What is chemistry? This is probably the hardest question I have ever had to answer because chemistry is so abstract compared to other sciences. Physics has its big questions: Where does the universe come from? What are the fundemental particles of matter? and so on. Biology, zoology, botany can easily be appreciated interms of animals, plants and other obvious manifestations of their science and of course biochemistry is about how we, and other organisms, work but when you come to chemistry well then it gets difficult.
I suppose one could define chemistry as the study of the interactions of elements to form compounds and the determination of the properties of those compounds. A rather clumsy definition but one I am going to stick with for now.
Of course with such a definition one is immediately is faced with several questions; what are interactions? and what are elements? and what are compounds?
Lets start with elements and compounds. This is relatively easy since this question was first answered by the Greek philosopher -------. If we take a quantity, a grain for example, of a pure substance such as salt then it has certain properties such as its taste, is solubility in water, its melting point and so on. Now if we divide that grain into two parts and keep in dividing each of the parts then eventuall we will have something so small that we will not be able to see it and it will still have the properties of salt.
Some useful links
(Web Elements - everythin you ever wanted to know about the periodic table.),
Journals
(Index pages for Organometallics),