Isaac
Newton"I don't know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Isaac
Newton
The primary focus of this chapter is to describe what makes science different from other areas of study and to give you an overview of the types of things in which scientists are interested and the types of methods that they employ in their studies. By the end of this chapter you should be able to name and describe some of the major fields of scientific study such as physics and chemistry. You will also learn a little about the difference between good science and what sometimes is passed off as scientific on unknowledgeable people. A little bit of the history of science is also included here.
This is a fairly detailed chapter in which you will learn about the intricacies of SI and metric measurement. The main goal of this chapter is to give you an opportunity to define basic terms and get good at using the measurement systems because you will be seeing a lot of them in the following chapters
Kinematics is the mathematical description of motion. Our study will not involve any higher mathematics but will involve some logical thinking and analytical skills. Be prepared to really understand how things move, maybe for the first time. You'll need to brush up on your algebra and graphing skills. The primary objective of this chapter is to provide a foundation for what comes next. Historically science followed the same pattern. Once we understood how things moved we could get a better handle on why.
Dynamics is the study of forces and motion. This is where we start to put things together from the previous chapters. After the discoveries of Galileo and Kepler, Isaac Newton was able to propel (pardon the play on words) scientific understanding into modern forms. His laws of motion and gravitation provided a means to understand and explain the world around us in ways that are still valid today. The great astronomy missions into our solar system still rely on the principles that he discovered. The main goal of this chapter is to analyze mechanical systems and describe them with the rules of kinematics and the laws of dynamics.
This chapter not only defines these terms but extends your understanding of how they work (pardon please) as a consequence of the laws of motion. The law of conservation of matter and energy is one of the most important rules of nature and is introduced here. The main goal of this chapter is to understand how the basic laws of physics apply in many everyday phenomena.
After Newton provided the frame for understanding how matter and forces interact, people extended these ideas to explain all sorts of phenomena. The solids, liquids, and gases that we can see around us and the changes that they experience when we change their temperature can all be understood using the tools discussed in the previous chapters. This chapter will explore how the laws of force and motion can explain why sometimes things stick together and sometimes not.
You should watch the movie "The Abyss" before you do this chapter. Why do planes weighing tons fly? Why do steel ships float? I bet you can't blow a ping-pong ball out of a funnel. How high can a balloon float? When Goldfinger shot the hole in Bond's plane did he get sucked out or blown out? This chapter concentrates on some special questions involving forces in liquids and gases. The technical terms describing these topics are hydrostatics and hydrodynamics. Be that as it may it is still a fun chapter.
One of the great scientific questions about the world is "Whatsamatter?" Pardon me again. I meant to write "What is matter?" In this chapter you'll take a break from physics for a little while and delve into the world of chemistry. You should come out of this with a good understanding of the different types of matter that exist. The main goal of this chapter is to define and recognize various examples of elements, compounds, and mixtures and what makes them different from one another. You'll learn a little about atoms and molecules and the sizes of the particles that make up all of the stuff within and without us. In the next two chapters you will get back to physics but only so that you will get the tools needed to more fully understand the nature of the particles that compose matter.
One of the ways that energy can be transferred through space is by waves. Waves can tell us a lot about energy and matter and the study of waves has led to some pretty amazing stuff. Like TV for example. In this chapter you'll learn about sound and light and the ways in which these forms of energy travel through space. You will be able to describe waves in some detail and this will become important in understanding how we learn about atoms and molecules.
Electricity and magnetism are actually different forms of the same thing. You can't have one without the other. The term used to describe them is electromagnetism. In this chapter you'll be studying some of the effects and properties of electromagnetic phenomena. You should see in this chapter that most, in fact almost all, of our daily experience is related to electromagnetism. You will learn a little about how the study of electromagnetism gave Albert Einstein the clues he needed to refine Newton's laws in his revolutionary theories of relativity. Today we are struggling to understand the inner workings of atoms and the particles of which they are composed by using the electromagnetic waves that they emit. Astronomers are gathering electromagnetic waves from the farthest reaches of space to better understand our place in the physical universe. Pretty heady stuff.
One of the great triumphs of modern science (since 1900) has been a theory of atoms that works pretty well. Ever since ancient times people have wondered about what all this stuff around us really is. Remember chapter eight? In this chapter you will have an opportunity to follow the development of our present day understanding. It is a great story with invisible rays, nuclear weapons, spies, and all sorts of cool things going on along with the science. I love this stuff! The main goal of this chapter is for you to learn something about our modern models of atoms and how men and women found out enough to construct them.
It is often repeated that chemistry is physics written on a larger scale. In chapter eleven you studied the structure of atoms more or less in isolation from each other. But atoms bump into each other quite frequently and sometimes they stick together and sometimes they don't. This is chemistry folks. The laws of physics determine the behavior of atoms and chemistry is the study of how those laws manifest themselves in our world of experience. In this chapter you'll learn about how the structure of atoms determines the properties of matter. A major objective of this chapter is for you to become aware of patterns in the properties of atoms and the reasons that those properties exist. There are only about 100 different kinds of atoms and in this chapter you will become familiar with many of them. It is easier than it might seem.
In this chapter we dive completely into the pool of chemistry. You will learn some of the details of how atoms bond together and the symbolism and arithmetic used to describe that bonding. There are a lot of specialized skills covered in this chapter so you will have to concentrate on learning them. Practice is the key in this chapter. The ideas covered in this chapter can best be summed up in the following little poem.
Johnny drank some water.
Johnny will drink no more.
For what Johnny thought was H2O was H2SO4.
Don't be a Johnny.
In chapter thirteen you learned how to describe chemical compounds in some detail. In this chapter you will extend your abilities to describing the chemical reactions that result in the bonds holding the compounds together. This chapter includes some discussion about the different types of chemicals and chemical reactions. One of the main goals in this chapter is for you to be able to recognize patterns in reactions that occur between similar substances. You will learn to write chemical equations that describe chemical reactions and make sense of all the symbolism used. This is another chapter that requires careful attention to detail. It is not a difficult chapter but it does require your attention.
The title of this chapter says it all. Here you'll apply your knowledge of chemical bonds, reactions, and states of matter to those reactions that happen in solutions. This is a very important study because many reactions occur in solutions. In fact living things, you for example, are largely dependent on the chemistry that occurs in solutions. All those little neurons firing in your brain right now are the result of ions (electrically charged particles) moving around in a water solution inside your brain.
Organic chemistry is an older term that is still in common use today. Early on chemists thought that the chemical reactions that occur as a result of the life process could not be duplicated outside of living things. Today we know that that is not true and that we can duplicate many of the reactions of life in the laboratory. In principle we can duplicate any chemical process. The modern term for what used to be called organic chemistry is Carbon Chemistry. Carbon is element number 6 and is the basis for the chemistry of nearly all life here on earth so it is no wonder that its chemistry was first associated only with life. Not so today.
When you hear about vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates, hormones, DNA testing, and genetic research you are hearing about a branch of organic chemistry known as biochemistry.
In this chapter we will touch on the basic naming systems and reactions that involve the chemistry of carbon. You may even learn how to make a little wine.
An epilogue is a little book on top of a big book. That's all folks.
