Why?
1) Everything is chemistry. Well, not literally everything, but all the things we interact with daily like food, shampoo, clothes, furniture, building materials and such. And the fields of nutrition, medicine, industrial processes, biology, geology, environmental science, planetary science and a lot of astronomy.
2a) A better playground for quantum mechanics you cannot find. Chemistry is all quantum mechanics (plus a crucial smidge of relativity). And every aspect of quantum mechanics you can puzzle over is found in every material.
2b) Chemistry is also a great playground for statistical mechanics – a model for studying aggregate behaviors of all kinds.
3) Atoms, their substructure, and their conglomerates – molecules and materials – are the perfect models for studying fundamental physics. Basically I think of fundamental particles, like quarks and electrons, as atoms. They have substructure – whatever’s going on inside them, such as the photon structure function > , and they form conglomerates, such as hadrons and quark-gluon plasmas. And I think of space as a material understandable via thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.
Why not?
Chemistry doesn’t tell you everything. You’d think it would translate easily to biology, but here are three counter-examples.
- Concentrated hydrochloric acid: you’d think there’s no way that’s part of biological organisms, but it’s generated by most animals (all vertebrates?) in their stomachs.
- Sodium vs potassium: there are hardly two more similar chemical elements in the periodic table, and when I first read that salt substitutes were KCl instead of NaCl, I thought that’s ridiculous what a rip-off it’s basically the same thing! But it turns out that K+ and Na+ play opposite roles in water balance in cells: Na+ pumps it in and K+ pumps it out.
- Genetics: the microscopic details of how genetics works depend on the behavior of deoxyribonucleic acid molecules in the environments inside cells (water, proteins, salts and such), but the rules of genetics have little to do with chemistry and lots to do with how genetics needs to work in order for the organisms it controls to multiply and adapt. In another universe with different physical rules, as long as particle-conglomeration systems exist that are sufficiently adaptable and complex (aka chemistry), the evolution of complex structures (aka life) will result in genetics with rules not identical to ours but we’d recognize them.
Still
Chemistry is amazing.
On a related note, psychology occupies a similar place in social sciences.
Credits
I hafta give credit to my alma maters Miami University and The University of Chicago’s Departments of Chemistry and The Geophysical Sciences and The Enrico Fermi Institute, and credit to my research professors Alan Isaacson and especially Bob Clayton for putting up with me, for my well-rounded education, research, and seminar experiences in chemistry, physics, and the practice of science.
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