[Rei]

I am really bad at physics. I am being eaten alive in my 1st semester general physics class right now. Do I have any chance in physical chemistry? I want to know if physical chemistry is very math-heavy and if it must be treated with the same level of methodological rigor in problem solving as physics requires. If you would guess it, I'm not too great with math either (scraping by in multivariate calculus), so this worries me.

On another topic, tell me about inorganic chemistry. I'm currently a second-year undergraduate in chemistry, and inorganic chemistry was one of the subfields of chemistry that interested me the most when I decided on a choice of major. However, I have yet to take a course on it, and despite my best efforts to research more about it, I can't find much. This surprises me, because you'd think a field that covers the majority of the elements on the periodic table would be more studied/discussed. Is it currently a promising field to go into, with many applications?

[Borek]

I want to know if physical chemistry is very math-heavy and if it must be treated with the same level of methodological rigor in problem solving as physics requires.

Yes.

Is it currently a promising field to go into, with many applications?

Not so much - there are simply not so many inorganic compounds to be studied (compared to organic chemistry) and they have been mostly already researched.

[Dan]

Not so much - there are simply not so many inorganic compounds to be studied (compared to organic chemistry) and they have been mostly already researched.

Materials chemistry surely? That's a big and expanding field.

[Borek]

I wouldn't classify material chemistry as inorganic chemistry, more as an interdisciplinary field.

[Corribus]

The bulk of research in inorganic chemistry these days is in nanoscience and catalysis, although there is still a lot of work being done in bioinorganic chemistry, industrial chemistry (e.g., fertilizers, pigments) and solid state chemistry (photovoltaics, semiconductors). All of these require some background in inorganic chemistry. Be aware that the traditional four classifications don't mean a whole lot any more. Research is so interdisciplinary. My degree is officially in inorganic chemistry, but I've did just about everything during my dissertation research.

And yes you will have to be reasonably good at math for physical chemistry.

[Irlanur]

Not so much - there are simply not so many inorganic compounds to be studied (compared to organic chemistry) and they have been mostly already researched.

Haha, yes, and physics was mostly completed before Planck and Einstein...

[Borek]

Haha, yes, and physics was mostly completed before Planck and Einstein...

I don't think it is a valid argument. Inorganic chemistry - understood as chemistry of compounds that doesn't contain carbon in other forms than carbonates - is limited, mostly because they are relatively simple, rarely made of more than 2-3 elements, and they rarely create longer chains or more complicated yet well defined structures. While we do find ways of preparing new strictly inorganic compounds now and then, they require more and more exotic conditions and they are rarely stable. We have spent several hundreds years doing so, so there are not many things that have been not tried. Sure, there are still interesting things happening in the metaloorganic chemistry, but I wouldn't include them in inorganic chemistry.

Plus, while there are obvious gaps in our knowledge (like quantum gravity) they don't seem to be able to open new windows into our understanding of the matter behavior in "normal" conditions - "normal" as in the surrounding Universe. "Shemistry" deals with a rather narrow range of temperatures, and we are capable of explaining behavior of matter well beyond these temperatures.

tl;dr: I have nothing against groundbreaking discoveries, but I don't hold my breath.

[Irlanur]

I don't think it is a valid argument. Inorganic chemistry - understood as chemistry of compounds that doesn't contain carbon in other forms than carbonates - is limited, mostly because they are relatively simple, rarely made of more than 2-3 elements, and they rarely create longer chains or more complicated yet well defined structures. While we do find ways of preparing new strictly inorganic compounds now and then, they require more and more exotic conditions and they are rarely stable. We have spent several hundreds years doing so, so there are not many things that have been not tried. Sure, there are still interesting things happening in the metaloorganic chemistry, but I wouldn't include them in inorganic chemistry.

Live a happy mediocre live then:)

[Enthalpy]

Semiconductor processing are an example in inorganic chemistry where everything remains to discover, because
- People are interested in the surfaces rather than the volume
- Reactants and products must generally be gaseous
- The means are exotic: plasma, sputtering, single-layer epitaxy, atomic layer deposition...
- The necessary purity is unknown elsewhere
- The shape, the anisotropic selectivity matter
- Usually nowhere near equilibrium
- I forget a few more
- Processes evolve so quickly that one has no time for theories
So much exotic in fact, that process developers progress in the dark, alone in the world.

Semiconductor components and materials also make discoveries regularly. One fashionable theme presently is spintronics, where thin films can be ferromagnetic, electrons in semiconductors have their spin oriented, and so on. Supposed to make interesting components some time in the future; makes already read heads for hard disk drives.

New opto, power and GHz semiconductor materials are badly wanted, especially for deep UV Led and lasers, and every progress there is very much a matter of processing, with chemistry in it. Things as simple as: How to have a P dopant in AlN or B_xAl_1-xN.