I'm making this topic to vent out my love of chemistry. As some of you, probably none, know, I'm currently doing my 3rd year in general chemistry bachelors (hopefully honors for the juicy extra lab course) and these days all I've been working on is chemistry, and some philosophy but mostly chemistry. I'll talk about some general chemistry stuff below
Or you can just scroll down to the videosTo start off, what exactly is chemistry?It is the study of the properties of Matter. In chemistry, we concentrate on all things from Chemical Reactions to the behavior of infinitesimally small particles that help explain why those reactions happen.
What does chemistry do for me? Like what the forget do chemists do?Chemists do a great deal for you. That soda pop you're drinking? A chemist devised what reagents to put into it's making, what reaction conditions needed to make it, etc.. That plastic keyboard you might be typing on, made of a type of plastic correct? A chemist constructed that plastic via a type of polyethylene synthesis in a lab somewhere, and then gave the formula to an industry so they could mass produce it. That aspirin you might need at the end of reading all this, made by a pharmaceutical chemist that does whatever the forget organic chemists do to make their stuff. I don't know, I never pay attention in my organic chemistry lectures.
Ok well what do you study? How do you learn how to make this crazy stuff?Chemists start by studying the very basic rules of chemistry, stuff you learn in high school, and that set of rules is expanded afterwards but most of it remains unchanged. A good chemist is one that knows all the rules. If you know your basics, all the experiments you do in the lab become a breeze, because then you can figure out how the reactions in the lab experiments work and why you use this acid and not water or why you dump your reaction in a bucket of ice later on for whatever reason. It's all in the rules.
On a side note, most of the experiments are the very basic experiments that have left a good mark on the history of Chemistry and science in general, excluding the more dangerous ones of course like the synthesis of Nitroglycerin. I asked my prof if we could, he said no :'(
Chemistry is so god damned confusing, why do we need to learn this in high school? What's the point? I don't want to be a chemistMan I know how you feel. The good news is at least that you might learn a few useful things on the way, like not to mix chemical solvents and the industrial cleaners they use at Mc Donalds.
tl;drDiscuss general chemistry stuff here, chemistry videos, other chemistry stuff too for the heck of it. Chemistry-related questions are more then welcomed and I'll do everything in my powers to answer anything you throw at me, especially the challenging ones. How does this work? Why does this happen? What the forget is salt and why does it disappear in water? Stuff like that. I'll try to answer anything you throw at me.
Chemistry vids:
Alkali metals in water
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCk0lYB_8c0Thermite
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrCWLpRc1yMNitroglycerin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ0RePZd3bg
