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CALCULATING ON THE SIDE OF SUCCESS – Support Module D: MAKING SENSE OF CHEMICAL FORMULAE

 D.  MAKING SENSE OF CHEMICAL FORMULAE 

 D1.  SOME BASIC CONSIDERATIONS 

This usually leads on to simple ideas in Chemical Bonding and the use of Chemical Equations to represent the wide variety of reactions encountered.

Without developing sufficient fluency in the writing and manipulation of chemical formulae, much of the material encountered is devoid of pattern and so its learning becomes an almost insurmountable challenge and certainly an extremely inefficient exercise.  One does not survive in the subject at any respectable level in school or college chemistry without having this technique available on demand.

Chemical formulae on demand:
can you manipulate them ? 

Although many chemical formulae were established correctly by experiment in the 19th century, some while before the details of Atomic Structures were elucidated in the period 1890 - 1916, elementary chemistry courses routinely rely on electronic arrangements of different elements to justify the various Chemical Formulae in use.

Language of Science & Chemistry
- Sir Harry Kroto (1939-2016) -
C60 discoverer & Nobel Laureate

'To understand science, one needs to understand the language.  Scientists have been bending over backwards for over a decade to explain themselves to non-scientists, but it is time to accept that there is a language barrier; science is a cultural and intellectual activity, the language of which must be learnt for its ideas to be understood.  Like all languages, it must be acquired very early in life; if a child does not learn language early, they never learn, and the same is true of science, particularly mathematics.  Attempts to redress the balance later in life are costly in time and effort, and in general will not be successful.  It is about time that we took account, in our educational programmes, of the fact that the brain's ability to acquire new knowledge and use it decreases rapidly with age.'

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© The Sunday Times

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