 16 works
Peter Wothers (The Royal Institution)
Uses water to show that a substance's familiar behaviour is anomalous — its expansion on freezing and high boiling point follow from hydrogen bonding, not from anything ordinary about the molecule.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Catherine Drennan (MIT OpenCourseWare)
Builds general chemistry upward from quantum structure to bonding, thermodynamics and kinetics, so periodic-table behaviour is derived rather than memorised.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Paul Flowers et al.
A free, peer-reviewed introduction to general chemistry — bonding, thermodynamics, kinetics and equilibrium — built for first-year courses at no cost to students.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Giacomo Ciamician
Argues that industrial chemistry should learn to run on sunlight the way plants do, anticipating solar photochemistry roughly a century before it became a serious research programme.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Keith J. Laidler
Traces how the equation describing how reaction rates depend on temperature emerged from van't Hoff's thermodynamics rather than from Arrhenius's own work on ionic dissociation.
David M. Hanson, Erica Harvey, Robert Sweeney & Theresa Julia Zielinski
Builds spectroscopy, atomic structure and bonding by solving the Schrödinger equation for one system at a time — particle in a box, rigid rotor, harmonic oscillator — rather than presenting quantum results as facts to memorise.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Serena Corr (The Royal Institution)
Argues that battery progress is limited by electrochemistry rather than engineering: energy density is set by what ions the electrode materials can reversibly accept without degrading.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Michael Faraday
Establishes, from his own electrolysis experiments, that the amount of chemical change at an electrode is strictly proportional to the quantity of electricity passed through it.
about 15 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026J. Willard Gibbs
Derives the phase rule and the concept of chemical potential, giving chemical equilibrium and phase behaviour a single thermodynamic foundation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026G. N. Lewis
Proposes that a chemical bond is a pair of electrons shared between two atoms, replacing electrostatic bonding models with the shared-electron-pair picture still taught today.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Irving Langmuir
Models gas adsorption as a dynamic equilibrium between a surface's finite set of binding sites and the surrounding gas, giving the isotherm still used to fit adsorption data.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gilbert N. Lewis & Merle Randall
Frames chemical change as a competition between enthalpy and entropy, computed as free energy, and gives the first systematic tables of thermodynamic data for real substances.
link checked 17 Sept 2026