death by chemistry - a rant

I swear, chemistry is going to KILL me this phase – worse than it did when we had ionic equilibrium or that useless, worthless qualitative analysis chapter. I naïvely thought Electrochemistry was going to be mildly interesting, going by its sophisticated name, but it turns out that I had vastly overestimated its appeal, and that there is nothing remotely scientific about it. It’s all a bunch of useless theories with millions of unnecessary concepts – all to support a subject that has only two practical applications: the electrolytic cell and the galvanic cell. I imagine I would have understood the chapter just as well, if we hadn’t been taught “electrode potential” or “standard electrode potential” or “standard reduction potential” or “standard oxidation potential” or “molar conductivity” or “equivalent conductivity” or “molar ionic conductivity” or “equilibrium constant of a galvanic cell” or any of the rest, in such unnecessary detail. The chapter spans about a hundred pages in my notebook, even though my handwriting is microscopic and I stuff two to three lines into every line. What do we have in the end? A chapter with some five formulas and around three extraordinarily easy concepts.

Did I hope to derive some form of relief from thermodynamics after that? I did. What I hadn’t realized was that the First Law of Thermodynamics itself, and practically every symbol used in the chapter, differed vastly from what I had learned in physics last year. I think chemists are a bitter, pretentious group of people who only came up with that ridiculous sign convention because they wanted to establish theirs as a superior science to physics. But why in the world did they have to use E as the symbol of internal energy instead of U? Another thing that really bugs me is that you can’t expect chemistry teachers to adhere to the rules of math or to be able to respond to any of your arguments, when you question the logical soundness of what they teach. Lenny, for instance, can’t defend what he writes on the board, even when he’s right. For instance, he integrated dPdV over a nonzero change in volume to zero, and justified it by saying dP and dV were both very small and therefore negligible constants. A girl rightly pointed out the “integration variable” couldn’t possibly be a constant, and that if it were, how did he integrate dV/V over the same change in volume to ln(V2/V1)? He lamely said, “You can’t expect a chemistry person to know more than this.” The answer was SO obvious. Only dP is a negligibly small constant, so that when you end up getting dP(V2-V1) after integrating, you can approximate it to zero. So the chemistry class is basically divided into three broad groups: the first, which thinks the teacher is wrong; the second, the teacher, who is actually right but can’t justify what he writes; the third, which can justify it.

Lenny’s a good teacher, but I’m sorry, I just can’t help being mean to him and the entire Chemistry Cult. WHY does there have to be a separate subtopic for each of the the four different kinds of isothermal and the four different kinds of adiabatic processes? The fact that Lenny tends to be incredibly longwinded (Seriously, couldn’t he have just written “Heat/enthalpy of a reaction” instead of “Heat of a reaction/enthalpy of a reaction”?) doesn’t help one bit. Thermochemistry is an incredibly stupid chapter. I don’t know if anyone noticed this, but the definition of enthalpy itself changed. I was hardly surprised when the barrage of unnecessary concepts started coming at me: heat of a reaction; standard heat of a reaction; heat of formation; standard heat of formation; heat of combustion; standard heat of combustion. Am I seriously expected to study this garbage?