SG chem week 2

Throughout this week, the main conclusion I made is the difficulty level during the assignments increased rapidly as the week progressed.  During the beginning of the week, we were given readings about different scientific theories.  One of the readings we were assigned to talk-to-the-text (underline and make comments about the important parts of the reading) was a reading titled Matter by Anthony Carpi.  In my opinion, this was my favorite thing learning this week because I now have a better understanding of the process the scientists had to go through in order to make the conclusions we are taught today.  The reading focuses on the differences in atoms from the scientists who built the foundation for the theory of atoms.  I will be focusing on reflecting on the process to discover oxygen.  The first scientist that started this process is Empedocles, who lived between the time period of 492 BCE and 432 BCE.  Throughout his studies and experiments, the main conclusion he resulted was that all matter was composed of four elements which were fire, air, water and earth. Even though this isn't the overall theory taught today, Empedocles ideas lead to amazing discoveries by other scientists because it supported the idea that pure materials were composed by various different elements.  With this information, Democritus's came up with the theory that atoms could not be destroyed.  "Democritus theorized that atoms were specific to the material that they made up." Sadly, this theory wasn't approved by other scientists.  Evangelista Torricelli proved that air had weight which lead to the invention of the barometer.  Due to this discovery, they realized if air had weight but we couldn't see, smell or taste it, it had to be constructed by physical particles.  Daniel Bernoulli used this information to conclude that "air and gas have tiny particles that are loosely packed in an empty space of volume." One of the most interesting things that happened thought the reading was that a scientist used theses particles to create a gas.  Priestly started his process by experimenting with Mercury calx.  He discovered that when this substance was heated, it turned into mercury which was a silver metal liquid and a strange gas. Once Priestly realized the strange gas was released, he carefully collected it and continued testing.  After placing a mouse inside a container with the "strange gas" he discovered the mouse was able to live longer than a mouse in ordinary air.  With this information, Antoine Lavoisier renamed the gas oxygen.  Understanding absorbing this amount of information may be challenging, I made a timeline which helped me get a visual of the main goals theses scientists accomplished.

The second reading we were giving was titled The Race for Iodine.  We were assigned a question sheet to answer about facts about the scientists that were involved in this scientific race.  In my opinion, this reading was not as interesting as Matter, but I did learn about other scientific discoveries and different scientists. From my perspective the most impressive fact in this article was that the English scientistic Davy discovered nitrous oxide (laughing gas) when he was only 21.  In addition, his family didn't have money when he was growing up and he never had an actual education.  To have the ability to accomplish what he did at such a young age is beyond extravagant.  http://mxplx.com/meme/1443/ This website also helped simplify The Race for Iodine.

As the week progressed, the worksheets increased in difficulty.  Throughout the worksheet, we had to figure out the answers to problems based on their compounds with different elements. The first step we had to do in the worksheet was determine the value of the ratio of mass O divided by mass C.  "O" stands for oxygen and "C" stands for carbon because we were given the compounds of carbon and oxygen.   In each problem, we are given 2 compounds; A and B.  You determine the ratio in each compound by using the formula above, mass O divided by mass C.  Then we have the information needed to determine the differences between the ratio of the two compounds.  Now for the challenging part of the problems, putting the information we found into a particle drawing.  After it was explained the process became easier to comprehend.  

In Hypothesis 1, we are given the scenario that carbon and oxygen have the same mass.  To explain how I concluded in hypothesis one, box one is because with the numbers that were given to us, the mass ratio from compound A was 1.33 which is also 4/3 and the mass in ratio in compound B is 2.66 or 8/3.  Therefore,  for compound A in the first box, we can conclude that for ever 3 carbon atoms, there will be 4 oxygen atoms.  In the second box which is compound B, we can determine from the previous problem that for every 3 carbon atoms, there will be 8 oxygen atoms.  Now looking at the second column, we are given the scenario that oxygen is going to be heavier than carbon.  The first box is the atoms compared to each other.  Compound B box is interesting because 8/3 is twice as much as 4/3 which is why there is two oxygen for every one carbon atom.  

Surprisingly, the last worksheet of the week was fairly simple to make conclusions and determine the correct answer. Studying how sugar is made up of and how the amount of different elements can make 2 different types of sugar the same was our assignment.  In all of the problems, we were given a total mass and different amount of mass each element made up. We were assigned to find the percentage each element made up of the total mass. Throughout the different problems, the numbers changed slightly.  As a class, we made the conclusion that if one problem has the same percentages for the same element as another problem, then they are the same.