Formal & Natural Sciences
The science of substances, their transformations, and the bonds that make matter interesting.
10 fields · 94 topics · 100 curated works
The physical laws underneath chemical behaviour.
Foundations & Overviews · Chemical Bonding · Thermochemistry · Chemical Kinetics · Chemical Equilibrium
Carbon compounds and the logic of building them on purpose.
Foundations & Overviews · Structure & Nomenclature · Reaction Mechanisms · Stereochemistry · Functional Group Transformations
Everything that is not built around a carbon skeleton.
Foundations & Overviews · Periodic Trends · Coordination Chemistry · Crystal & Ligand Field Theory · Organometallic Chemistry
Determining what is in a sample, and how much.
Foundations & Overviews · Chromatography · Mass Spectrometry · NMR Spectroscopy · Infrared & Raman Spectroscopy
The chemistry that living systems run on — proteins, nucleic acids, membranes and the metabolic pathways that power all of it.
Foundations & Overviews · Protein Structure & Folding · Enzyme Kinetics & Catalysis · Nucleic Acid Chemistry · Lipids & Membranes
Designing substances for a property you specify in advance.
Foundations & Overviews · Polymer Chemistry · Ceramics & Glasses · Nanomaterials · Composite Materials
Turning molecules into drugs: design, structure-activity relationships, delivery, and the toxicology that decides what survives.
Foundations & Overviews · Drug Design · Structure-Activity Relationships · Pharmacophores · Prodrugs & Delivery
Chemistry judged by what it leaves behind — pollutant fate in air, water and soil, and the synthesis routes that avoid them.
Foundations & Overviews · Atmospheric Chemistry · Water Chemistry · Soil Chemistry · Pollutant Fate & Transport
Chemistry where the nucleus itself is the reagent.
Foundations & Overviews · Radioisotopes · Radiochemical Separation · Nuclear Fuel Cycle · Radiopharmaceuticals
From alchemy to the periodic table to the synthesis of everything.
Foundations & Overviews · Alchemy · The Chemical Revolution · Discovery of the Elements · Mendeleev & the Periodic Table
No prior grounding assumed.
Pierre Curie, with Autobiographical Notes by Marie Curie
Marie Curie · 1923
Recounts Pierre Curie's work on piezoelectricity, magnetism and radioactivity alongside Marie Curie's own account of their scientific partnership and…
+12 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Sceptical Chymist
Robert Boyle · 1661
Attacks the Aristotelian four-element and Paracelsian three-principle theories of matter, demanding that any claimed chemical element actually be…
+28 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Elements of Chemistry
Antoine Lavoisier · 1789
Redefines a chemical element as a substance that cannot be decomposed further, replaces phlogiston with oxygen as the agent of combustion, and treats…
+57 more at this level
12 of 100 works
Marie Curie
Recounts Pierre Curie's work on piezoelectricity, magnetism and radioactivity alongside Marie Curie's own account of their scientific partnership and the isolation of radium.
about 3.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026George de Hevesy
Demonstrates using a radioactive isotope as a tracer to follow an element's path through a chemical or biological system without disturbing it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Rachel Carson
Documents how persistent pesticides such as DDT accumulate up the food chain instead of breaking down, arguing that chemical pest control had become a form of long-term environmental poisoning.
C. G. Wermuth et al.
Gives medicinal chemistry's working vocabulary precise definitions, including the pharmacophore as the minimal spatial arrangement of features a molecule needs to bind its target.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Tim Soderberg
A free, complete organic chemistry course that motivates every mechanism by the biological reaction it resembles, rather than teaching reactivity and biology as separate subjects.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Peter 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 2026Andrew R. Barron
Works through the s- and p-block elements group by group, tying each one's reactivity to the periodic trends in size, electronegativity and oxidation state that explain it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David T. Harvey
A free, complete analytical chemistry course covering sampling, calibration and the major instrumental and wet-chemical methods, built as an open alternative to a commercial textbook.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kevin Ahern, Indira Rajagopal & Taralyn Tan
A free introductory biochemistry textbook covering protein structure, enzyme catalysis and metabolism, written to replace an expensive commercial text rather than supplement it.
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 2026Peter Wothers (The Royal Institution)
Demonstrates experimentally that the periodic table's groups predict reactivity, so the arrangement is a claim about electronic structure rather than a filing convenience.
link checked 17 Sept 2026