Skeletal chemistry
What is the minimal core of an education in chemistry? What should someone with a passing need to understand a bit of chemistry know of our subject? And what, if heaven were on our side, should the cultivated 'man in the street' know about chemistry?
A year ago I was invited to the American Chemical Society meeting in Washington DC to give my views on what constituted the minimal core of an education in chemistry. Privately, it became known as 'the Atkins' diet', though we run into serious copyright issues if we make this joke in public. There is a lot more to chemistry than my minimal basis, but bedrock is one thing and superstructure another.
What it boils down to
Here I am focusing on bedrock, and as such I think there are only nine central ideas.
Matter is atomic
This provides the currency of all chemical discourse. Richard Feynman once remarked that if he were to have to leave a message carved in stone that would put survivors of a nuclear holocaust on the fast track to our current scientific understanding, then he would scratch 'matter is atomic'. Without this fundamental understanding of the composition of matter, chemistry would be intellectually amorphous, so it must lie at the bedrock of our subject...
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