Reactions: The Private Life of Atoms

218 Pages·2011·2.95 MB·English

by  Peter Atkins

REACTIONS
Reactions

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF ATOMS

by PETER ATKINS
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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© Peter Atkins Limited 2011

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First published 2011
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Printed & bound in China
by C&C Offset Printing Co Ltd
ISBN 978-0-19-969512-6
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
CONTENTS

Preface

PART I The Basic Tools

A Preliminary Remark: Water and Friends

1. Matter Falling Out

2. Give and Take

3. Burns Night

4. Back to Basics

5. Two Hands Clapping

6. Electric Occurrence

7. The Generation Game

8. The Death of Metal
9. Civil Partnerships

10. Changing Partners

11. Marriage Broking

12. Divorce and reconciliation

PART II Assembling the Workshop

13. Stringing Along

14. Snapping Together

15. Missile Deployment

16. Electronic Warfare

17. Fasteners

18. Zippers

19. Adding Up

20. Taking Away

21. Carbon Footprints
22. Networking Opportunities

PART III Making Light Work

23. Dark Matter

24. Irritating Atmospheres

25. Seeing the Light

26. Green Chemistry

PART IV Building by Design

27. Food for Thought

28. Grand Designs

PART V Economizing

Glossary

Index
PREFACE

At the heart of chemistry lie reactions. When chemists shake, stir, and boil their
various fluids, they are actually coaxing atoms to form new links, links that
result in forms of matter that perhaps have never existed before in the universe.
But what is actually going on? What form does that coaxing take? How, using
the laboratory equivalents of using shovels and buckets, are individual, invisible,
submicroscopic atoms urged into new partnerships?
Chemistry is thought to be an arcane subject, one from which whole
populations seems to have recoiled, and one that many think can be understood
only by the monkishly initiated. It is thought to be abstract because all its
explanations are in terms of scarcely imaginable atoms. But, in fact, once you
accept that atoms are real and imaginable as they go about their daily lives, the
theatre of chemical change becomes open to visualization.
In this book I have set out to help you understand and visualize the private
lives of atoms to that when you look at chemical change—and chemical change
is all around and within us, from the falling of a leaf through the digestion of
food to the beating of a heart and even the forming of a thought, let alone the
great industrial enterprises that manufacture the modern world—you will be able
to imagine what is going on at a molecular scale. In the sections that follow, I
invite you to imagine constructing a toolbox of fundamental processes which
will enable you to imagine levering one atom away from its partner and
encouraging it to join another. Then, with those basic tools in mind, I help you to
establish a workshop where you will assemble to tools and bring them to bear on
a variety of projects. Finally, I introduce you, in outline but not in detail, to how
those workshops are invoked to engineer certain grand projects of construction.
The representation of atoms and molecules is fraught with danger and the
representation of the changes they undergo is even more hazardous. I have used
drawings of molecules, cartoons really, that chemists typically used to represent
their ideas, and have tried to represent various quite complicated processes in a
simple and direct manner. Detail and sophistication, if you want them, can come
later from other sources: I did not want them to stand in the path of this
introduction and encouragement to understanding. My aim is not so much to
show you exactly what is going on during a reaction but to invite you into the
possibility of thinking about the private lives of atoms in a visual way, to show
that chemistry is indeed all about tangible entities with characteristics that are
the equivalent of personalities and which, like human personalities, lead them
into a variety of combinations.
I wrote and illustrated the text myself. For reasons related to how the
illustrations would lie on the page I also needed to set the pages. In that process I
had a lot of help from the editorial and design departments of my publishers,
who also took my necessarily somewhat amateurish raw efforts and refined them
into the current version. I am very grateful to them; having gone through the
entire process of constructing a book, except for its actual printing, I can
appreciate even more their skills.
PWA
March, 2011;
the International Year of Chemistry