CHEMISTRY MADE EASY!
An Illustrated Study Guide For Students To Easily Learn Chemistry
NEDU LLC
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Table of Contents
Section 1:
Introduction
Chemistry is a huge topic; some students spend their entire college careers studying each and every aspect of it. There are many subtopics in the study of chemistry that are woven together to create an image of what we know about atoms, molecules, and chemical reactions. There are probably millions of different chemical reactions out there. As there are currently 118 elements in the periodic table, the possibilities in the numbers and types of molecules out there are endless.
You probably don't have four years of college to devote to studying chemistry. You may not even have a semester to cram in what you need to know. No worries! This book has you covered. You will surely not be a chemistry newbie after reading this, even as you will not be able to get a chemist job anytime soon. No matter; it's probably not a job you aspire to have, anyway.
In this book, you will learn that chemistry is about matter. You can break matter down a great dealall the way down to molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. The smaller the matter, the weirder it gets because none of these aspects of matter can be seen under a microscope, and some are nothing more than a mathematical idea (and not a real thing). Don't worry; none of this is Greek, and you'll soon feel like a pro as you come to understand the language of chemistry. Let's start with the easy parts first then work our way up to more complex aspects of this fascinating (yes, really!) topic.
Chapter 1:
Matter and Measurements in Chemistry
You may already know what matter is and what it's made of. However, way back in the day, Empedocles (a pre-Socratic Greek who lived around 450 BC), thought he knew matter, too. He said that matter was made of one of four elements. These were air, fire, earth, and water. Most people believed this as well, until relatively recently.
Even before Empedocles, the Greek philosophers knew of the four elements but thought only one of these was the main element and that the others were mostly secondary. You now know most likely that these guys had it all wrong.
Democrates in 400 BC and others had a better idea. He believed that matter was only made of two things: 1) lots of empty space and 2) tiny particles he called atoms or "atomos, " which could not be divided. In Greek, the word atomos means indivisible. You can see where the modern word atom came from! Despite being pretty close to correct about matter, Democrates was largely ignored in favor of the earlier concepts on what matter was made from.
Others (much later on) revisited this novel idea. Robert Boyle was one of these more modern-day scientists. He published a paper in 1861 where he said that an element is made of atoms that cannot be broken down under any circumstances. This put to rest the idea of four main elements. You'll see he was mostly right, too, but couldn't then have known much about atom-splitting bombs.
Boyle didn't get much credit for his work. John Dalton must have had a better publicity agent because he is credited with what we now know is modern atomic theory. In reality, he was first, after all, having published his atomic theory in 1803. He had some great theories on atoms. These include:
All matter is made from atoms. Atoms cannot be destroyed or divided.
All atoms of the same element will also be the same or identical.
Atoms from different elements have different properties and different atomic weights.
One can combine different atoms in whole numbers to create a new molecule.
If a compound decomposes, all atoms can be recovered as they can't be destroyed.
Atoms cannot be created from nothing.
Chemical reactions just rearrange atoms in molecules. They do not make new atoms.
Mass or matter is always conserved in any isolated system. This is a fact best explained by the Law of Conservation of Mass. This idea also came from the Greeks, who believed that all the matter in the universe is neither created nor destroyed. Antoine Lavoisier described this principle in 1789. This statement is absolutely true when you maintain a closed system.
Think about it: If you mix two substances in solution and one of the end products is a gaseous substance, you might doubt the Law of Conservation of Matter if you weigh the products left in the reaction flask. The end products will not have the same weight as the beginning substrates. This is because, unless you close the system up and keep the gas inside the "system," the gas escapes and isn't counted. Anytime you do a chemical reaction, you need to think about what might leave the system afterward for any reason.
Einstein extended the law of conservation of mass to add energy into the equation. Energy and mass are both parts of any reaction system. Because of this, the total energy plus the mass in a system are always constant. This gets a little more complicated, so most chemists ignore the energy aspect of a reaction. This is because most lab-table chemical reactions don't make much energy.
Joseph Proust got a law named after himself in the early 1800s by conducting experiments on the composition of simple molecules. He realized that all compounds are made by mixing elements in fixed proportions. The molecule of carbon dioxide, or CO2, for example, will always be made from a single atom of carbon and two of oxygen. He went further by noting that the mass of CO2 in a system will be fixed in how much of it is carbon and how much is oxygen. Two oxygen atoms have an atomic mass of 16 x 2 or 32, while one carbon atom has an atomic mass of 12. The ratio then is 12:32 or about 3:8 (by weight).
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