I'm taking AP Chemistry and have recently been introduced to rate laws and the rate constant. We are told that this will have to be determined experimentally.
Is there any research or discussion on establishing a solid rule for the derivation of these constants based on the properties of the elements?
I feel like there are too many values in Chemistry that are determined experimentally and used in a lot of situations, will there ever be a time where we know the reasoning behind these constants?(I'm not talking about the major ones such as Avogadro's number, but rather the smaller ones such as heat of fusion/vaporization for various elements, bond energies, etc.)
Is this even something that is worth researching or is it better to just assume that this research involves too much expense to produce anything useful and that using our experimental alternatives without question is a better way forward?