Yesterday I referred to the book Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, wherein one of the characters (Prof. Gottlieb) makes disparaging remarks about organic chemistry. I have duplicated the full passage from Chapter 2 at the bottom of this post. Enjoy! (And here’s a link to the entire book. You can read it for Spring Break.)
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Diffusion-controlled rate constants are the MAX
Today’s class presented two formalisms that organic chemists use for connecting rates, rate constants, and the shapes of PE surfaces:
- Arrhenius equation (old-school but still useful and still widely used; go here for more background on collisions & kinetics)
- transition state theory (more obvious connection to thermodynamic quantities, but web pages say this is not useful when barriers get very small)