All the time, and Quite Possibly Never - Three Reasons Why Everyone Should Learn Chemistry
What follows is a fairly lengthy discussion (by internet standards) of why I feel that everyone should learn chemistry. I urge you to read this post in its entirety, maybe leave a nice comment if you feel so inclined. I hope that by reading this entire post you will agree with me that chemistry has tremendous value for each and every student. It also contains some interesting science factoids that you can use to impress friends and family, or people that you just met. So sit back, relax, grab your favorite beverage, and settle in for the next ten minutes or so.
Let’s begin with a few of those interesting science facts:
A molecule of water.
Fact #1: A single molecule of water has a width of 0.3 nanometers. That’s 0.0000000003 meters, or 0.00000001 inches. It’s difficult to grasp how small this number really is - 10 billion water molecules are needed to span a length of just one inch!
Fact #2: The smallest object visible to the human eye is ~58 micrometers across. A water molecule is ~200,000 times smaller than this. If you’d like to get a better feel for the size of a typical molecule, take a look at this interactive Scale of The Universe model.
Fact #3: The fastest event perceptible to the human eye, known as the flicker fusion threshold, is ~1/90th of a second, or 0.011 seconds.
Fact #4: A chemical reaction between two molecules occurs on the order of a femtosecond, which is 0.000000000000001 seconds. That’s one thousand billion times faster than the human threshold for perception.
We cannot observe molecules in the same straightforward way that we would observe, say, a plane in flight. Molecules are too small to see, and they interact much too quickly for human senses to perceive (though if you are curious, take a look at this article to see how a group of physicists managed to slow a chemical reaction down to a few milliseconds).
We do see macroscopic evidence of chemical reactions, things like bubbling, color changes, or the release of heat, but chemists must use indirect methods to observe the behavior of the molecules themselves, things like laser pulses and isotopic labeling. These vicarious measures are informative, but they aren’t the kinds of hands-on, tactile observations that quickly build an intuitive understanding.
For students, especially those just starting out with chemistry, the world of molecules often feels abstract and distant, disconnected from their daily experience. Naturally, this leads to the question “When am I going to use this in real life?” I love this question. It means that my students are invested. They want to know that their education, and the hard work they put into it, will have lasting value. It’s my job to provide them with a convincing answer.
So when will you, the student, use chemistry in real life? Honestly, all the time. Also, quite possibly never. Just as the electron is simultaneously a wave and a particle, so too do these realities of chemistry education exist together. Neither is wrong, but neither fully answers the question.
The question “When will I use this in real life?” usually refers to one of the many discrete skills of chemistry - titrations, thermodynamic calculations, and the like. There are a plethora of excellent jobs that use these skills and their associated knowledge exactly as they were learned in chemistry class. Pharmaceutical chemist, food scientist, chemical engineer, and chemistry professor are just a few of the careers that require a consummate understanding of all things chemistry - ‘chem’ is usually in the job title, so no surprises there! Lots of other jobs, for example medicine, engineering, environmental science, and even athletics, also require a fair portion of the discrete knowledge learned in chemistry class. A career in sales, law, finance, the performing arts, or other non-scientific fields is admittedly less likely to draw upon one’s explicit understanding of chemistry. It is to the students who envision themselves pursuing a similarly non-scientific path that the remainder of this post is dedicated.
A Brief Detour
At the age of four, my wife decided that she would be a veterinarian, and that is exactly what she did. Now 39, she is an impressively accomplished clinician and surgeon with expertise in small animals, exotics, and wildlife. I, on the other hand, took a more meandering path. My wanderings began when I went against the recommendation of my college orientation advisor, opting not to enroll in freshman chemistry because “it wasn’t really my thing in high school”. Freshman year was a mish-mash of general education requirements, and a few other courses that seemed interesting for one reason or another. Intro to Psychology was particularly fascinating, which led me to consider neuroscience as a possible major. That, in turn, compelled me to finally take that general chemistry course, and then a year of organic chemistry. The second time around, it turned out that chemistry was very much “my thing”. Like a metal drawn by the pull of so many parallel electrons, it just clicked. A year or two later I found myself graduating UCSB with a degree in biochemistry. After that, my meanderings took me to UPenn, where I earned my doctorate in organic chemistry. My wife took the direct path, while I did not, but we both ended up where we were supposed to be.
Why learn Chemistry? The First of Three Reasons
In addition to the freshman chemistry course mentioned above, I also opted not to take physics during my first year of college. When my burgeoning interest in neuroscience led to my taking physics the following year, I chose the less daunting option of algebra-based physics instead of the calculus-based variety. As mentioned above, my wanderings eventually veered toward biochemistry. One of the graduation requirements for biochemistry, however, was calculus-based physics. It was only through luck, and more specifically a relaxing of the biochem requirements during my senior year, that I was able to graduate with the major that I really wanted. Like mine, your path may meander - don’t close important doors because the work is challenging. If your challenge happens to be chemistry (or math, or physics!), rise to that challenge and keep your options open.
Why Learn Chemistry? Reason #2
As a graduate student, I was occasionally allowed out of the lab for good behavior, and also on special occasions. In one such instance, I visited a friend of mine who was living in the San Diego area. Whilst relaxing by the pool one day, I struck up a conversation with a very earnest gentleman who informed me that all illnesses were caused by an imbalance of pH in the blood. Details were plentiful - a pH of 7.8 caused depression, while a pH of 6.4 was the reason for cancer, and lesser deviations of pH led to more pedestrian maladies like the common cold. So great and well-intentioned was the enthusiasm with which these “facts” were presented, that I didn’t have the heart to correct him. In actuality, human blood is buffered by the presence of carbonic acid and bicarbonate, and this keeps the pH from going above 7.45, or below 7.35. I found myself thinking that this well-intentioned gentleman would benefit from a chemistry refresher, so that he could, of his own accord, come to a more accurate understanding of human biology and medicine.
We live in an age where information is more available than it has ever been, and also less vetted. Anyone (including me) can post their version of reality online, and it will rarely, if ever, be fact-checked. The ability to discern fact from fiction has never been more important. Your chemistry class (in addition to many of your other classes), is a wonderful opportunity to learn some of the knowledge, and more importantly the analytical thinking skills, that will help you in that endeavor. The ability to think like a scientist is a necessary and indispensable skill for modern life, and chemistry is the vehicle (admittedly, one of many vehicles) that will get you there. It doesn’t matter if you are or are not an actual scientist. You must learn to think like one.
Better Living Through Chemistry (Brief Detour #2)
The molecule on the right is a commonly used artificial sweetener, which goes by the brand name Splenda.
Splenda is another great example of the power of chemistry. I’m not referring to the chemists who made Splenda, but rather the chemists who looked at the molecule and thought “that thing looks dangerous!” To make Splenda, or sucralose as it is more properly called, three of the oxygen atoms of sucrose (i.e. table sugar) are replaced by chlorine. Owing to the fact that our bodies cannot digest this chlorinated sugar derivative, sucralose has zero calories. When I first saw the molecular structure of Splenda, about fifteen years ago, I was concerned about two of the chlorine atoms in particular - they sit just off of the 5-membered ring, offset by one carbon atom. Organic chemists refer to this arrangement as a primary alkyl chloride. Lots of important biomolecules, DNA being one of them, like to react with primary alkyl chlorides.
Recent studies have linked sucralose to increased rates of DNA damage and a pathology called Leaky Gut Syndrome. These findings are relatively recent, and the research is ongoing. It remains to be seen if the genotoxicity of sucralose is caused by one of those primary alkyl chlorides that spooked me so many years ago - biology is, after all, very complicated. Nevertheless, I’m glad that my chemistry education led me to steer clear of Splenda, and I’m also glad that the chemistry education of other scientists led them to study the biological effects of this ubiquitous food additive. Hooray for Chemistry!
Why Learn Chemistry? Reason #3
Your brain is a muscle. Regularly flex that muscle, and you’ll be surprised by what it can do. I’ve often been asked if I have an eidetic (i.e. photographic) memory. I don’t - I just googled “idetic” so that I would spell it correctly. Every morning I read about the latest science and technology news, I routinely learn new information and skills with each new class that I teach, and I allow myself to have and to explore a fervent curiosity about the world. Learning helps you to learn. Not only do you build skills that make learning faster and easier (after all, practice makes perfect), but learning of all kinds gives you a deeper and more extensive body of prior knowledge, to which you can attach new knowledge via comparisons, contrasts, analogies, etc. From a metacognitive perspective, a challenging subject like chemistry is a great way to learn how to learn. Furthermore, chemistry is the backbone of so much science, technology, and medicine (batteries, pharmaceuticals, lasers, solar cells, fuels, chemical weapons, vaccines - you get the point). I have no doubt whatsoever that you will more effectively interpret and understand the world around you once you have learned chemistry.
“When am I going to use this in real life?” Quite possibly never, and also all the time. Enjoy learning about chemistry, and do it well - the world of atoms and molecules is a beautiful and fascinating place.
