The Handy Chemistry Answer Book. Justin P. Lomont
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SCIENCE
CHEMISTRY EXPERIMENTS YOU CAN DO AT HOME
NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY WINNERS
INDEX
Acknowledgements
We would first like to thank Roger Jänecke and Kevin Hile at Visible Ink Press for their assistance, patience, and for taking a chance on two young science writers.
College students at the University of Michigan and Brandeis University submitted many of the questions in the chapter titled “The World around Us.” Our thanks go out to these people for their creative and inspiring questions: Jon Ahearn, Krishna Bathina, Alex Belkin, Matt Benoit, Emma Betzig, Jeetayu Biswas, Ariana Boltax, Nick Carducci, Gina DiCiuccio, Alice Doong, Christina Lee, Shelby Lee, Greg Lorrain, Jake Lurie, Sotirios Malamis, Aysha Malik, Yawar Malik, Katie Marchetti, Nicholas Medina, Leah Naghi, Humaira Nawer, Logan Powell, Nilesh Raval, Alexandra Rzepecki, Minna Schmidt, Leah Simke, Sindhura Sonnathi, Eva Tulchinsky, Afzal Ullah, Anna Yatskar.
Finally, we would like to dedicate this book to the person who initially brought us together, inspired and challenged us with this project and many others, taught us what it really means to learn and to teach, and so much more. This is for you, Brian.
Photo Credits
All line art illustrations by Kevin S. Hile. Photographs in the “Chemistry Experiments You Can Do at Home” chapter by James Fordyce.
All other images courtesy of Shutterstock, with the following exceptions: page 18: Armtuk; page 62: BrokenSphere; pages 67, 79, 129, 156, 186, 193, 222: public domain; pages 106, 141: Wikicommons; page 136: Patrick Edwin Moran; page 163:
Introduction
What’s inside of a zit? Why does eating turkey make you sleepy? How do glow sticks work? What causes a hangover? Chemistry (and this book!) holds answers to all of these questions. There are many wonderful stories about chemistry and the people behind these discoveries. Whether you have studied chemistry in high school or college, or even do chemistry for a living, we think you will enjoy this book. We certainly enjoyed writing it.
As you will see right away, our approach is quite different from a textbook. If you’re curious about the answers to hundreds of interesting questions about all the things in the world that you touch, feel, and taste every day, then you’ve come to the right place. The Handy Chemistry Answer Book uses a simple question-and-answer format to explain the chemistry in our daily lives. There are entire chapters on sustainable chemistry, the chemistry of cooking, and the chemistry of space. Some of these are questions we got from people like you! The questions in the chapter called “The World around Us” were all submitted from college students at the University of Michigan (our alma mater—Go Blue!) and Brandeis University.
We think that you’ve probably wondered, for just one more example, what sodium laureth sulfate is doing in your shampoo, but maybe never had a chance to ask. We are interested in explaining these things in plain language, and we’ve kept a conversational tone throughout the entire book, even with some very challenging subject matter. We hope that reading this book feels like you’re talking to someone about chemistry, even if you wouldn’t be caught dead doing that. There are chemical structures throughout this book, and we’ve used a simplified drawing system. Take what you can from these abstract drawings, but don’t dwell on them. Focus on the stories we’re trying to tell about molecules. And if you have a chemistry question you’d like to ask, or a chemistry story you’d like to share with us, please drop us an email. Finally, we both really enjoy working at our corporations and institutes of higher learning, respectively, and want to continue to do so for years to come. So every fact, implication, mistake, and opinion expressed herein is absolutely ours and ours alone,
and do not in any way represent the opinion or position of our employers, or any other person or organization.
Enjoy.
Ian Stewart Justin Lomont [email protected]
HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY
What is the earliest historical evidence of the study of chemistry?
Although they didn’t call it chemistry, people from ancient civilizations used chemical reactions in many aspects of their lives. Metalworking, including the extraction of pure metals from ores, and then combining metals to make alloys, like bronze, left many artifacts of early man’s chemistry experiments. Pottery, including the production and use of various glazes, fermentation to make beer and wine, and pigments and dyes for cloth and cosmetics are all evidence that man has always been fascinated by the ability to change matter.
Where was early chemistry developed?
While many civilizations learned how to make dyes and pigments, or ferment fruit into wine, the earliest theories about atoms and what makes up the chemical world came from ancient Greece and India. Leucippus in Greece and Kanada in India both came up with the idea that there must be a small, indivisible part of matter. The Greek word for “uncuttable” is atomos, clearly the root of the modern term atom. Kanada’s term for this similar concept was “paramanu” or simply “anu,” the indivisible element of matter.
What does the city of Miletus have to do with chemistry?
Miletus, one of the Greeks’ greatest cities, was located on the western coast of what is now Turkey and was home to where some of the earliest ideas about chemistry were recorded. During the sixth century B.C.E., the Milesian school of thought was founded, and the musings of three philosophers survived into the modern era: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Thales thought the most basic building block of the