3: Chemistry

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There are the rushing waves...mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business...trillions apart...yet forming white surf in unison. Ages on ages...before any eyes could see...year after year...thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what?...on a dead planet, with no life to entertain. Never at rest...tortured by energy...wasted prodigiously by the sun...poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar. Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves...and a new dance starts. Growing in size and complexity...living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein...dancing a pattern ever more intricate. Out of the cradle onto the dry land...here it is standing...atoms with consciousness... matter with curiosity. Stands at the sea…wonders at wondering…I…a universe of atoms…an atom in the universe.

- Richard Feynman (1918-1988), Nobel laureate in physics

Chemistry is basic to life. Our mineral requirements are for certain kinds of atoms that our body needs. The body’s use of food involves the breaking and forming of chemical bonds. Even the awesome creation of life occurs as a series of chemical reactions.

Everything around us, living and non-living, is a collection of atoms. Considering the seemingly infinite variety of things—sand, leaves, plastic, rubies, stars, air, human beings—one imagines that there are thousands, perhaps millions, of different kinds of atoms. But there aren’t many more than 100, and only 14 make up almost all that’s familiar (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, potassium, calcium, iron). Living substances, from a leaf to the complex brain, are made mainly of only 4 kinds of atoms: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.