As Peter Atkins says in the preface to Reactions: ‘Chemistry…is thought to be abstract because all its explanations are in terms of scarcely imaginable atoms. But, in fact, once you accept that atoms are real and imaginable… the theatre of chemical change becomes open to visualisation.’
Throughout the book we are encouraged to imagine that we have been shrunk to the size of a molecule, so that we can observe first-hand the interactions between individual atoms, ions and molecules. It is hard to appreciate just how incredibly small atoms are, but the point is made rather neatly in that:
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