Lesson 1: Physical Properties & Lab Fundamentals

The short version of what chemists and other scientists do is that they observe, classify, compare, measure, speculate, and test. To put it a different way, they observe and ask questions of nature. That is also what will be expected of you.

In the next few lessons we will look at several of the basic skills associated with learning chemistry, including such things as the observation and description of materials and objects, making measurements, and doing calculations. Then we will consider a number of applications of these basic skills--such things as making inferences, classifying the types of changes that materials can undergo, using those changes make separations, begin studying chemical reactions, and classifying materials into categories useful for the study of chemistry.

We will apply calculations to the study of chemical reactions and to the chemicals themselves. Then we will look at how the nature of chemicals and chemical reactions can be explained by the existence of atoms, and how the nature of atoms dictates the properties of chemicals. As you can see, we have a long way to go in this course, but we will start with simple beginnings.

In this lesson (and throughout the course) you can navigate through the course material by using the buttons on the left side of a page to link to the main topics in the lesson.. The bottom of each page will generally have a link to the "top of the page" and from there you can link to the other pages you need as you need them.

This first lesson will focus on both the mathematical fundamentals needed for the rest of the lessons in this course and also some of the laboratory fundamentals, particularly physical properties that can be observed and measured.

Much of this lesson is on measurement. Careful, reliable measurements have been at the heart of chemistry during the last 200 years. Careful measurements, beginning with Antoine Laurent Lavoisier prior to the French Revolution, have led to our understanding of combustion, chemical composition, and a host of other things.