Reactions by Theodore Gray

Author:Theodore Gray [GRAY, THEODORE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2017-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Alcohol groups are a good example of how knowing a bit of chemistry can help you predict, at least approximately, the characteristics of unfamiliar molecules. If you see a molecule with –OH group(s) on it, you can expect that it’s probably more soluble in water than a similar molecule with no –OH groups.

In You

YOU ARE MADE OF chemical reactions. From digestion to death, it’s all chemistry. But is that really a useful way of thinking about it? I could just as well say that you are made of elements, or that you are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Or that you are made of quarks and gluons, or whatever those things are made of. All these things are true. So to understand life, should we study physics, chemistry, biochemistry, medicine, or what?

It comes down to this: What kind of language is the most helpful for understanding the particular phenomenon you’re interested in? If you want to figure out why a certain sport is popular, it’s probably not useful to talk about the chemical reactions that move the athlete’s muscles. You’d want to use the language of psychology or sociology or politics to understand how that sport got popular and how its managers use the media to trick people into thinking they care about a certain team and giving them money.

Every field of study is useful at its own level, and there is a definite order in which these fields build on each other.

Political science and sociology are useful for understanding the actions of people acting (often badly) in large groups. To do that, you need to know something about how individual people behave, which is covered by the field of psychology.

Psychology is useful for understanding the thinking of one or two people at a time. People’s thoughts are influenced, but not fully explained, by the mechanics of what’s going on in their brains, so to understand thoughts you want to know something about medicine.

Medicine is the study of how people’s bodies work as whole systems, with all their interacting parts influencing each other. To do that, you need to know how those individual parts work, which is explained mostly by biochemistry.

Biochemistry is about chemical reactions—often involving proteins, DNA, and other very large molecules—that go on in living systems. To understand these very complicated reactions, you need to know how reactions work in general.

Chemistry is the study of how atoms and molecules interact with each other at the atomic level. Individual bonds being made or broken, one atom knocking out another, and so on. To study that, you first need to know how atoms and subatomic particles work, which is physics.

Physics is the study of the fundamental forces of nature. It used to be about big things like planets and gravity (and it still is) but much of it is now about things happening at scales far smaller even than an atom. This is the world of quantum mechanics.

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