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Download : Inorganic Chemistry, 4th Edition
Inorganic chemistry: it is not an isolated branch
of chemistry. If organic chemistry is considered to be the 'chemistry of carbon', then inorganic chemistry is the chemistry of all elements except carbon. In its broadest sense, this is true, but of course there are overlaps between branches of chemistry. A topical example is the chemistry of the fullerenes, this was the subject of the award of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Professors Sir Harry Kroto, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl. An understanding of such molecules, carbon nanotubes and graphene sheets involves studies by organic, inorganic and physical chemists, physicists and materials scientists.
Inorganic chemistry is not simply the study of elements and compounds; it is also the study of physical principles. For example, in order to understand why some compounds are soluble in a given solvent and others are not, we apply laws of thermodynamics. If our aim is to propose details of a reaction mechanism, then a knowledge of reaction kinetics is needed. Overlap between physical and inorganic chemistry is also significant in the study of molecular structure. In the solid state, X-ray diffraction methods are routinely used to obtain pictures of the spatial arrangements of atoms in a molecule or molecular ion. To interpret the behaviour of molecules in solution, we use physical techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy; the equivalence or not of particular nuclei on a spectroscopic timescale may indicate whether a molecule is static or undergoing a dynamic process.
The application of a wide range of physical techniques in inorganic chemistry is the topic of Chapter 4. The aims of Chapters 1 and 2 In Chapters 1 and 2, we outline some concepts fundamental to an understanding of inorganic chemistry. We have assumed that readers are to some extent familiar with most of these concepts and our aim is to give a point of reference for review purposes.
An atom is the smallest unit quantity of an element that is capable of existence, either alone or in chemical combination with other atoms of the same or another element. The fundamental particles of which atoms are composed are the proton, electron and neutron.
A neutron and a proton have approximately the same mass and, relative to these, an electron has negligible mass (Table 1.1). The charge on a proton is positive and of equal magnitude, but opposite sign, to that on a negatively charged electron. A neutron has no charge. In an atom of any element, there are equal numbers of protons and electrons and so an atom is neutral. The nucleus of an atom consists of protons and (with the exception of protium, see Section 10.3) neutrons, and is positively charged; the nucleus of protium consists of a single proton. The electrons occupy a region of space around the nucleus.
Nearly all the mass of an atom is concentrated in the nucleus, but the volume of the nucleus is only a tiny fraction of that of the atom; the radius of the nucleus is about 10 15m while the atom itself is about 10^5 times larger than this. It follows that the density of the nucleus is enormous, more than 10^12 times that of the metal Pb. Although chemists tend to consider the electron, proton and neutron as the fundamental (or elementary) particles of an atom, particle physicists deal with yet smaller particles.
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