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O. Chem 1 Lecture 2: Basic Definitions

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.  Share and Like if you found this helpful, and subscribe and click the bell to keep receiving these lectures of organic chemistry as well as other chemistry and math lectures.  Also, comment on which lectures in science and math you would like me to cover.  Until next time, keep learning.

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