Chapter 1
Introducing Inorganic Chemistry
In This Chapter
Getting familiar with basic concepts in chemistry
Building your knowledge of chemical bonding
Traveling across the periodic table
Delving into details with special topics
Counting by tens: products, prizes, instruments, and experiments
Inorganic chemistry is a practical science. By studying it, you become familiar with the intricate working of processes and materials — from how silicon works in a semiconductor to the reason why steel is stronger than iron. Inorganic chemistry is important for civilization and technological development.
The science of inorganic chemistry covers a great deal of material; in short, it’s the chemistry of everything you see around you. Inorganic chemistry explores and defines laws that atoms follow when they interact, including trends in how they react, characteristics they possess, and the materials they make. It may seem daunting at first to think about how many possibilities there are in the science of inorganic chemistry. Fortunately, each new concept builds on another concept in a very logical way.
This chapter explains what to expect when reading this book and should help you find the right section to guide you through your study of inorganic chemistry.
Building the Foundation
Before diving into the particular details of inorganic chemistry, it’s helpful to understand some of the prominent ideas in general chemistry that are useful to further appreciate inorganic chemistry.
Chemistry is a science of change. It looks at how individual atoms interact with each other and how they are influenced by their environment. We start by explaining what atoms look like, and we describe details of their structure. This is important because the way that the atom is made up determines how reactive that atom is, and as a result of the activity, it can be used by a chemist to make materials. After you have these basics down, you are able to understand the physical properties of many materials based on what atoms they are made from, and why they are made using those specific atoms.
Stemming from this basis of general chemistry we then deal with the specifics of inorganic chemistry. This includes an understanding of approximately 100 atoms that are of practical interest to chemists. To simplify this, inorganic chemistry is understood according to some general trends based on atomic structure that affect the reactivity and bonding of those atoms. This is quite different from the study of organic chemistry that deals with the reactions of just a few atoms, such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. But there is an overlap between inorganic chemistry and organic chemistry in the study of organometallic compounds.
Losing your electrons
In chemical reactions, follow the electrons because electrons hold the key to understanding why reactions take place. Electrons are negatively charged, mobile, and can move from atom to atom; they can be stripped from atoms, too. Atoms are always trying to have just the right amount of electrons to keep stable. If a stable atom has cause to lose or gain an electron, it becomes reactive and starts a chemical process.
The nucleus of an atom has a positive force that attracts electrons. This comes from protons within the nucleus that influence electrons to orbit around the nucleus. As you progress in atomic size, one proton at a time, there is room for one more electron to orbit around the atom.
There are periodic trends that can be seen in the periodic table, the first of which deals with the stability of atoms according to the number of outer electrons in the atom. This is known as valency, and it can be used to show why some atoms are more reactive than others. There are many more periodic trends that are associated with the electrons around the atoms, and you can find more examples in Chapter 2.
Take a stable atom, such as iron, for example. Imagine that you remove an electron from iron; it now has a different reactivity. This is known as oxidation chemistry, and it’s the focus of Chapter 3. The chemistry of oxidation tracks how electrons are gained or lost from molecules, atoms, or ions. When an electron is lost, the molecule, atom, or ion is said to have an increased oxidation state, or is considered oxidized. When the opposite occurs and a molecule, atom, or ion gains an electron, its oxidation state is reduced.
Originally named from the common involvement of oxygen molecules in these types of reactions, chemists now realize that oxidation and reduction reactions (sometimes referred to as redox chemistry) can occur among molecules, atoms, and ions without oxygen.
Splitting atoms: Nuclear chemistry
Another area of general chemistry with which you should be familiar is the study of radioactivity, or nuclear chemistry. Specifically, nuclear chemistry deals with the properties of the nucleus of the atoms; that’s why it is called nuclear chemistry.
As you progress through the periodic table each successive atom has one more proton and neutron compared with the previous atom. The protons are useful for attracting electrons, and the neutrons are useful for stabilizing the nucleus. When there is an imbalance between the two nuclear particles (proton and neutron), the nucleus becomes unstable, and these types of atoms are called isotopes. If they are radioactive...
