Chapter 1 Essentials
The first thing we need to talk about is what is chemistry. Chemistry is the study of matter and the changes that matter undergoes. But what is matter? Matter is anything that has mass and occupies space. Mass is the measure of the amount of matter in it. Mass should not be confused with weight. Weight is the force that gravity exerts on an object. One way to keep this straight, the amount of mass an object has would not be dependent on what planet you are on, but an objects weight would depend on the planet that you are on. So pretty much everything around you is matter.
When we are studying matter that’s around us in chemistry, we must have a protocol or a procedure that we follow. And the procedure we follow is the scientific method.
What you should notice about the scientific method is there are a lot of opportunities for us to go back. Every observation that we make every experiment that we perform is an opportunity for us to see where a hypothesis or an explanation on what we’re observing might be wrong. And in science that’s often the case. And we must re-evaluate how we’re looking at things. The first step is to make an observation. We look at the natural phenomena that’s happening around us and based off what we’re observing we make what’s called a hypothesis. In making a hypothesis we try to explain what we’re seeing in our observation. Once the hypothesis developed, a statement defining what we’re seeing, then we experiment and try to prove or disprove that hypothesis. If we find the hypothesis holds true, we move to what is called the model. And from the model then we continue to experiment on those observations. Until we can prove that under all circumstances all scenarios that you know that that observation that hypothesis is in fact true. If we find some scenarios where it is not, then we have to go back to our model and alter that and change it based off of what we saw and experimentation. And so often we end up going back and changing hypotheses and altering based on what we’re seeing in the experiments.