Chemistry FAQ's

Without realizing it, we participate in chemical reactions every second! A chemical reaction allows us to move our eyes across this page to read. Another chemical reaction during baking created the muffin you had for breakfast. Even breathing requires complex chemical interactions within our bodies. Everyone needs to understand the basics of chemistry, because whether we realize it or not, we use chemistry every day.⁶ Deep within each of us is a chemist. When we breathe, when we drive a car, when we visit a doctor or eat a meal, a chemical reaction takes place. We grow, mature and become stronger through chemical reactions, many of which are just now being understood by scientists.

The clothes on your body, the calculators and pencils used in school - these objects (and millions more like them) came about through the transformation of raw materials (iron, cotton, wood, etc.) - this too is a part of chemistry. The food consumed by our species arrives through fertilizers, preservatives, and the understanding of vitamins and minerals; and, if we are to save our planet from the harmful effects of human activity, to chemistry we will turn for the solutions to this vexing problems.

There are legions of politicians elected to higher office every election cycle that are apathetic and ignorant towards fields such as chemistry.³ Every year, these apathetic politicians write bills that can impact the safety of our waters, our stance on evolution, climate change, our endeavors in space, and even fundamental concepts such as the classification of birth control methods. Many times, science is misconstrued and twisted to meet political goals, and the public is none the wiser.

According to Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D. of ThoughtCo⁶ and VogelPrep⁷, here are 20 reasons why you should take chemistry!

1. Chemistry helps you to understand the world around you. Why do leaves change color in the fall? Why are plants green? How is cheese made? What is in soap and how does it clean? These are all questions that can be answered by applying chemistry.

2. Basic knowledge of chemistry helps you to read and understand product labels.

3. Chemistry can help you make informed decisions. Will a product work as advertised or is it a scam? If you understand how chemistry works you'll be able to separate reasonable expectations from pure fiction.

4. Chemistry is at the heart of cooking. If you understand the chemical reactions involved in making baked goods rise or neutralizing acidity or thickening sauces, chances are you'll be a better cook.

5. A command of chemistry can help keep you safe! You'll know which household chemicals are dangerous to keep together or mix and which can be used safely.

6. Chemistry teaches useful skills. Because it is a science, learning chemistry means learning how to be objective and how to reason and solve problems.

7. Helps you to understand current events, including news about petroleum, product recalls, pollution, the environment and technological advances.

8. Makes life's little mysteries a little less... mysterious. Chemistry explains how things work.

9. Chemistry opens up career options. There are many careers in chemistry, but even if you're looking for a job in another field, the analytical skills you gained in chemistry are helpful. Chemistry applies to the food industry, retail sales, transportation, art, homemaking... really any type of work you can name.

10. Chemistry is fun! There are lots of interesting chemistry projects you can do using common everyday materials. Chemistry projects don't just go boom. They can glow in the dark, change colors, produces bubbles and change states.

11. Practical and Survival Reasons. We all need to feed ourselves and maybe even others in our households. Understanding chemistry will help you be better at Cooke/Bake/ or Mixing flavors/aromas, while making our food more flavorful and nutritious. 

12. Improve your problem solving and trouble shooting skills. Being able to create compounds or take apart waste materials will require you to understand a sequence of reactions and the properties of new materials.  

13. Improve your skills in understanding bonds and electricity. Chemical reactions change substances, which can also generate energy and electricity. Thus, those new substances offer the potential to transport matter from one location to another.  e.g. Oxygen gets transported in the human body through a molecule of Hemoglobin inside red blood cells. Thus, red cells move oxygen from the lungs to other body tissues and allow our bodies to function while generating energy. 

14. Be more medically savvy. Understanding how different medications might interact with each other, how a new drug might impact a critically ill member of the family, how to deal with an infectious disease or how invitro fertilization works.

15. Do some fun science! Here is a list of rewarding exercises that can entertain family members: carbon-date fossils from your environment; find the ideal chemical compounds required to remove different kinds of stains from clothing; learn how to measure the pool water pH and how to adjust it. 

16. Enhance your college application. Taking an AP chemistry test or SAT Subject Test in chemistry in high school is a great way to distinguish yourself from all the other students who apply for admission to your favorite colleges.

17. Prepare for a variety of careers. Professional chemists work in many different industries they develop new building materials, pharmaceutical compounds, food preservatives or cosmetic fragrances. Many chemists also combine their education with advanced degrees and work in engineering, education, information technology, medicine, veterinary science, toxicology, biotechnology, patent law, or finance.

18. Challenge yourself. Chemistry is not for everyone but can be a source of great intellectual rewards. After all, not many people can understand what happens at the molecular level with atoms, both inside and outside our bodies.   

19. Save our environment! Understand the news regarding climate change and fuel alternatives and contribute sound proposals, so our society can make decisions that can preserve our planet for future generations. 

20. Become an entrepreneur. Understanding the chemical reactions of substances, individuals can create the next best pet food or cosmetics.  Alternatively, you can become a consultant to governmental entities that are trying to make the best decisions to protect our natural resources, including air, water, and soils. 

Chemistry is often referred to as the central science because it joins together physics and mathematics, biology and medicine, and the earth and environmental sciences. Knowledge of the nature of chemicals and chemical processes therefore provides insights into a variety of physical and biological phenomena. Knowing something about chemistry is worthwhile because it provides an excellent basis for understanding the physical universe we live in. For better or for worse, everything is chemical!

In addition to being a central component of our daily existence, chemistry is a fundamental subject in science which overlaps a host of other fields. Biology, medicine, engineering, physics, geology, astronomy, and many other disciplines rely on the principles of chemistry to complete their tasks. It would be unusual for someone with a geology degree to follow a career in biology, but in chemistry this is quite common: chemistry graduates readily move into other areas of science. Multiple doors of opportunity open themselves to chemistry graduates, and career opportunities are quite varied.

To many, chemistry is a foreign concept, belonging to the world of academia and textbooks with little relevance to our everyday life. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find an aspect of your daily routine that isn’t directly impacted by chemistry research.

Chemistry is the study of molecules: the building blocks of matter. It is central to our existence, and leads our investigations into the human body, Earth, food, materials, energy, and anywhere and everywhere in between. The chemical industry, supported by chemistry research, underpins much of our economic progress, and provides wealth and prosperity for society. In Australia, 60,000 people are employed by the chemical industry and it contributes around $11.6 billion annually to our GDP.

What follows is a snapshot—just a small sample—of the major discoveries in chemistry that have helped to shape the way we live. From the first instances of metal work in the Copper Age in 5000 BC, to the digital era and the new cutting-edge technologies of today, such as nanoscience and biotechnology, chemists have more often than not been the driving force behind the progress in our standard of living.  

Metals

Chemical theory has been developing since well before ‘chemist’ became a possible career choice. The phenomenon of fire was one of the first marvels that humankind sought to understand and the use of fire led to the study and manipulation of metals. This dates back to 5000 BC, when copper was first discovered and replaced stone as a material for making tools. It was obtained by a process called smelting, and was thought to also have produced the first glass as a side product.

The Bronze Age arose when it was discovered that copper could be combined with tin to produce a harder metal—you guessed it, bronze. This was the first alloy ever made and resulted in stronger weapons and tools. The trading of these tools facilitated sharing of technology and knowledge between early civilizations. The Iron Age, following at around 1200 BC, saw the prevalence of iron increase as the major metal of choice for cutting tools and weapons. Iron was slower to evolve as a material because it required higher temperatures to work the metal. This shift saw a change in smelting practices, improved furnace technologies, and also the development of forging, as opposed to the casting techniques used in the Bronze Age.

Materials and Manufacturing

The Iron Age also saw the development of many of the basic elements of urban development we are familiar with today such as cements, mortars and bitumen. During this period, populations became increasingly urbanized in large cities leading to construction of the first proper roads.

Around 500 years ago, chemistry became an earnest occupation. Elements other than naturally occurring metals were being identified and their properties were being explored—though they were still not entirely understood. People didn’t yet have much of an appreciation of the underlying science that determined material properties and it was unclear how many different basic or elemental building blocks there were.

Another important development was that of vulcanized rubber, in 1843 by Charles Goodyear. This led to pneumatic tyres and kicked off the polymer and plastics industries, which would later revolutionise the manufacture of household goods. The discovery by Alfred Nobel of dynamite in 1867 and more refined explosives later on led to rapid expansion of mining as a means to extract ores and minerals.

The invention of vulcanized rubber by Charles Goodyear in 1843 kickstarted the polymer and plastics industries. The synthesis of the first artificial dye, a purple color later named mauveine, occurred in 1856. It was an accidental discovery made by William Perkin, an 18-year-old who was actually trying to make artificial quinine. Blue and purple pigments were historically incredibly rare, and mauveine was met with high demand. Its development drove further investigation into organic chemistry, and the production of related dyes and pigments. Some of the world’s biggest organic chemistry companies today were founded around this time due to demand for dye production.

Despite the increasing use of chemical compounds, it wasn’t until 1870 that Dimitri Mendeleev came up with a systematic way to arrange all the known chemical elements into the periodic table. The table is based on common chemical properties and trends in their behavior. It is a concise, information-dense catalogue of all of the known different types of atoms, and it is still an essential tool for chemistry study today.

More recently, Harold Kroto, Richard Smalley, James Heath, Sean O'Brien and Robert Curl at Rice University made a new discovery regarding something we thought we thoroughly understood—they discovered a new form of carbon. Kroto, Curl and Smalley were later awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering fullerenes, a completely new arrangement of carbon atoms, forming ball-shaped cage-like structures. These have been useful in materials design and could have a number of biomedical applications.

This field of research has also led to the development of carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are used to create ultra-strong, lightweight materials, for use in aircraft for example. The diameter of each nanotube is more than a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. 

Another form of carbon that has unique properties is graphene. Graphene is a sheet made of a single layer of carbon atoms, and although a single layer of atoms may sound extremely flimsy, it’s actually extremely tough, 200 times stronger than steel, ultra-light, flexible, and an excellent conductor. Although scientists knew for quite a while that graphite was made of sheets of carbon atoms, it was only in 2004 that Professors Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov were able to isolate a single layer on its own to make graphene. Graphene isn’t yet as ubiquitous in our everyday lives as some other great chemical discoveries—with this one, it’s more of a case of ‘What will graphene do for you in the future?’ With its unique properties, it has the potential to have a huge impact in several areas, including electronics, materials, energy technology and biomedical applications.

Energy

One of the key contributions the field of chemistry has provided to our burgeoning society is the ability to harness and store electrical energy—electricity. Electricity had long been an intellectual curiosity, and the phenomena became more understood through experiments by chemists and physicists.

Traditional energy production, via combustion and thermodynamics of fossil fuels, led to the industrial revolution. This boom in industry from the mid-1700s to the 1800s was an era of growth, with chemical engineers coming to the fore to scale up and industrialize processes of manufacture. It was during this time that many of the practical uses of chemistry we rely on today were developed.

The batteries that so many of our devices depend upon are underpinned by a chemical reaction that produces electricity. The first electrical battery was created by Alessandro Volta, who proved that electricity flowed through wires attached to different metals and the types of metal used affected the voltage. The term ‘volt’ as a measure of electric potential is named in honor of him. Although current batteries are far more sophisticated than in Volta’s day, there is renewed interest in pushing this vital chemical technology further, so that sustainable energy produced by solar cells or wind energy can be stored.

Food and Agriculture

Complex technology goes into modern food production. From soil science to nutrition analysis, and from safety testing to food packaging and preservation, the chemical processes involved are extensive, and often not given much consideration. For example, if it wasn’t for refrigeration, our food distribution systems would be limited and storage would be short lived. The first cooling systems were developed in 1874. They used dimethyl ether, but it wasn’t long before ammonia-based systems were introduced, which are still in use today in industrial refrigerators.

Ammonia is also an integral chemical innovation for food production, chiefly due to its use in fertilizer production. Indeed it is estimated that around 1 per cent of the world’s energy is used to make ammonia. Increasing the productivity of our food-growing systems has become necessary due to the combined pressures of population increase, climate change and water shortages. If it wasn't for the Haber-Bosch process, our current agricultural output would be unsustainable. It was first developed in 1909, and allows for the efficient, large-scale production of ammonia (NH₃) by reacting atmospheric nitrogen (N₂) with hydrogen (H₂) at high temperature and pressure. This resulted in an easily accessible route to fertiliser production, and was responsible for quadrupling agricultural productivity. The discovery of pesticides and herbicides further increased crop yields, with DDT and glyphosate being key compounds. Today, around 40–60 per cent of global agriculture yields rely on artificial fertilizers.

Human populations the world over rely on chemistry to maintain safe clean water supplies. Recycling will be essential for sustaining this resource into the future. Here in Australia, droughts forced us over the past decade to reduce our water use and reconsider our reliance on dams and reservoirs, and think about alternative water sources. There are already three large water desalination plants, in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. Without this development in chemical engineering, nations including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Libya would most likely not have enough usable water to sustain their current populations. Effective resource management is becoming more important as we face environmental uncertainty, with chemistry playing a crucial role in potential solutions.

Health

Modern health care is founded on many life-saving breakthroughs the field of chemistry has provided. These include developing new pharmaceuticals, diagnostic tools and better diagnostic equipment such as X-ray machines, MRI imaging, cancer tests and pregnancy kits. Analytical chemistry and forensic science are crucial for identifying poisons or toxins in food, plants and animals, and in tracing and identifying unknown chemicals and materials.

Medical practices have also drastically changed as chemical knowledge has advanced. The discovery of painkillers and anesthetics opened up a whole new scope of opportunity for medical practitioners. Advanced surgery (rather than simple amputation) became possible. Compounds such as nitrous oxide (N2O), or laughing gas, became popular and minor surgical procedures and dental work became slightly less risky, although infection was still a major challenge. Here, chemistry came to the rescue (again!) with the first antiseptics. In 1867, Joseph Lister introduced carbolic acid as an antiseptic to clean surgery wounds. Death rates in his surgery dropped from 45.7 per cent to 15 per cent.Breakthroughs in chemical processes led to the discovery of anesthetics, enabling advanced surgery. 

Still on this front, but somewhat later, Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin, in 1928. This discovery ushered in a whole new era in fighting bacteria-borne illness. It wasn’t until the 1940s however, when Howard Florey, a scientist from Adelaide, manufactured penicillin on a large scale that it was adopted for widespread use. His work resulted in the easy treatment of infection, and has also saved millions of lives. But the microbes have begun to fight back, meaning our days of simply solved infections may soon be behind us. Due to the ever-increasing prevalence of antimicrobial resistance, further work in this field of chemistry is more important than ever.

Marie Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, and the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes and to this day is one of only two people to hold two in two different, scientific fields (physics and chemistry). She is an important icon for science and in particular for chemistry, as her work in the discovery of radioactive elements provided the base work for innovations in X-ray imaging, nuclear power and radiotherapy.

In 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson published the structure of and mechanisms of DNA, which built largely on the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for this discovery, by which time Rosalind Franklin had unfortunately died from cancer. This work has since helped to explain how diseases are passed down through generations, and explains other mysteries such as why we look like our parents, how cells function on a micro level and how life evolves. It was a pivotal moment for academic research, and has shaped the direction of research into medicines and health, with a push towards personalized medicine.

Technology

One aspect of chemical innovation that's largely taken for granted but is integral to the day-to-day life of many people now are the display screens in smart phones, televisions and computers. These devices use molecules known as liquid crystals to control light and images, which gives them their name—LCD (liquid crystal display) screens. Liquid crystals occur when a substance has an intermediary state between a solid and a liquid. Instead of having one melting point, describing the change from solid to liquid, a liquid crystal has two—an initial temperature at which a substance melts to form a turbid fluid, and a clear secondary melting point at which that turbid fluid becomes clear. Between these two points is the liquid crystalline state.

LCD televisions screens. LCD screens use molecules known as liquid crystals to control light and images. Liquid crystals have light modulating properties, and as such are useful in screens. They were first observed in 1888 by botanist and chemist Friedrich Reinitzer, who observed the effect in cholesterol extracted from carrots. LCD technology is likely to be superseded by light emitting diodes (LEDs) in the next decade. LED displays are more durable and consume less electricity. Their impact will depend on further materials breakthroughs in the fields of conducting polymers and nanomaterials such as quantum dots, which provide the bright, vivid colors needed for display screens.

Conclusion

The consequences of chemistry are far reaching. Chemistry has been largely responsible for shaping society as we know it; from developing stronger materials for large scale construction, down to what kind of cosmetic products you use every day. Society has benefited hugely from advances in the field, with the few key discoveries outlined here just a small cross-section of the chemical innovations that have driven society’s development. While discoveries in chemistry have made a huge impact, and continue to have enormous potential, we also need to ensure that we use them responsibly to ensure sustainability into the future. 

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1. Dowd, Dr. M. (2017, September 26). Majors that require chemistry. Synonym. https://classroom.synonym.com/majors-require-chemistry-9944.html

2. Russell, Dr. M. (n.d.). Why study chemistry?. Chemistry 221 . https://mhchem.org/221/classroom/zzWhyStudyChemistry.htm

3. Strauss, V. (2012, October 12). Yes, students should take chemistry. Here’s why. Answer Sheet. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2012/10/17/yes-students-should-take-chemistry-heres-why/

4. University of Wisconsin LaCrosse. (n.d.). Chemistry & Biochemistry. https://www.uwlax.edu/academics/department/chemistry-and-biochemistry/student-resources/why-study-chemistry/#:~:text=Chemistry%20is%20essential%20for%20meeting,%2C%20materials%2C%20and%20energy%20usage 

5. Helmenstine, A. M. (2019, July 3). Why Study Chemistry? . https://www.thoughtco.com/reasons-to-study-chemistry-609210 

6. A., F. (2018, March 14). Why chemistry is important-even if you are not a chemist. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-chemistry-importanteven-you-chemist-fatih-akay 

7. Vogel, E. (2020, February 28). Top ten reasons to study chemistry. https://www.vogelprep.com/blog/top-ten-reasons-to-study-chemistry 

8. Jones, O., & Mulvaney, P. (2022, March 16). What has chemistry ever done for you?. Curious. https://www.science.org.au/curious/chemistry