Now that you know the definition of organic chemistry, you might as well not bother to take this course, unless you are
Organic chemistry is indeed the study of carbon-based compounds. As such it is a huge field. At present there are over 18,000,000 organic compounds known. 18 million!! It shouldn't be surprising then that there are specialized areas of organic chemistry. A partial list of the people who practice these specialties includes
In this course we will take a look at all of these areas. Our survey will not be even handed however. We will devote most of our attention to the work done by synthetic and physical organic chemists and relatively less to natural products chemistry, polymer chemistry, and theoretical chemistry (I think).
In order to deal with the vast amount of information that they have generated, organic chemists have developed organizational schemes, the two most important being functional groups and reaction mechanisms. A functional group is an arrangement of atoms that displays a characteristic reactivity pattern under a particular set of reaction conditions. A reaction mechanism is a detailed description of how a chemical reaction occurs. The inside covers of most organic chemistry texts list between one and two dozen different functional groups. In other words, the more than 18 million known organic compounds represent different combinations of 12-24 recurring molecular fragments. Many of these molecular fragments share characteristic reactivity patterns. Consequently, very few reaction mechanisms are required to describe virtually all of the chemical reactions of organic molecules. Developing the ability to recognize functional groups along with an appreciation of their characteristic reaction mechanisms will grealty simplify your job of mastering the material covered in this course.
To a large degree, our approach to learning organic chemistry will be guided by one question- "How do chemists know what they know?" This means that we will consider not just the currently accepted mechanism for a particular reaction, but the experimental design and experimental data that led to the development of that mechanism.
We'll start our adventure with a review of some basic principles that you encountered in your general chemistry course. They're listed under Topics.
N.B. Many of these discussions contain links to other web pages. While most of the links work, some may not. If you encounter a link or a button that does not behave properly, please send me an e-mail message describing the problem. My address is newton@usm.maine.edu.