This book describes the profound changes that occurred in the teaching of chemistry in western countries in the years immediately following the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, in 1957. With substantial government and private funding, chemistry educators introduced new curricula, developed programs to enhance the knowledge and skills of chemistry teachers, conceived of new models for managing chemistry education, and experimented with a plethora of materials for visualization of concepts and delivery of content. They also began to seriously study and apply findings from the behavioral sciences to the teaching and learning of chemistry. Now, many chemistry educators are contributing original research in the cognitive sciences that relates to chemistry education. While Sputnik seemed to signal the dawn of far-reaching effects that would take place in political, diplomatic, and strategic, as well as in educational spheres, the seeds of these changes were sown decades before, mainly through the insight and actions of one individual, Neil Gordon, who, virtually singlehandedly, launched the ACS Division of Chemical Education and the Journal of Chemical Education. These two institutions provided the impetus for the United States to eventually become the undisputed leader in chemistry education worldwide.

This book examines the history and fundamentals of the physical organic chemistry discipline. With the recent flowering of the organic synthesis field, physical organic chemistry has seemed to be shrinking or perhaps is just being absorbed into the toolkit of the synthetic chemist. The only Nobel Prize that can be reasonably attributed to a physical organic chemist is the 1994 award to George Olah, although Jeffrey I. Seeman has recently made a strong case that R. B. Woodward was actually a physical organic chemist in disguise (I). 2014 saw the awarding of the 50th James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry. James Flack Norris was an early physical organic chemist, before the discipline received its name. This book provides insight into the fundamentals of the field, and each chapter is devoted to a major discovery or to noted physical organic chemists, including Paul Schleyer, William Doering, and Glen A. Russell.

Dalton's theory of the atom is generally considered to be what made the atom a scientifically fruitful concept in chemistry. To be sure, by Dalton's time the atom had already had a two-millenium history as a philosophical idea, and corpuscular thought had long been viable in natural philosophy (that is, in what we would today call physics).
Atoms in Chemistry will examine episodes in the evolution of the concept of the atom, particularly in chemistry, from Dalton's day to our own. It begins with an overview of scientific atomic theories from the 17th through 20th centuries that analyzes corpuscular theories of matter proposed or entertained by natural philosophers in the 17th century. Chapters will focus on philosophical and religious conceptions of matter, 19th-century organic structural theories, the debate surrounding the truth of the atomic-molecular theory, and physical evidence accumulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that suggested that atoms were actually real, even if they were not exactly as Dalton envisioned them. The final chapter of this book takes the reader beyond the atom itself to some of the places associated with the history of scientific atomism. As a whole, this volume will serve as a passport to important episodes from the more than 200-year history of atoms in chemistry.

For nearly 20 years, the author, Mary Virginia Orna has led Science History tours to Europe and other parts of the world. Given the broad popularity of her tours among those in the scientific community, the ACS initiated a symposium on the topic as well as this book. The goals of both the Orna-led tours and this book include learning science through travel to sites where the science actually happened and describing how such travel can interface with the professional goals of chemists in academe, industry, and other areas of endeavor. This book makes it possible to plan a scientifically-oriented visit to well-known scientific sites armed with information not necessarily available on the internet or in guidebooks.

Chemistry is intimately involved in the development of the oldest known civilizations, resulting in a range of chemical technologies that not only continue to be part of modern civilized societies, but are so commonplace that it would be hard to imagine life without them. Such chemical technology has a very long and rich history, in some cases dating back to as early as 20,000 BCE. Chemistry Technology in Antiquity aims to present the discovery, development, and early history of a range of such chemical technologies, with the added goal of including a number of smaller subjects often ignored in the presentation of early chemical technology. While the book does not aim to be a comprehensive coverage of the full range of chemical technologies practiced during antiquity, it provides a feel and appreciation for both the deep history involved with these topics, as well as the complexity of the chemical processes that were being utilized at such a very early time period.

Can the existence of God by proven by science? The answer will still surprise you. Since the advent of science in the 16th century, it has navigated mankind in the direction of mechanistic materialism, and as a consequence to atheism. Since the beginning of the 20th century this direction has changed. Relativity and quantum physics, in conjunction with Big Bang cosmology, laid the foundation for a revolution in physics, in what became labelled as the "New Physics". Subsequently during the 1970's it was discovered that the universe, at every level and from its first billionth of a second at the time of its creation, was mysteriously fine-tuned. This fine-tuning comprises the inexplicable and delicate balance of the four fundamental forces that rule the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and the weak nuclear forces. This discovery implies that even the most basic building blocks of matter, such as atoms and its sub-atomic particles, can only exist by the grace of an inexplicable, complex and delicate balance between these forces. The chance that this fine-tuning could have emerged spontaneously and fortuitously, is not only improbable, but utterly impossible. Intelligence or Chaos elucidates that the complexity and fine-tuning of the universe can only be explained by the presence of an all-pervasive intelligence, the source and reservoir of the Information that actually guides and controls the universe. For the first time in history such a conclusion is confirmed by indubitable scientific evidence. The existence of an all-pervading intelligence, as expressed in the principle of fine-tuning, is also at the core of the ancient Vedanta philosophy of India. The author explores how Vedanta disentangles some of the paradoxes encountered in quantum physics and major cosmological questions such as the Big Bang and its origin. Using the latest empirical and scientific evidence Intelligence or Chaos clearly shows that the universe is ruled by intelligence and information, and not by chance and chaos.