Hello, and welcome to the Organic
Chemistry lecture series by The Science of Life. Today, I’ll be covering some basic
definitions which will be necessary for the rest of the course.
To begin, what is Organic
chemistry? To put it simply, it is the
chemistry of the compounds which contain carbon. There are some definitions which exclude the
most oxidized of these compounds, such as CFC’s in old school aerosols, Teflon,
and carbon dioxide, but for the purposes of this course, these severely
oxidized compounds of carbon will not be considered, so for all practical
purposes in this course, these two definitions incorporate the same set of
compounds covered in this course.
Everything in this course, though,
falls under the definition of the word chemical, which are substances which, in
their pure form, contain the atomic nucleus of one or more element. This means everything from glucose to
fructose, from vitamin C to cyanide, from proteins to aluminum fall under the
definition of chemical.
Elements are the things found on the
periodic table, and are represented physically by atoms. Atoms are those things which contain a single
nucleus of protons and nucleus which commonly have electrons surrounding
it. Most of the mass of the atom – most
of the material which is affected by gravity – is contained within the nucleus,
while most of the volume of the volume – the space which the material takes up
– is contained outside of the nucleus but in the electron cloud.
Each element has it’s own specific
atomic number Z, which is the number of protons in its nucleus. The natural question comes to mind of whether
that applies to electrons and neutrons also are specific to any given
element. Since we see charged atoms such
as sodium and chlorine of table salt, the number of electrons are not fixed by
element; these are called ions. Since
there are atoms such as hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium – which have different
numbers of neutrons but are all stull under the umbrella of the element of
Hydrogen – the number of neutrons is not fixed for a given element. Atoms of the same element but with different
numbers of neutrons is called isotopes.
A more appropriate example of isotopes for this course is Carbon 12 (the
most common isotope of carbon) and carbon 13 (the second most common and
radioactive version of carbon).
That’s it for this lecture. Join me next time, where I’ll be covering the
structural theory of Organic Chemistry.
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