Chemistry is Your Friend; Introduction Lecture Notes

Chemistry AS403 – Notes for Introductory Lecture

Breathe. Breathe again. Now, repeat after me: “Remain calm, all is well.”

Welcome to Purgatory, or as I like to call it Chemistry for the Scientifically Reluctant. In the next few sessions, we will take an all-too-brief tour through the wonders of the chemical world.

Why should you come along for the ride? Because your entire existence – body, home, street, community, Earth itself – rises and falls on the basis of the chemical reactions that occur around and within you. Chemistry is your friend, even if you feel that chemistry class is not….

We’ll start the tour with INTRODUCTIONS. Your tour guide/persecutor is Brad Bolon, professional science geek (experimental pathologist and medical writer). I get to torment you with chemistry because

(1) I am a reasonably adept apprentice-level chemist, having about 1000 hours of lecture and lab in the field during the course of my professional education, and

(2) the other topic for this course was physics, which causes my brain cells to short-circuit.

You know who you are (I hope).

The next introductory item is to define HOW SCIENCE FITS INTO THE “REAL” WORLD. “Real” in this context means “material” or “natural” or “physical.” We will approach this question as a scientist would, by constructing a theoretical model off which to bounce our subsequent experiments. Based on lots of years in college (13!) and living in this world (45), my model for gathering and using knowledge emphasizes several different epistemologies. (An epistemology is a system by which we know that something is true.) There are several different epistemologies with relevance to the modern world, and most of us use more than one in the course of our daily lives. Examples include Revelation (“God told me so”), Reason (“it just makes logical sense”), and Tradition (“we have done it that way in the past”). The main epistemology of modern science is Empiricism (“we did an experiment, and this is how the world works”). Put them all together, and my current model of the world looks like the picture above.

To keep us on the same page, to me “hard” science means disciplines that emphasize physical experiments (astronomy, biology, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, physics) while “soft” science means fields where the results depend on unpredictable responses of individual human beings (economics, history, politics, psychology).

Please note that human beings are engaged in acquiring knowledge in all these realms. By definition, humans have opinions of their own, so subjectivity enters into everything that they do. The difference between experiment-based science (whether “hard” or “soft”) is that the only aim is objectivity, so the practitioners strive to remove as much bias as possible when doing their work.

The next introductory topic is to ACING THE HARD SCIENCES. Success in studying science is not easy – it’s not called “hard” science for nothing! – but the goal is attainable. All it takes is self-discipline and a logical approach. I used a 7-step process in my own science education, and I still use it daily as in my work as a scientist. The 7 keys are simple, not rocket science:

(1) Read the textbook the night before class. Yep, I hate to break it to you, but science classics are almost always textbooks. The reason is that science builds on itself over time. In general, about 50% of the stuff printed in current science magazines will prove to be wrong a decade or two from now, while the principles in modern textbooks represent concepts that most scientists believe to be true. So why read the textbook before class? Remember, science builds on itself – in this case, by repetition. The more times you are presented with a concept, the better you will understand it and recall it.

(2) Annotate what you have read. Take notes in the margin of the book or on a separate sheet of paper. Ask questions. Write your own lecture. The act of writing helps your brain to better remember what you have read.

(3) Listen to the lecture. This key is simple, if you show up and maintain some degree of consciousness. It’s even easier if you have read the book before coming to class….

(4) Read the textbook a second time. Not to be a nag, but repetition is good when studying science.

(5) Do the homework. The professor did not dispense problems to you just to torture you. (That is just a side benefit.) The assignment was given because the only way to truly understand a scientific principle is to work with it.

(6) Read more stuff. Don’t just read the assigned pages in the textbook. Read ahead, or reread relevant pages from previous chapters. Look for other presentations regarding the same topic on the Internet. The idea is to give your brain as many different versions of a new principle as are necessary for the concept to finally penetrate.

(7) Repeat as needed. (Duh.)

The thing about science is that it really is hard. People don’t subject themselves to this degree of torture voluntarily unless they are geeky enough to really enjoy the challenge. Maybe you qualify as a science geek, maybe not. Regardless, don’t make the task more difficult on yourself than it has to be.