Transcript for:
Introduction to Chemistry Class Overview

the following content is provided under a Creative Commons license your support will help MIT open courseware continue to offer highquality educational resources for free to make a donation or to view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses visit MIT open courseware at ocw.mit.edu so um I am Kathy drenan you're going to be learning more about me as this morning goes on everybody should have a handout if you do not have a hand out Aaron uh will come around and give you one if you just raise your hand um there's a few in the back that just came in we will be giving out the look for taas as you come in the room we'll have handouts for you every day so look for them um and if you come in late we'll normally leave them in the entrance way here um I know that some of you have a long uh walk between classes um so the handouts will be available so when you come in grab your handout come on into class so now let me tell you a little more about these these lecture notes that you can bring a pen or a pencil to class to write on um so this is the summary for today um so today is really more about announcements and what we're going to cover um but there's some features of today's handouts that will that you can use throughout the semester so um summaries lecture summaries will all always have the reading for the class for that day's class so when you're going back over things and thinking about it you can always look at what reading was associated with the class they'll also always have a reading for the next class so you can read ahead which is good for the pre-lecture questions so um now I want to give you a sense of the material so we had this on our list of topics today general information we've gone through course material overvie um and introductions to the teaching team but it's MIT so we need to start with a quiz the quiz is can you tell me who these people are so who is this it is me this is my college yearbook picture so one day you will have one of these who is this is it's all it's not me people say that but thank you um it is Lisa kudro so who knows who Lisa kudro is Friends yes so Lisa kudro and I were classmates we were in the same year so you can look at who's next to you and figure out you know who in your row is going to be that famous person that one day you can say yes I was classmates with them um so so Lisa and I were classmates what do you think Lisa went to college to study I heard the correct answer out there it was in fact biology what do you think I went to college to study yes some people have watched my open courseware and know these things yes theater drama biopsychology that's kind of like a course nine um that's what I was interested in what do you think Lisa majored in biolog Biology or drama it was biology what do you think I majored in it was chemistry and of course we all know that Lisa is an actress and and I am a chemistry professor so I like to start every class with this because I think it send of it says something very important I did not like chemistry in high school I would schedule I was in chorus I would schedule every one of my music lessons during the chemistry class I did everything to avoid having to attend chemistry in high school and then I went to college and they said you have to take chemistry if you're thinking of a biopsychology major and I was like I am I have taken chemistry I'm quite convinced chemistry Bears is not relevant to biology in any way I was told I was wrong I was sure I was right I took chemistry and realized that chemistry can be very different in different circumstances and that everybody can find their appreciation for chemistry at a different time in their lives some of you right now already like chemistry but a lot of you probably have not found your love for chemistry yet some of you may find that love for chemistry during this semester I'm hoping it'll be a large fraction of you some of you may not find your love for chemistry until next year or senior year at MIT or even in graduate school or even when you have a job later on sometimes when I'm uh traveling around and as a professor I travel the world and give talks and I'm chatting with someone and Air plane or or on a bus or something and they say what do you do and then I say oh you know I teach chemistry and I always kind of watch the reaction to that and some of them are like oh chemistry and other people say boy I I'm an engineer now and I have to work with chemist all the time and I really wish I had paid more attention in chemistry class because we need to work together and I need to understand more what they're doing so some people do not find their love or their appreciation for chemistry till they have a career later in life so I'm not sure when it's going to be for all of you um but if you have not found it yet I am hoping to find a connection your connection to chemistry what about chemistry relates to what you want to do in the future and one reason that I did not appreciate chemistry in high school is I didn't really understand who chemists were and I didn't really understand what chemistry was what people used chemistry for and part of the reason I I think were these pictures that are often shown in courses in intro courses for chemistry and in your intro textbooks that's partly why I think $8 is a good price to spend on these chemistry textbooks these were great chemists but they're all dead and that really gives the message that chemistry is not a living discipline chemistry was a thing that people used to do and it was exciting at that time but then when they they got rid of their powdered wigs they moved on to other fields so I'm going to be showing you some different pictures in this class I'm going to be showing you these pictures some of the old pictures will be there too but every time I show you a dead white guy I want to show you someone who's alive so these are living chemists people who are using chemistry every day of their lives and I'm going to be showing short videos of these people telling you how they're using chemistry and what chemistry is being used for today so you'll be hearing and this is a series I call in their own words another thing that I didn't appreciate about chemistry was in the lab course I had we had a strong base in a weak acid and we would drop drop drop drop drop until it turned pink and then we could calculate the molecular weight of an unknown weak acid and I asked myself is this like a real pressing problem there are like a lot of weak acids out there somewhere that if only we knew the molecular weight the problems of the world would be solved but it turns out that this is kind of a good intro lab but it's in fact not what chemists do every day we will learn about titrations because we need to know PKA because PKA is important but we don't have a lab and we're not going to be doing that experiment so what is chemistry research chemistry research arches all of these following things so creating Quantum dots to be used in surgery how do you know if the doctor's got the right amount of a tumor you don't want to take more flesh than you need but you don't want to miss some of the cancer so you want to image exactly where that cancer is chemistry is designing sensors to find explosives in war zones this is a really important problem right now biofuels energy alternative energy that's what chemistry is using basic principles to to figure out how to design better biofuels or making new Pharmaceuticals we haven't really produced new antibiotics in a long time in this country and a lot of things that we thought used to be treatable conditions now are no longer so treatable because we don't have a new antibiotics and the bugs are becoming resistant to the old ones this is what chemistry research is today this is what you're going to be using chemical principles for so what chemical principles are you going to be learning that will help you solve these real world problem problems so we need to learn about matter and we need to know how matter reacts so in the first half of the course we're going to start with atomic theory there is going to be a little bit of history involved in that talking about the discovery of the nucleus electrons protons um and so we're we're going to have a little bit of history and some cool demos we're going to move on to the periodic table that's the chemist toolbox those are the elements that we can combine to make things and when we combine them to make things they need to bond so we're going to talk talk about bonding and they're going to form molecules and we need to think about the structures of those molecules because the structures dictate the properties of that of those molecules of that matter and then molecules can react so we're going to talk about how they react and whether a reactions going to go is about thermodynamics is it going to be spontaneous but then we also need to know if it's fast or if it's slow that's kinetic so we're going to cover both of those things chemical equilibrium you can have a reaction that goes one way and is going in the reverse Direction at the same time and there'll be an equilibrium constant associated with that reaction but sometimes you really want to go more in the forward direction to make the thing you want to make so you need to think about how the reaction quotient Q is related to the equilibrium constant K and if you're the Green Lantern equilibrium constants are meaningless you have the Green Lantern ring and you can push that equilibrium any direction that you want if you're the Green Lantern Q is always greater than K but if you're a student of chemistry you actually can become a superhero by learning about those chemical principles and then you can drive Q to be greater than K as well so I want to teach you how to be a superhero I also am going to teach you about solubility and acid base and oxidation reduction reactions because those are really the fundamental types of reactions that occur in biology in materials in everything and a little unit on transition metals that middle part of the periodic table where you have iron and Cobalt and copper and nickel and all those amazing elements that really allow you to do the most challenging chemical reactions um those are especially fun and if you want to have the power of chemistry you got to know about the transition metals all right so without chemistry you wouldn't be alive your body or a series of chemical reactions you wouldn't be wearing the clothes that you're wearing pretty much a chemist figured out the material that you're wearing and or how to process it and I think really importantly you couldn't spell MIT without chemistry we have the M from physics the I from math and we have the T from chemistry so if you want to spell m you got to learn about the ideal gas law and you wouldn't have the paper that you might be currently writing on without chemistry so chemistry you really should study chemistry because the major challenges of our time require chemistry knowledge to fix them treating human disease requires an understanding of chemistry solving the energy problem requires an understanding of chemistry and I believe people will come up with Alternative Energy I'm just less con convinced that they're not going to destroy the environment while they do it so I really think we need people thinking about solving the energy problem who care about the environment and can use chemistry to think about how we can protect the environment so why do I care so much about this and that's because yesterday morning I walked my daughter to her first day of first grade she's six years old she's starting school and I need people to know chemistry to make the world a better place for her so what I can do as a mother who's a chemist is find the smartest people I can find which I've done and then teach them the chemical principles they know to make the world a better place for my daughter so what I'm hoping that you will do here in my objectives I said I'd get back to these I want you to have a working knowledge of chemistry that you can take Advanced courses starting pretty simple that's what I want I also want you to know enough chemistry so you can do a europ in a chemistry lab and we'll talk more about the undergraduate research program uh throughout the course um I would like you to employ chemistry principles in a lab that's not a chemistry lab in your europ I want you to appreciate how chemistry is used to solve real world problems to make informed decisions about your health about the environment and energy and science policy and I want you to be able to advance science and engineering through the application of chemistry principles because I want you to make the world a better place for my for my daughter and uh that's why I want you all to have Superior knowledge because my daughter needs more than adequate knowledge uh to have a better world she needs Superior knowledge so that's my goal for all of you to teach you these things you don't all have to become Chemists in fact it's fantastic if you take the knowledge of chemistry and bring it to other disciplines because we're going to need all the disciplines coming together with that solid knowledge to be able to to make this world a better place I'll say that there were many uh 5111 Superstars um in this class in the past who came in like Sarah who hated chemistry and became a chem major and ended up getting a PhD in chemical biology um all these folks have gone on using chemistry not all as Chemists in biological engineering full uh full ride scholarship to medical school um PhD in biology running a local pharmaceutical company as an executive doing biof physics out at UCSF so all of these people learned the chemistry they needed to go on and do great things and you can put your picture in there okay so speaking of people we have H five minutes where I really need to introduce you to all the teaching team we have a huge group of people who are going to make it possible for you to obtain that Superior knowledge of chemistry and go on here at MIT to do great things so I'm going to ask them all to come down and I think we have a handheld mic and everyone can introduce themselves and let's uh bring that down actually maybe we'll start here okay hi everybody uh my name is Elena Goran I'm going to be your course coordinator for the semester so if you have any issues that uh you feel need to be handled by someone closer to Professor drenan uh I'm the one I'll also be sending a lot of emails to you guys so pay attention um and I'll tell you a little bit about clickers you'll get an email from me about clickers very soon hi everyone my name is Sam um I am the clicker ta so I'll be handling clickers and clicker competitions and stuff like that so if you have any clicker questions you can find me before or after class in the clicker corner I think is what I'm designating it clicker Corner um so if you forget your clicker or anything like that I encourage you not to forget them um but if you happen to um Don't Panic just come see me and we'll work things out um and we're supposed to say something that I enjoy doing outside of chemistry in graduate school um so I ski so if there any skiers in the audience we should hang out hi everyone my name is Ashley I'll be running recitation number eight uh so I look forward to meeting as many of you as I'll have the opportunity to meet uh one of the things that I enjoy outside of chemistry is Latin dance I'm not saying I'm any good at it but I do try to be uh hi I'm Ivon uh I'm I'm I run the microphone me and Ashley we run the microphone so we'll run around like give it to you whenever you have questions during class I run recitation 4 and I enjoy cycling outside of chemistry hi I'm Aaron uh I'm one of the two handout Tas so before class you want to make sure you have a handout before you get into class so toe and I and probably a few other people on some days will be making sure you all get handouts before you get in class I'll be running recitation 2 so I will hopefully see uh 25 of you or so at 2:00 tomorrow and outside of class I enjoy doing taekwon do I'm Odin uh I was lucky enough to be switched into this class just yesterday actually um and I enjoy hiking I spent a lot of time in the White Mountains up in New Hampshire hi I'm Dan I'm in recitation 7 so hopefully I'll see some of you guys tomorrow it's at 12:00 um and outside of chemistry uh I guess some of my favorite things to do are just play pickup games of soccer football with my friends uh hi I'm Mike I'm the mitx coordinator for the class so if you have questions about uh pre-lecture questions talk to me I was also the uh uh graduate uh chemistry teacher here for the last couple years so in in quantum mechanics so I'll have office hours on Wednesdays after class so if you have quantum mechanics class questions come and ask me hi I'm Lisa um I'm teaching the recitation 6 so if you're in six you're with me it's going to be awesome um I enjoy traveling and running so usually what I like to do is every time I go to a new place I like to go for a run there kind of weird but hi my name is Rose I'll be teaching recitation number nine um outside of chemistry in school I enjoy reading and being outside I go for runs too hi I'm Eric alt uh I think I'm teaching recitation five and outside of chemistry I like to run and play soccer and other sports hi my name is Frank and uh I'm not teaching any recitation but I'm the I will be the P ta for the course and what I love to do outside class was playing badminton hi uh I'm toe uh like toe right here all right seriously um um I'm teaching recitation number 11 and outside of chemistry I have no interest so I just sit there and do nothing hi I'm Anthony I teach uh recitation section number one uh bright and early at 10 a.m. tomorrow um outside of chemistry I enjoy tennis and playing piano hi my name is Eric and I teach at recitation 10 and outside of chemistry I like to cook hi I'm Amanda um I don't W remember my recitation number but I know it's at 2 o'clock in the afternoon um so maybe I'll see some of you tomorrow and when I'm not doing chemistry or school I like to ride horses I grew up on a horse farm so hi everybody I'm uh Jay I'm teaching rest or doing recitation number three it's at 3 p.m. tomorrow hopefully I'll see some of you guys there uh me and Eric are the two demo teas so when we bring awesome demos or when we have awesome Demos in class you can thank us um and outside of chemistry I like to I like to play tennis and table tennis too so