> chemistry suffers from being actually quite difficult field
I wonder how much of that is inherent, and how much is artifact of highly suboptimal education? Chemistry education research has been unusually scathing, characterizing chem ed content using adjectives like "incoherent". My favorite high-school state standard insisted students be taught both that atoms are conserved in chemical reactions, and that atoms are by definition electrically neutral. :P And the incentives around say teaching orgo, are more about serving as med school proxy, than using chemistry to achieve real goals. What might chemistry look like if taught well? How difficult would it still be? It seems a very open question?
I would start the same way my high school chemistry teacher did when she said. "sometimes science isn't safe". My uncle's childhood chemistry set had radium in it. There are a lot more of us than there were back then, it is ok if some of us die in the pursuit of knowledge. It is a worthy goal, in that people like Curie paved a way to a better standard of living for the rest of us. If you can't demonstrate any cool experiments how are you going to attract future chemists? A different uncle who actually became a chemist had a crc reference that made your fingers itch just to turn the pages. I'm half convinced it would qualify as a superfund site and it was just a reference book. We worry too much about the wrong things. I'm sure all the big pharma in the water supply is fine, but chocolate has way too much cadmium!
For me it was only once I realized chemistry is just a specialization of physics that I really started to understand and care about it more. I learned way more about chemistry from a couple college physics classes than the chem class and lab I was required to take.
Everything I learned in my first chem class was just bad rehashing of electron orbits and configurations from physics. I'm sure things get more interesting with organic chemistry, but the classical stuff/basic elements I thought were easier to understand just thinking about the physics of their atomic structure.
Chemistry is fundamentally microscopic in a way that machinery is not, and chaotic in a way that electricity is not. (A big part of electronics is wrapping microscopics in friendly abstractions like "batteries" and "resistors".)
Molecules are small and diverse (it takes alkynes to make a world!) and the world is big.
Certainly chemistry also has abstractions that make it easier to handle. For instance, acids and bases are such; if you know something is an acid, you can trust it to behave in certain ways in certain situations regardless of the microscopic structure of the molecules.
I wonder how much of that is inherent, and how much is artifact of highly suboptimal education? Chemistry education research has been unusually scathing, characterizing chem ed content using adjectives like "incoherent". My favorite high-school state standard insisted students be taught both that atoms are conserved in chemical reactions, and that atoms are by definition electrically neutral. :P And the incentives around say teaching orgo, are more about serving as med school proxy, than using chemistry to achieve real goals. What might chemistry look like if taught well? How difficult would it still be? It seems a very open question?