Hello Veeky Forums, quick question

Hello Veeky Forums, quick question.

Is Chemsitry a subject that somebody can learn to a high level from home with the use of textbooks + the internet?

Why do you want to learn it?

I want to make LSD.

You won't get the lab experience you need. You'll find that you're quickly over your head. LSD production isn't the meth walk-in-the-park.

Ignore
That's not me.

I'm just interested in learning a scientific subject. Bored with life desu. Chemsitry interests me but I hear it becomes difficult later on without practical experience. Wouldn't want to waste my time.

Well what kind of books would you recommend to learn the necessary theory?

I have access to lab and lab equipment.

Well, are you going to have literally no chance to apply what you've learned?

There's not really a barrier to just learning it, but if you're looking to get a job in chemistry at some point, then you need some experience.

>There's not really a barrier to just learning it, but if you're looking to get a job in chemistry at some point

Won't get a job in the subject as I have no education. Just looking to learn for fun.

In that case, I don't see why you couldn't.

Theoretically, yes. I was a biochemist in my former career. My brother, who was 16 at the time, came to me with a drug molecule he had read about, available in some local varieties of flora, and asked for my help. This turned out to be the first time I'd ever heard of dimethyltryptamine, but i looked up its structure on wiki, and told my brother it would be no problem. We went on a road trip, collected the plant material, and proceeded to do a relatively simple backyard acid base extraction that gave fairly good yield and purity and seemed very effective in the subsequent bioassay. After explaining the process to him, he became hooked on chemistry.

My brother is now 24, and without an iota of formal training, his theoretical chemistry is miles better than mine, and I have a doctorate. I'm still better at arrow pushing, reaction mechanism, redox; my naming is current (I.e., as he's often read from out of date chemistry text books, he still refers to alkanals as aldehydes, alkanones as ketones, still uses the prefixes formyl and acetyl as opposed to methyl and ethyl, still refers to isopropyl alcohol instead of 2-propanol, etc), and I'm better at the quantum mechanics side of things. But in terms of pure encyclopaediac knowledge of organic chemistry, names of reactions, and names of catalysts, my brother will start talking along the lines of "we reduce the oxime and then perform an aldol condensation of the resultant aldehyde yielding the product in 82% yield which can then be purified by bisulfite adduct . . ." And I'm completely lost.

So yes it's possible, it's just hard.

Vogel's organic chemistry is an excellent start. What do you want study? Organic chem? Inorganic chem? Biochem? What field?

Organic Chemistry like Walter White.

As an addendum OP, how much do you currently understand of the subject?

>doctorate with (close-enough-to-idetic-memory-) little brother in backyard lab
sounds pretty awesome!

and yeah I agree you can learn it, OP. You can learn alot of science, not just chem if you read up on it. *cough* physics *cough* nobel chem prize winners were physicists * gee there's something in my throat

Next to nothing if I'm honest.

I hear that there is much less math in Chemistry than Physics.

>organic chemistry
>theoretical knowledge

Yes. In fact you can with pretty much any subject. Lookup the books used in classes at a university -> buy those books -> study those books -> congrats you have an education

The point with university is simply to stress you into learning the material then resulting you in a piece of paper which proves your knowledge.

In physics, you will play with everything from fields and resistance in electrical circuitry to gravity to predicting atomic orbital patterns, and beyond.

All of this utilizes a shit load of math, mostly geometry and as a result calculus in addition to your traditional algebra skills.

Chemistry on the other hand, only uses math as a tool, typically with prebuilt or easily deriven formulas. Synthetic, Analytical and Biochemistry generally don't deal too much more than that, however Physical Chemistry tends to grab more math then other branches.

You hear correctly. Alright here's the deal with chemistry. Along with biology and physics it forms the big three of the hard, fundamental sciences. However culturally it's miles apart from the other two. Biology has a dignified, almost aristocratic heritage, a long proud history resulting from It's close assosciation with medical science (doctor is a high status profession) and from the fact that all of modern biology is essentially one long footnote to Charles Darwin, a Victorian gentleman. Physics is the alpha science, and they know it. Populated by alpha geeks, they're better than us and we all want to be like them. Physics envy is real. They also have as good a history as us biologists, filled with names like Galileo, who stood up to the establishment, but unlike Darwin in a less dignified and more stubborn autistic manner.

Chemistry is the little brother science, which had to wait for advances in quantum physics to be placed on a secure footing, unlike bio and phys, whose great theoretical breakthroughs came from within themselves. Chemistry has a more hands on culture, populated by guys that spent their teenage years blowing their eyebrows off in makeshift labs, burning down their mums kitchen, and ingesting various alkaloids they had purified. It's not dignified or alpha geek, but it's definitely enormous fun. It has a subversive, anarchistic culture. At uni, chem PhD's were the best to go clubbing with.

Chemistries Galileo was Dimitri Mendeleev, and his telescope was the periodic table he invented. He realised that purified elements could be classified as to their chemical activity, and could be placed in a table in order of atomic weight (roughly). Crucially, when things didn't make sense, he left a gap in the table, predicting an element would one day be found that had the right properties for that spot. It was the chemical equivalent of predicting the existence of Neptune from wobbles in Uranus' orbit.

Linus Pauling was chemistries Newton. Trained in quantum physics, he finally elucidated the nature of the chemical bond, giving the science it's theoretical underpinning. Physicists had at the time been predicting that carbon must make 2 bonds, much to the annoyance of the chemists, who had experimentally determined it made 4. Pauling explained the discrepancy, showing that the chemists were right, and that the physicists were incorrectly applying quantum mechanics to bonding. It was the first time in history the physicists had taken a bitch slap from another science (fuck you physics). Pauling then went on to solve the problem of protein secondary structure while unwell, showing that alpha helices and beta sheets resulted from rotation around peptide bonds. The guy essentially founded the entire discipline of molecular biology on a sick day. He then raced Watson and Crick to elucidating the structure of DNA, losing narrowly (fuck you Pauling). He spent the remainder of his life going insane and advocating the use of vitamin c to treat cancer.

That should give you enough to start on OP. To begin with you should study how electron shells fill, spdf subshells, and why that gives the periodic table it's shape. Atoms are like Lego, they attach to other atoms in certain ways, and the shape of the Lego is determined by the electron shells that are filled or empty. This will bring you to an understanding of the chemical bond, why non metals bond covalently and metals ionically, the difference that entails, why heavier metals in a group are more reactive etc. Then you can start to tackle organic chem.

this. fucking around with chemicals is waaaaaaaay different from reading about them. you need to follow safety protocol, you need appropriate equipment, and you need machines t characterize what you have.

lol, the funny thing is the physicists probably looked at the atomic orbitals and said "whelp, that's that. two!"