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Gza
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This thought came up in my mind 2 years after taking a general chem class, a good half of which was dedicated to some basic quantum mechanics (shapes of s, p, d, f orbitals, various quantum numbers and their meanings.) During the class i had nothing more than some basic classical mechanics under my belt, so the whole notion of quantum numbers and "orbitals" made absolutely no sense to me, and i felt like all of the homework problems did little to help me in understanding, since they all had to be plug and chug, due to the fact that no underlying theory was presented that could be used to solve the problems with a more bottom-up approach. Having gone 8 weeks into my first quantum class, I feel as if all the dim lightbulbs installed by my chem class have finally been illuminated, and I'm able to understand what is actually happening. This makes me wonder what the point of chemistry is, since it seems nothing more than a bastardization of physics concepts into a framework of science meant to understand various forms of matter. Why not just start with the basic physical principles, and derive chemistry from there? I'm not saying this simply because I dislike chemistry, I'm just wondering if chemistry itself is a little redundant as a science...