Your Chemical World :: Essays Papers

Your Chemical WorldIn todays world we commit on many different facets to achieve what we normally dont even give a second thought. As I am sit down here typing this paper I am simultaneously using the culmination of numerous chemical breakthroughs. The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a assemblage of over 150,000 chemists, both academic and industrial. Your Chemical World, a book that the ACS has published, is a biography of sorts, where in the uses and need for a chemical world are shown in an easy-to-understand way. Although alchemy would seem to be just a recently invented and used scientific field, chemistry has been an integral part of our lives for a long time. Our early ancestors, otiose to even write, figured out that certain substances could be used for painting, hence the archaic cave paintings found in Southern Europe. Today we use chemistry to build our houses, to drive to work everyday, even toasting your toast in the morning. Because chemistry is our link to the hidden world of the earths terrestrial fruits same Silicon or Iron our hands will be forever bound to chemistry.The book start-offs off with our beginning and the unlikely usage of chemistry in pre-historic times. Our ancestors were more then likely concerned primarily with staying alive. Certain things are needed to do that, like food, shelter, energy, and drink. Once those needs were meet our Neanderthal brethren make some archaicaly beautiful cave paintings. In doing so they applied chemistry in a whole new way, to benefit their lives. In time chemistry became an integral part of society, today we have used it to stretch our lives out by more then forty percent of what it would have been in the start of the century by the use of medicine. Later on in recordable history chemistry was implemented through rusty trial and error methods which allowed many things to be created such as Bronze in 3600 BC or glass in 2500 BC. But it wasnt until the age of Greek philosophers that the qu estion of these materials components, or do them exist. After many theories by many different people a man named Leucippus came up with the idea that all things were made up of indivisible, small particles. Although we at once know that that was the correct theory the age of alchemy started and didnt slow down until after medieval times. The next remarkable step was taken by Robert Boyle a British chemist who defined and coined the term elements as pure substance, which resists all ordinary attempts at decomposition.