After Professor Tanja Cuk finished teaching the quantum mechanical portion of Chemistry 4A, Professor Ke Xu began teaching thermodynamics. By then, I had already met Professor Xu in Chemistry 96, a seminar class on College of Chemistry research. I found his research on super-resolution fluorescence microscopy and its applications to biophysics particularly impressive. However, I felt distant from Professor Xu because his research requires a deep knowledge of physics. I also felt distant from him because of my interests in medicine; I am not nearly as interested in biophysics as I am biochemistry and medical chemistry. All in all, I found my first impressions of Professor Xu to be of respect, intimidation, and indifference. I believed, after all, that he thought of all undergraduates as "bothersome" or "idiotic." My perceptions were seemingly reinforced when he began teaching gas laws. …show more content…
I understood the basics formulas and concepts regarding ideal gases, as shown by Robert Boyle, Jacques Charles, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, and Amedeo Avogadro's experiments. However, it was more difficult for me to fully understand the real behaviors of gases. Certainly, I understood how to use and apply the formulas Professor Xu taught us in lecture. I also understood that gases did not act ideally because gas particles have mass and volume, are attracted to each other, and frequently collide with each other. However, what I could not understand was the meaning and derivation of many of the formulas. Why does Mean Free Path represent? Why does the Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution equations better represent the kinetic behavior of gases from a mathematical standpoint? My inability to truly understand the behavior of real gases hindered my understanding of thermodynamics and, for all intensive purposes, the topics of Chemistry