What's the Difference Between Physics and Chemistry? [Uncertain Principles]

Published: December 3, 2007, 10:16 am

An off-line question from someone at Seed: Fundamentally, what is the difference between chemistry and physics? There are a bunch of different ways to try to explain the dividing lines between disciplines. My take on this particular question is that there's a whole hierarchy of (sub)fields, based on what level of abstraction you work at. The question really has to do with what you consider the fundamental building block of the systems you study. At the most fundamental level, you have particle physics and high-energy nuclear physics, which sees everything in terms of quarks and leptons, which are put together to form mesons and hadrons, including the protons and neutrons that we're used to. The next level up would be low-energy nuclear physics, which deals with protons and neutrons as the essential building blocks, and looks at how they're put together to make nuclei. They don't discard the quark model of nucleons, but it would be calculationally intractable to deal with

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