Molecules and Reactions
Why a reaction goes, how fast, and how far: kinetics and equilibrium, acids and bases, and the electron transfers behind every battery.
Counting a reaction
What a balanced equation asserts, how a laboratory mass becomes a count of molecules, and the single variable that says how far a reaction has run.
The heat of a reaction
How to compute the heat of a reaction nobody has run, from formation data or from bonds, and why the heat released turns out not to be the reason a reaction goes.
Entropy and free energy
The quantity a cold pack gains while losing energy, how it is tabulated, and the combination that decides the direction of a reaction from properties of the system alone.
The equilibrium constant
Why a favourable reaction stops before it is finished, and the one equation that turns a table of thermodynamic data into a predicted yield.
Moving an equilibrium
What happens to a mixture when you add a reagent, squeeze it or heat it, with Le Chatelier's rule of thumb replaced by the arithmetic behind it.
Rate laws
How the speed of a reaction is defined and measured, why the orders cannot be read off the equation, and what integrating a rate law gives you.
Temperature and activation energy
Why ten degrees doubles a rate, how to measure the energy barrier that causes it, and why a collision theory that gets the exponential right is wrong by a millionfold in front of it.
Reaction mechanisms
How a sequence of elementary steps predicts a rate law, what the steady state approximation buys, and why kinetics and thermodynamics are forced to agree.
Acids and bases
Proton transfer as an equilibrium, the pH of a weak acid with the approximation everyone uses and the test for when it breaks, and what makes one acid stronger than another.
Buffers and titrations
Why a mixture of a weak acid and its conjugate base barely moves when acid is added, and how to compute a titration curve point by point.
Solubility and precipitation
The solubility product as one more equilibrium constant, why a shared ion suppresses solubility, and why acid dissolves limestone but does nothing to silver chloride.
Oxidation and reduction
Oxidation numbers as an accounting fiction that nonetheless balances every redox equation, half reactions in acid and in base, and the titrations they make possible.
Electrochemical cells
What a voltmeter reading actually measures, how a cell potential gives both a free energy and an equilibrium constant, and the equation that connects a battery to its state of charge.
The whole subject