Study of macroscopic and microscopic phenomena in chemical systems in terms of physical laws and concepts [thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, kinetic theory, quantum mechanics...].
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5answers
2k views
Conversion of mass to energy in chemical/nuclear reactions
Is mass converted into energy in exothermic chemical / nuclear reactions?
My (A Level) knowledge of chemistry suggests that this isn't the case. In a simple burning reaction, e.g. $C+O_2\to ...
5
votes
1answer
411 views
What happens to chemical compunds that include radioactive nuclei, when those decay?
Say you have a chemical compound made up of one or more radioactive nuclei. If the nucleus decays, does the compound?
Possible outcomes I can think of:
the compounds continues to exist if a ...
6
votes
2answers
927 views
How are the calories in food calculated?
This is intended to be a fun question. Calorimetry used for calculating the heat generated from chemical changes has been around for centuries, however, I suspect the process for calculating food ...
5
votes
2answers
220 views
In condensed matter simulations, how is particle number density computed in practice?
I have been reading a recent paper. In it, the authors performed molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of parallel-plate supercapacitors, in which liquid resides between the parallel-plate electrodes. ...
4
votes
3answers
140 views
Do electrons in multi-electron atoms really have definite angular momenta?
Since the mutual repulsion term between electrons orbiting the same nucleus does not commute with either electron's angular momentum operator (but only with their sum), I'd assume that the electrons ...
8
votes
5answers
3k views
How was Avogadro's number first determined?
I read on Wikipedia how the numerical value of Avogadro's number can be found by doing an experiment, provided you have the numerical value of Faraday's constant, but it seems to me that Faraday's ...
5
votes
2answers
790 views
Is the Mendeleev table explained in quantum mechanics?
Does anybody know if there exists a mathematical explanation of Mendeleev table in quantum mechanics? In some textbooks (for example in "F.A.Berezin, M.A.Shubin. The Schrödinger Equation") the authors ...
