Analytical Chemistry

Analytical chemistry is a subdiscipline of chemistry that has the broad mission of understanding the chemical composition of all matter and developing the tools to elucidate such compositions. This differs from other sub disciplines of chemistry in that it is not intended to understand the physical basis for the observed chemistry as with physical chemistry and it is not intended to control or direct chemistry as is often the case in organic chemistry and it is not necessarily intended to provide engineering tactics as are often used in materials science. Analytical chemistry generally does not attempt to use chemistry or understand its basis; however, these are common outgrowths of analytical chemistry research.
Analytical chemistry has significant overlap with other branches of chemistry, especially those that are focused on a certain broad class of chemicals, such as organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry or biochemistry, as opposed to a particular way of understanding chemistry, such as theoretical chemistry. For example the field of bioanalytical chemistry is a growing area of analytical chemistry that addresses all analytical questions in biochemistry, (the chemistry of life). Analytical chemistry and experimental physical chemistry, however, have a unique relationship in that they are very unrelated in their mission but often share the most in common in the tools used in experiments.
Analytical chemistry is particularly concerned with the questions of "what chemicals are present, what are their characteristics and in what quantities are they present?" These questions are often involved in questions that are more dynamic such as what chemical reaction an enzyme catalyzes or how fast it does it, or even more dynamic such as what is the transition state of the reaction. Although analytical chemistry addresses these types of questions it stops after they are answered. The logical next steps of understanding what it means, how it fits into a larger system, how can this result be generalized into theory or how it can be used are not analytical chemistry. Since analytical chemistry is based on firm experimental evidence and limits itself to some fairly simple questions to the general public it is most closely associated with hard numbers such as how much lead is in drinking water.