Physical Chemistry Problem Set

These come once a week, so Fridays (due at 8:00 am Friday morning) are my least stressful day. With the sheer amount of work, school, tutoring, grading, home improvement, AMCAS application, etc. winding down for the week, I finally started my problem set last night. First off, starting your pChem homework the night before the due date is bad for several reasons. One, the problems can be drawn out and long. That being the case, I was up until 3:00 am completing and recopying my answers into an organized form to turn in. Two, if one has any difficulty completing a problem or there is ambiguity in a problem, there is no recourse for help. Fortunately, that was not the case.

Lesson learned? Do the problem set (or at least start it) on the weekend before the week ahead. Now, I need to guzzle a lot of coffee to ensure my wakefulness for the rest of the day. Three and a half hours of sleep really does not cut it. I cannot imagine conking out in the middle of the quad on campus, but as the day progresses, the pain my body feels will only worsen.

Surprisingly, though, I had little trouble staying awake in lecture this morning, despite the rigors of harmonic and anharmonic oscillators spinning through the air. My familiarity with the math and certainly helped in reabsorbing the material. Pictured here is a view of an anharmonic oscillator (or Morse oscillator, if you like) for a diatomic species. The bottom of the well corresponds to the equilibrium bond distance between the two atoms. The lines in the well show the excited energy levels. The ground state, quantum number v = 0 is shown with a view of its wavefunction. None of this is to scale nor meant to represent any real diatomic, but shows the principles associated with this model. I’m sure I could go on and tell you more, but you are probably board out of your mind or have absolutely no idea what the hell I’m blabbering about. At that, I’m off to my differential equations class.