Rebecca's Chemistry Resources

Buttercup on Droop Mountain

Let's Get Chemical

I tracked down these links while writing lecture notes for my chemistry class. I took three years of chemistry in college, and I worked in molecular genetics labs for ten or more years, but electron orbitals, redox, and radioactive isotope decay are things I've never had to explain to anyone else. That requires quite a bit of intense review, and chemistry was never a favorite topic of mine. The text for the course seemed a little thin on some topics, so I've gathered these links to fill in my memory gaps.

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J.J. Thomson's Experiments

When I was an undergraduate student, I believed my chemistry and physics professors hated me. I was a biological sciences major, and had to take large lecture sections with the 200-300 pre-med and pre-vet students. I know from personal experience that pre-med students are not much fun, so that probably explains the surly faculty. As a student, it was almost impossible for me to ask a question in lecture, and I never got a civil (let alone helpful) answer from a chemistry or physics professor in the three years I spent in those departments.

This was in sharp contrast to my experiences in all my other classes, from Chaucer to calculus to microbiology. Of course, I graduated loving Chaucer, and statistics, and botany....and hating chemistry. Of course, every science job I ever had after grad school was in biochemistry.

Now I'm teaching a college-level chemistry class, and having flashbacks to the seventies as I prepare lectures. I'm current on DNA, but haven't thought about electron shells, subshells, and orbitals much lately. That's how I got curious about John Thomson's nineteenth century experiments on subatomic particles and electromagnetic charges. My chemistry students were supposed to work through a little computer simulation on "how we discovered the mass of the electron," but we couldn't make it "come out right." When I did this in physics lab in 1976, with equipment old enough to have been original to Thomson's lab, we got the same non-result. I couldn't make sense of it then, but I was determined to figure it out this time. That's how I came to find these excellent links. There are some amazing student resources available now. I'm a bit jealous.

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History of Carbohydrate Chemistry

In my continuing search for materials on the history of chemistry, I've been browsing the Web for carbohydrate chemistry. Here are some good sources. Reading about "how they came to know that" seems to help me understand and remember this material, which was always less than intuitive for me.

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Poetry, Newton, and Alchemy

Here are some excerpts from an interview on Newton's alchemy with historian Bill Newman, who has some interesting things to say about alchemy, poetry, and riddles. It's no wonder alchemy interested both John Donne and Isaac Newton.

[A]lchemy has been portrayed as the epitome of irrationality and a sort of avaricious folly....But we now know that most of the great minds of the [seventeenth and eighteenth centuries] were involved in alchemy, including Robert Boyle, John Locke, Leibniz, any number of others....[Alchemy] became legal during Newton's time. But why was it illegal? There's a long association, for good reasons, between alchemy and counterfeiting.

....[Newton] thought that alchemy promised tremendous control over the natural world. It would allow you to transmute virtually anything into anything else, not just lead into gold. There are other things, too, that probably were in Newton's mind. For example, alchemists realized that if the philosophers' stone were real and it got out to the public, it would ruin the gold standard.

....[T]his was the enigmatic language of alchemy. I mean "enigmatic" in a quite strict sense: it was a riddling language. The best way to look at these metaphors is in the light of riddles....the "menstrual blood of the sordid whore" is decipherable. It means simply the metalline form of antimony. That is the "menstrual blood" that's extracted from the "sordid whore," which is the ore of antimony.

It is a code, and it's clear that the alchemists delighted in this code. It's almost a form of poetry. In fact, lots of alchemists wrote in the form of poetry, quite literally.

....Newton was reading alchemists over a period of time, ranging over perhaps a thousand years, and there was a lot of development in these treatises. But Newton generally thinks they're all saying the same thing, so that's a problem....he was weaving together extracts from different authors, trying to make sense out of them. I think alchemy was the ultimate riddle. Newton delighted in riddles, and this provided a challenge to him that he just couldn't resist.

My inevitable list of links:

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Chemistry Lessons and John Donne

I'm preparing another chemistry lecture, and I keep coming back to John Donne. It may seem strange, but it's all connected in my head. I suspected the Bridgid in Cyberspace celebrants might find the final couplet of Donne poem Love's Alchemy a little, well, misogynistic, so I went with a The Relic (equally strange and blasphemous in its own way). But my reading lately has included some history of chemistry, including its early roots in alchemy. Here's Donne's chemistry connection:

Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I,
Say, where his centric happiness doth lie.
        I have loved, and got, and told,
But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,
I should not find that hidden mystery.
        O! 'tis imposture all ;
And as no chemic yet th' elixir got,
        But glorifies his pregnant pot,
        If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,
    So, lovers dream a rich and long delight,
    But get a winter-seeming summer's night.

Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day,
Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?
        Ends love in this, that my man
Can be as happy as I can, if he can
Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play?
        That loving wretch that swears,
'Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,
        Which he in her angelic finds,
        Would swear as justly, that he hears,
In that day's rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres.
    Hope not for mind in women ; at their best,
    Sweetness and wit they are, but mummy, possess'd.

Here's my usual list of links:

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