 They say there's more than one way to skin a cat and so it is that there's more than one way to talk about chemistry, three ways in fact. This is a concept in chemistry known as Johnstone's triangle although the name isn't terribly important you can look that up in your own time. The first of these three ways is the macroscopic world. Then we have the micro or submicroscopic world and we also have the symbolic world. These are three different ways for talking about exactly the same thing and might be why chemistry is often difficult to learn. The macroscopic world involves things like lab chemistry. Here we describe things as having physical properties that we can test. Water is a liquid at room temperature, it's wet, it has certain mass and density or it takes a certain amount of energy to raise this temperature. In the microscopic world water is three atoms joined together. There are three nuclei and ten electrons buzzing around it. This interacts with other water molecules around it hydrogen bonding through electrostatic interactions. In the symbolic world we represent water as 80 to always balls and sticks or as a Lewis structure. We draw its electrons in a molecular orbital diagram and represent its bonds through lines and dashes and its charges with pluses and minuses. All of these describe the same thing but in three different ways and a good chemist needs to be able to jump around them easily. Chemical kinetics in particular is a great example. In the macroscopic world we see physical changes we can measure, a color change over time for instance. In the submicroscopic world atoms break apart and come together and they have to overcome a certain energy barrier to do so. In the symbolic world we represent this with mathematics and equations that help us predict exactly what will happen generating laws that the molecules seem to follow but ultimately we can't escape the fact that this is just three ways of describing the exact same thing.