Yeah! Make sumthin blow up real good!
The same thing it took to get you interested - interest in the audience, interest in the topic, and walking that fine line between simplification and condescension.
I don’t understand what the purpose of the speech is - to fire them up at the beginning, wrap things up at the end, or give on overview of the importance of chemistry?
I think that a History of Chemistry & it improved our lives would be good - beer brewing in hollow tree stumps, making bronze, composition of the dyes for illuminated manuscripts, the tragedy of the Sunflowers, extraction of active ingredients from herbs in tisanes versus infusion (did I get that one right?).
Touch on history and hunting and agriculture and the arts and medicine and general learning, and how chemistry has changed these.
If it’s a dinner speech, start with something about cooking.
It’s a bunch of middle-school kids that are interested enough in chemistry to come to a dinner and play a chemistry quiz game. I’m new to this project, but I assume the purpose is to keep them (and make them more) interested in chemistry by having actual adults that work with chemistry talk about how it’s a neat and interesting field, and worth pursuing.
Huh, you got me interested now. No idea what that is. What is the “Tragedy of the Sunflowers?”
Thanks for the other recommendations, they’re good!
Oh, um, Van Gogh and titanium oxide mixed with some yellow (iron-based?) pigment that caused it to oxidize, discolor, and degrade in one (or more) of his Sunflower paintings, I think …
Well, apparently I got that totally wrong. Van Gogh’s sunflowers did discolor and degrade because of a chemical reaction between two pigments, but I got the chemistry wrong (… this is what happens when you hang out with people in the social sciences and literary arts, no one ever pins you down on the details …) it was sulphur and chromium. I think.
Anyhow, this is a great story for interesting people in chemistry (especially if you get the chemistry right, I suspect). We lost Van Goghs - frigging Van Goghs!! - because he did not know enough chemistry. If that isn’t the best argument for a solid science education, I don’t know what is.
(If anyone brings up acrylics - especially the gorgeous reds that you don’t get in oils - you’re on your own.)
I still have no idea what the heck are you talking about, either when you talk about “the valence theory” or about “another theory of predicting reactions”, and I’ve got a MSc on predicting reactions.
I was taught valences as a memorization technique to assist with formulation, no “theory” behind it. Excuse me while I search… ok… we were taught about valences in inorganic chemistry, apparently what you guys are talking about is the idea of individual orbitals. That’s used all the time in current theoretical chemistry.
I also don’t see a problem with something that works “most of the time”, so long as you’re conscious of its limitations. A lot of the work done in predictive chemistry involves testing different prediction methodologies against the kind of stuff you want to study and picking the one that works best most of the time. For different kinds of stuff different methods turn out to work best, and if thinking in terms of “little negative balls going round and round around a big positive ball” or using “balls and springs” works best, you don’t use a quantum method which works about as well but takes much longer (and which also works on limited orbitals, btw).
Then again, even at this remove I can agree that TA was a jerk…
Not quite - a tisane is an archaic-in-my-country term for a water based infusion. We tend to call them “teas” now, even when they’re made with herbs that aren’t tea (Camellia sinensis). The most common traditional herbal preparations are water infusion/tissane/tea, alcohol extracts called “tinctures”, and oil based infusions called “oils”. (There are also vinegar extracts, “acetums”, and glycerin extracts, “glycerites”, but those aren’t made or used as widely.)
What you mean is that different active ingredients are water soluble, alcohol soluble or oil soluble, and we can largely predict this by learning if the ingredients we want are polar or nonpolar molecules.
Why is this important? Two examples, only one of which is appropriate to share with 11 year olds:
Marijuana tea is almost useless. THC is oil soluble, not water soluble. There are other water soluble compounds in marijuana, so you’ll get greenish brownish hot water that tastes like marijuana, but most people want the THC, not a cup of drinking tea and a wet soggy mess of bud with the THC still in it.
More appropriate for middle schoolers: People *died *some years back when manufacturers decided they could get a “more efficient” extraction from kava kava if they used acetone as the solvent. Acetone is a brilliant solvent. That stuff really does extract a very wide range of chemicals. Too many, in fact. Turns out that kava kava has some compound(s) in it that will kill your liver. This isn’t a problem for the islanders who traditionally make it by wrapping chunks of the root in a big juicy leaf and whacking it with a stick - this is form of water extraction, and water is not the right kind of solvent to extract the liver killing compounds. So they’d drink the perfectly safe kava extract and the dangerous chemical was thrown away with the pounded root. Worked well for hundreds of years until someone decided to use acetone to get more product per pound of root. This is why it’s important as an herbalist to understand the chemistry, or if you don’t understand the chemistry to only follow the traditional recipe or another recipe which has been tested and proven safe. Changing the solvent was a huge change in the process, and one which turned out to be deadly.
I meant ‘tisanes and tinctures’, thank you.
I’ve always liked the contrast in the 2nd syllable after the alliteration of the 1st in that phrase, but I don’t hang out with many herbalists these days.