Stress First Principles thinking. That is a design-principle instruction for this course, and it shapes almost everything that follows. The First Principles of chemistry are not the conclusions chemistry reaches; they are where it starts. They are the foundational layer from which everything else gets argued into place.
The layer has two parts. First, the five foundational assumptions: reality is real; the world is composed of materials; phenomena are interactions; no material disappears; the total material is constant. Second, the rules of argumentation, by which other principles and concepts get derived from that starting set. These five assumptions, along with the principles derived from them by the rules of argumentation, form the First Principles of chemistry. Neither half of the pair is enough on its own. Assumptions with no reasoning to build on them are a list on a shelf. Reasoning with no assumptions under it has nothing to reason about.
Why insist on naming this layer at all? Because all learning, knowledge, and thinking begin with a statement taken as accurate without proof. Every field sits on some such starting point; honest fields say so. To lay out the First Principles is to show the learner where the floor is. From there the rest of the course follows: the conservation principle comes out of assumptions four and five; the concept of transformation and the role of chemical potential come out of assumption three; the definition of a property, as a name and value applied to a feature, is itself one of the early derivations. The pattern is the same in each case: start from the bedrock, argue forward.
The First Principles are close kin to the assumptive base, but they are not the same thing. The assumptive base is the raw set of foundational assumptions, the starting statements. First Principles is the framework-level concept: those assumptions together with the argumentation that turns them into a working discipline. Put another way, the assumptive base is what we take as given; First Principles is what we build from it and call chemistry.
Question
If the five foundational assumptions are the bedrock, why call the bedrock plus the reasoning on top of it by a different name?
Reveal Merrill's answer →Hide answer
Because the bedrock alone does not do any work. Assumptions on a shelf are inert. These five assumptions, along with the principles derived from them by the rules of argumentation, form the First Principles of chemistry. The assumptive base is the starting layer; argumentation is what builds with it; First Principles is the pair treated as one framework.