Crash Course Chemistry

Hank does his best to convince us that chemistry is not torture but is instead the amazing and beautiful science of stuff. Chemistry can tell us how three tiny particles - the proton neutron and electron - come together in trillions of combinations to form ... everything.

A unit is a frequently arbitrary designation we have given to something to convey a definite magnitude of a physical quantity and every quantity can be expressed in terms of the seven base units that are contained in the international system of units.

Today's Crash Course Chemistry takes a historical perspective on the creation of science which didn't really exist until a super-smart super-wealthy Frenchman put the puzzle pieces together - Hank tells the story of how we went from alchemists to chemists.

Hank gives us a tour of the most important table ever - The periodic table of elements including the life story of the obsessive man who championed it Dmitri Mendeleev.

Hank brings us the story of the electron and describes how reality is a kind of music discussing electron shells and orbitals electron configurations ionization and electron affinities and how all these things can be understood via the periodic table.

Chemists need stoichiometry to make the scale of chemistry more understandable - Hank is here to explain why and to teach us how to use it.

Dihydrogen monoxide (better known as water) is the key to nearly everything. It falls from the sky makes up 60% of our bodies and just about every chemical process related to life takes place with it or in it. Without it none of the chemical reactions that keep us alive would happen.

Last week Hank talked about how stuff mixes together in solutions. Today and for the next few weeks he will talk about the actual reactions happening in those solutions - atoms reorganizing themselves to create whole new substances in the processes that make our world the one we know and love.

A lot of ionic compounds dissolve in water dissociating into individual ions. But when two ions find each other that form an insoluble compound they suddenly fall out of solution in what's called a precipitation reaction.

All the magic that we know is in the transfer of electrons. Reduction (gaining electrons) and oxidation (the loss of electrons) combine to form Redox chemistry which contains the majority of chemical reactions.

Learning to talk about chemistry can be like learning a foreign language but Hank is here to help with some straightforward and simple rules to help you learn to speak Chemistrian like a native.

Gases are everywhere and this is good news and bad news for chemists. The good news: when they are behaving themselves it's extremely easy to describe their behavior theoretically experimentally and mathematically. The bad news is they almost never behave themselves.

We don't live in a perfect world and neither do gases - it would be great if their particles always fulfilled the assumptions of the ideal gas law and we could use PV=nRT to get the right answer every time.

Hank bursts our ideal gas law bubble er balloon and brings us back to reality explaining how the constants in the gas law aren't all that constant; how the ideal gas law we've spent the past two weeks with has to be corrected for volume because atoms and molecules take up space.

This week we continue to spend quality time with gases more deeply investigating some principles regarding pressure - including John Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures vapor pressure - and demonstrating the method for collecting gas over water.

In this episode Hank describes what it means when we talk about the velocity of a gas - to understand gas velocity we have to know what factors effect it and how.

This week Hank takes us on a quick tour of how thermodynamics is applied in chemistry using his toy trebuchet as an example because he is a proud nerd.

If you are paying attention to this episode you'll learn what the state function is and how it varies from a path-dependent function; why enthalpy change is different from heat; that bonds are energy and to form and break them they release and absorb heat to and from their environment.

Today's episode dives into the HOW of enthalpy. How we calculate it and how we determine it experimentally...even if our determinations here at Crash Course Chemistry are somewhat shoddy.

Life is chaos and the universe tends toward disorder. But why? If you think about it there are only a few ways for things to be arranged in an organized manner but there are nearly infinite other ways for those same things to be arranged.

Hank takes a break from the desk to bring you to the lab in order to demonstrate some important points about the practical side of chemistry - experimentation in the laboratory. You'll learn what to wear in the lab how to dispose of chemicals safely and how to avoid the most common accidents.

Atoms are a lot like us - we call their relationships "bonds" and there are many different types. Each kind of atomic relationship requires a different type of energy but they all do best when they settle into the lowest stress situation possible.

Molecules come in infinite varieties so in order to help the complicated chemical world make a little more sense we classify and categorize them. One of the most important of those classifications is whether a molecule is polar or non-polar which describes a kind of symmetry.

Models are great except they're also usually inaccurate. In this episode of Crash Course Chemistry Hank discusses why we need models in the world and how we can learn from them... even when they're almost completely wrong.

In this episode of Crash Course Chemistry Hank discusses what Molecules actually look like and why some quantum-mechanical three-dimensional wave functions are explored he touches on hybridization and delves into sigma and pi bonds.