Hi everyone! We're going to start with chapter 1 from your textbook that covers some essential ideas that will give us foundation to the remainder of this course. We'll first go into address 1.1, Chemistry in Context, and you'll hear about what is chemistry, why it is important to all of us, as well as the steps of the scientific method.
At the beginning of these lecture videos, the professor will always present the learning objectives. Learning objectives are the outcomes you are expected to achieve by the end of this section. After studying chapter 1, section 1, you should be able to outline the historical development of chemistry, provide examples of the importance of chemistry in everyday life, describe the scientific method, differentiate among hypotheses, theories, and laws, and provide examples illustrating macroscopic, microscopic, and symbolic domains.
Now I want you to think a little bit about what brought you to this course. Why chemistry? Some of you might think that it is simply a requirement to obtain a degree, but I'd like to broaden this perspective and show you that what you learn is relevant both for your career and for your personal life. In these pictures we see a lot of chemistry that is part of our daily lives.
Coffee, many people drink in the morning to get awake. The soap that is so important to keep us clean and stop the spread of viruses, electronic devices such as TV remote, laptops, smartphones, and the gas that propels cars. Chemistry is everywhere, much much more than these four pictures.
In chemistry we study matter, so we study composition, properties, and interaction of matter. However, how did it came to be? How did it all start?
Humans have been attempting to understand the behavior of matter for more than 2,500 years. For the Greek, matter consists of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. Medieval alchemists attempted to transform base metals into noble metals such as gold, and they also tried to create elixirs to cure diseases and extend life. This picture shows an alchemist's workshop around the 1580s. Alchemists were responsible for some useful contributions to how to manipulate matter, but their work is not considered scientific by modern standards.
Chemistry is often considered the central science because it is interconnected to a vast array of other STEM disciplines. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. This diagram shows some just some of the interrelationships between chemistry and other fields. Chemistry and the language of chemistry helps explain various physical and biological phenomena.
It gives us a solid base for understanding the physical universe we live in. Both biology and chemistry focus on the structure and function of activities at the molecular level, and they converge in biochemistry and molecular biology. In the study of many complex processes that keep place in living organisms, in computer science for example, chemistry helps to understand how computers work on a fundamental level, aiding the development of more efficient and powerful computers. On the other hand, computational chemistry allows calculation of structures, interactions, and property of molecules.
There are many other connections with chemistry, so that's why we call it the central science. My point here is to show you that chemistry is not something that you're only going to see in this class. It's not like a drawer that you open, you start in the course, you close it, go back to your life, and never look at it again unless you need to pass this course.
It's actually around us all the time and it's all connected to other areas of knowledge. So we need to understand that in the big picture everything is connected and your majors are important to chemistry and chemistry is important to your desired careers. Here are some examples of chemistry in everyday life. When you ingest food, your body is able to break it down into smaller pieces. They are essential for the body to function.
New materials are developed every day to make our lives easier and more comfortable, such as fabric for clothing, nonstick pens, and credit cards. The gasoline that most of the society relies on for car fueling needs to be separated and processed from crude oil. Throughout this course, we will explore the changes in composition and the structure of matter. We're going to learn how to classify these changes, how to understand how they're happening, and we're also going to look into the energy changes that occur while chemical reactions take place. Chemistry is a science based on observation and experimentation.
The scientific method, this scheme we're going to see here for the scientific method, help us understand how theories and laws are created. So it all starts from observation and curiosity. So a question is proposed and the scientists find out a way of answering this question.
So the first step is to form a hypothesis, to make a prediction. A hypothesis is also often called a tentative explanation. Now from the hypothesis we perform experiments, we make more observations, and we draw conclusions from those observations. So if the results are not consistent with what we predicted in our hypothesis, we form a new hypothesis and we evaluate that again, perform more experiments and evaluate that.
Now, if the results we got are consistent with what we predicted, we can now contribute to the body of knowledge. If much additional testing observations supports that initial hypothesis, the hypothesis now becomes a theory. A theory is a well-substantiated, comprehensive testable explanation of a particular aspect of nature.
Now, sometimes the other tests that are performed do not support that initial hypothesis, so new hypotheses have to be created. New experiments have to be run, new conclusions will be drawn, until we can get to contribution to a body of knowledge. Now, if much additional tasks yields constant observation, we create something that we call a law.
So the observation is now a law. Laws of science summarize the vast number of experimental observations and describe or predict some facet of the natural world. So we can...
Explain law as the summary of observations. Sometimes the concept of theory and law can be a little confusing to understand. I like to think of the theory as the how.
How that phenomenon happens. Law, on the other hand, is the what. So what's happening? So whether this diagram is very helpful to understand how the scientific method works, I'd like to emphasize that scientific progress is rarely neat and clean. It requires open inquiry, reworking questions and ideas in response.
to whatever you found before. This is why science is always evolving. The study of chemistry involves three domains that help describe the behavior of matter and energy. The big domain, the large domain, macroscopic, is what we see in everyday life.
Things are large enough to be sensed directly by human eyes or felt by touch. So when we are in the laboratory, the observation from experiments belongs to this domain. Now the microscopic domain is also the small domain. It can feel more abstract. It's often in the realm of imagination and it cannot be directly experienced.
Now technology enables us to visualize aspects of the microscopic domain such as using microscopes microscopes to see biological cells but in most cases electrons, molecules, and atoms are only pictured in the mind. The symbolic domain is kind of the bridge between these two. It is representational. It's a specialized language that represents components of the other two domains such as chemical symbols. So water is 820. Ball and stick models, structural formulas.
empirical formulas, computer models, chemical equations, lots of things we're going to see throughout this course. Now, this picture helps us understand the three domains of chemistry using water as an example. On the picture, we can see that water in the microscopic domain in the ocean in the form of water, in the form of icebergs, and also if we were there, we could feel the moisture in the air on our skin.
Now on B, you can see the molecular domain. You can imagine how the molecular domain looks like. Gas molecules are further apart. They're not organized.
Solid water molecules are very close together and very organized in pretty structures. And liquid molecules are still close together, but they're very randomly moving. Now on C, we can see that the formula of H2O symbolizes water. And we can also see...
This physical states on the side G for gas, S for solid and L for liquid. Okay, more on physical states on the next video.