1

Over the last 52 weeks I've enjoyed sharing with you my fascination with biology. If
you've been through it with us, you've now got yourself now a pretty deep and
complex understanding of how life functions, from the chemistry that makes cells
work to the ecosystems that make the planet work. And it's never too late to catch up
on those biology and ecology courses; they'll be here on Youtube forever. But it's time
to move onto something new. Something bigger because it's smaller, more beautiful
because it's invisible, more powerful because it's everything. Crash Course Chemistry.

My undergraduate degree is actually in chemistry, and I've been a lifelong lover of

this subject, not just the rules, and laws, and the bonds, and the coefficients. But of the
men and women who shaped this science that deepened our understanding of the
world so magnificently. The Siberian misanthrope who would revolution our
understanding of matter. The German war criminal who saved a billion lives. The
French aristocrat who created the science of chemistry and all he got for his trouble
was beheaded.

And of course all of these stories exist within the greatest science ever. What is matter
made of? How and when do atoms come together and break apart? What is an
electron? Why is silver's chemical symbol Ag? How do we fix global warming and
live forever?

The answers to all of these questions (except for the last two) will be contained within
this course. But those last two, if and when they get solved I guarantee you will be
solved with the help of chemistry.

And we'll be doing it in this beautiful new set that was designed and created by Nick
Jenkins. And our graphics team, our graphics team, will be 'Thought Cafe'. Which is
what 'Thought Bubble' has turned into.

We're slaving away on Crash Course Chemistry now and the first episode should be
hitting your subscription box within the next couple of weeks. Until then, feel free to
check out any of the biology that you may have missed, and we'll see you soon.

2
Hello, I'm Hank Green and I want to teach you chemistry. But please, do not run away
screaming. If you give me five minutes to try to convince you that chemistry is not
torture, but instead the amazing and beautiful science of stuff. And if you give it a
chance it will not only blow your mind but also give you a deeper understanding of
your world.

This is just my opinion here, but I think that understanding the world leads to greater
ability to enjoy the world and there's nothing that helps you understand the world
better than chemistry. Chemistry holds the secrets to how life first formed, how
cancers are cured, how iPhones have bigger hard drives than 5 year old laptops and
how life on this planet might just be able to continue thriving, even ours, if we play
our cards right.

Chemistry is the science of how three tiny particles, the proton, the neutron and the
electron came together in trillions of combinations to form, get this, everything.

Now chemistry is a peculiar science, sometimes talked about as a bridge between the
ultra abstract world of particle physics and the more visible sciences like biology. But
calling chemistry a bridge is like calling Eurasia an island. Chemistry has it all, mad
scientists, world changing revelations, the practical, the impractical, medicine, bombs,
food, beauty, destruction, life and death, answers to questions you never knew you
had. I love chemistry, and I hope I can give you a glimpse into why. So today, let's
start out with maybe the biggest idea of all time, and move on from there, stuff is
made from atoms.

(Intro)

Atomic Theory and Einstein (1:44)

I know, you aren't shocked, you aren't awed, you might not even be paying attention
any more, but when atomic theory was first proposed, it sounded pretty crazy. And
yes, we call it 'Atomic Theory', using the scientific definition of theory, which is "a
well-tested set of ideas that explains many disparate observations", not the colloquial
definition of theory, which is "a guess." But luckily there's no-one running around any
more saying "atoms are just a theory."
But it wasn't that long ago that people were running around saying that. You wanna
know who settled it for good? Einstein! Atoms had been postulated for a long time by
the 20th century, but it wasn't until Einstein mathematically proved the existence of
atoms and molecules in 1905 that the matter was truly settled. And you thought
Einstein was all about relativity and E=mc2, he also proved atoms exist!

Here's how it happened. In 1827, a botanist named Robert Brown was looking at
pollen grains in water through a microscope and he noticed that they jiggled randomly
even when there was no movement to cause the jiggling. It was a mystery for a long
time, until 1905 when Einstein theorized that this phenomenon was caused by
as-yet-unproven atomic particles actually smacking into the grains of pollen.

He wrote up some fancy math, showing that his theory predicted this motion almost
perfectly, and everyone had to concede that yes, tiny discrete bits of matter were
indeed smacking into the pollen, and thus molecules, and by extension atoms, must
exist. Today, we remember this botanist and his discovery by calling the motion he
observed Brownian motion.

Composition of Atoms (3:18)

It's kinda crazy that every physical thing you've ever interacted with is made up of
little ball thingies. It started with people wondering what would happen if you just
kept slicing something in half forever. Eventually, and of course it turns out that
there's no knife sharp enough to do this, you end up with one, pure, unbreakable bit of
that substance. The word "atom", indeed, is from the Greek for "indivisible", though,
of course, as we learned in World War II, atoms can be broken as well.

So all the stuff that we think of as stuff is made of atoms, tiny discrete particles that
have specific properties depending on the arrangement of three simple subatomic
particles. There's the proton, heavy and positively charged, the neutron, about the
same size as the proton but neutral, and the electron, which has the same amount of
charge as the proton, just opposite, and very nearly has no mass at all, about 1800
times less massive than the proton or neutron.

Protons and neutrons hang out in the nucleus, and thus are the nuclear components or
nucleons; electrons hang out around the nucleus and are the parts of the atom that do
all the interesting chemical stuff. But before we get to the chemistry of the electrons,
we first have got to understand the properties of the nucleus.

Protons and Atomic Number (4:27)

Okay, this is pretty important, so pay attention here. The number of protons in an
atom determines what element it is. 79 protons: always gold. 59 protons: always
praseodymium. The number of protons in an element is its atomic number, it sits right
on top of the box in the periodic table because that is the element's defining trait. So
an atom of silver with 47 protons in its nucleus is always an atom of silver.

Depending on what its electrons are doing and what it's bonded to it might be part of a
chemical that's silver-colored or black or blue or shiny or poisonous or a cure for
disease, but whatever it is, that atom is still silver and will remain an atom of silver
probably forever, because that core number is very, very difficult to change.

Now you might have noticed something weird about silver here, it's chemical symbol,
the one- or two-letter short code that tells you what it is, is Ag, not Si, which is silicon,
or Sv which is perfectly available, but Ag. Why? To torture you? No.

Silver, of course, because we've known about it for a long time, was one of the first
elements added to the periodic table, and back then it was called "argentum", Latin for
"shiny gray stuff", also, the root of the word "Argentina", where Spanish explorers
heard rumors of mountains made of silver, which of course did not exist. The name
"Argentina", just like the chemical symbol "Ag", stuck, despite neither of them being
particularly representative of reality. Now, back to science.

Neutrons (5:51)

Nuclei, which is the plural of nucleus, are boring. They're thousands of times smaller
than the atom as a whole and they mostly just sit around being exactly the same as
they were when they were first created billions of years ago, held together by the
strongest of the four fundamental forces of physics, the strong nuclear force.
The fact that nuclei are so boring is the very reason they are the defining characteristic
of elements. While electrons can jump from atom to atom whenever it's convenient,
the number of protons is almost always extremely stable. So that core of the atom, the
nucleus, always comes out of chemical reactions unscathed. It's the bit that we can
bump around from reaction to reaction but always remains pure and behaves the same
way as any other atom with that number of protons. The atomic number is the soul of
the atom. It's what makes it it.

Neutrons are important too, of course, in their own way, but they don't change what
element an atom is. One of the two keys to all things chemical is charge, we'll discuss
that in another episode, and since neutrons don't have any charge, they mostly don't
change the properties of an atom. But they are, nonetheless, vital.

We all know that like charges repel each other. Neutrons serve as a kind of buffer
between the protons. You couldn't pack silver's 47 protons together in the nucleus by
themselves. They couldn't handle it; they'd rip themselves apart. So nuclei only clump
together permanently when the right number of protons and neutrons get together.
Silver needs about 60 neutrons to space out the 47 protons correctly. But it doesn't
have to be 60. In fact, silver nuclei are also very stable with 62 neutrons. 61 though,
that doesn't work, and the reasons for that, I don't know, you would have to talk to a
nuclear physicist.

Relative Atomic Mass (7:28)

The atomic number of silver doesn't change as the number of neutrons changes
because the number of protons stays the same. But the relative atomic mass does
change. Relative atomic mass, which used to be called atomic weight back when I
was in school, is basically the number of protons plus the number of neutrons
averaged across all the silver on Earth.

Because silver has two different stable isotopes, each with a different number of
neutrons, its relative atomic mass ends up not being a whole number. About 52% of
silver has 60 neutrons and about 48% has 62. The relative atomic mass, then, ends up
being about halfway between 107 and 109, 107.8682.

Isotopes (8:04)
You'll note that I said these two different sorts of silver are called isotopes, they have
different masses but the same chemical properties, and are the same element and so
belong in the same place on the periodic table. In fact, the word "isotope" means
"same place". And different isotopes have different mass numbers. The mass number
is just the total number of nucleons in the nucleus, which is different from atomic
mass, it's simple addition for a single atom, rather than an average of all the relative
atomic masses of all the silver atoms on Earth.

So silver has two stable isotopes, one with a mass number of 107, which we'd call
silver-107, and one with a mass number of 109, silver-109. There's an easy way to
write all this out, of course, to keep your information straight. The chemical symbol,
with the atomic number or number of protons here, the mass number, or number of
protons and neutrons here, and the charge out here, which tells you by simple addition
or subtraction how many electrons there are.

Finally, before we conclude this first episode of Crash Course Chemistry, and thus,
our discussion of the atomic nucleus, a note on the pronunciation of "nucleus". You
are welcome to say "nuculus", it is an accepted pronunciation of that word, but if you
can find it in you, it's probably best to switch over to "nucleus", which is, after all,
how it's spelled.

Credits (9:17)

And that is all for today's episode of Crash Course Chemistry, if you were paying
attention, you now know:

More about atoms than anyone did in 1900, like that they were finally confirmed
when Einstein mathematically defined Brownian motion;
That elements are chemically pure substances, and the type of element an atom is is
defined by how many protons it has in its nucleus, or its atomic number;
That neutrons stabilize nuclei for their proton friends;
That different isotopes of the same element are the reason relative atomic masses are
never whole numbers; and you know
That nuclei are the uninteresting, boring bits of the atom, and the electrons are where
all the interesting chemical-ly stuff happens.
Crash Course Chemistry is filmed, edited, and directed by Nick Jenkins, Dr. Heiko
Langner is our Chemistry consultant, sound design is done by Michael Aranda, and
our graphics team is Thought Bubble. If you have any questions, comments, or ideas
on any of this stuff we will endeavor to answer them in the comments below. Thank
you for watching Crash Course Chemistry.

2640 lumens.

1 foot.

2.3 kilograms.

9 volts. Aaah!

I just closed the circuit with my tongue and I felt all 9 of the volts. So what do
all these things have in common? They're units.

Yes, but they're also absolutely, completely arbitrary.

(Intro)

You know who decides how much a kilogram weighs?

A hunk of platinum and iridium known as the International Prototype

Kilogram or IPK.

The IPK isn't just how much a kilogram weighs. In a very real sense the IPK is
the kilogram. Every other kilogram is exactly the same as the IPK, and the IPK
is the lump of metal that decides what that mass is. A kilogram is defined as
being the same mass as the IPK. We made kilograms up just like we made up
seconds and weeks and volts and newtons.
There's nothing about these things that makes them them.

Someone just decided one day that that was a kilogram.

Now the fact that I find units fascinating probably says more about me then it
does about units, but I can talk about them all day.

For example, did you know that the International System of Units only
includes seven base units and every other unit is derived from those units?
Speed is length divided by time. Acceleration is speed divided by time again, so
meters per second per second.

Force is that acceleration multiplied by mass, cause F=ma remember? Work

done in joules is force multiplied by distance. And power is work divided by
time, so how much work can be done per unit of time. Makes sense.

It goes pretty deep, and it's absolutely correct to say that there are an infinite
number of possible derived units, just most of them aren't useful enough to
name.

But here's a bit of trivia for you. When I say watts or hertz, those things are
just regular words. No special capitalization necessary. But Hertz and Watt,
they were real people with like last names that were capitalized.

So what's up with that? Well, getting a unit named after you is kind of the
holy grail of science. To quote Richard Hamming: "True greatness is when your
name - like hertz and watt - is spelled with a lowercase letter." Of course
when these geniuses were first piecing together how the world works they had
no idea that there were fundamental basic units beneath it all.

They were basing all of their units on arbitrary values because, well, how could
there possibly be a fundamental amount of mass or distance.
Interestingly, one of the standard base units is derived from an actual value
though not a universal one. The second is 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of the
time it takes for the Earth to rotate a single time. That's something, at least
but it also illustrates an interesting point. As fundamental as that seems, when
you get down to the dirty details things start to get kind of cloudy.

The Earth's rotation for example is slowing down. Does that mean that seconds
should also slow down? No. That would mess up every calculation ever. So
seconds are slowly becoming less and less based on reality. Now don't worry.
It's gonna take forever for the Earth to slow down noticeably. And when it
does we'll just keep adding leap seconds to keep things balanced.

But units are extremely important in chemistry and in sciences in general, as

we learned when the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into Mars because
instructions were inputted in the wrong units.

Next time you get a B instead of an A because you didn't keep track of your
units, just remember at least you didn't destroy a 300 million dollar mission
to Mars. But what do I mean when I say keep track of your units?

Well. I mean watch them. Do not let them do anything you didn't tell them to
do because they're sneaky.

And a lot of chemistry is just converting between units. So say you are in a car,
and the car is going 60 miles per hour. Now right now everyone who doesn't
live in America is like: "Boo, miles are terrible. Convert to kilometers Hank!"

Well I'll do you one better. From a scientific perspective, kilometers are terrible
too. They're just as arbitrary. We should use something more universal. Like
light-years. The amount of distance light can travel in a year. And hours,
hours is no fun.

So let's convert to light-years per second. 60 miles per hour. When you say it it
sounds like a whole number with a single unit. But it's not. It's actually a
fraction. 60 miles over 1 hour. Let's start with the easy part. Getting to the
seconds.

So first we've got to get to minutes. So there's 60 minutes per hour. And also
1 hour per 60 minutes. That fraction once we have it can flip either way. We
want it with the hours on the top, on the numerator. Why?

Because we want the units to cancel. We want to destroy the hours. We don't
want them in our units when we're done. And then the same thing happens
again with 1 minute per 60 seconds. Now we go to light-years.

I asked Google, and there's 1 light-year in every 5.9 x 1012 miles. Looking at
this we see that the hours cancel and the minutes cancel and the miles cancel.
Leaving us with light-years per second. That's really what matters.

We've come out with the correct units. The rest is just hammering at the
calculator to discover that a car going 60 mph is also going 9.3
x 10-12 light-years per second.

Now we perform an important test. The "does this make sense?" test. And yes
indeed it does because 9.3 x 10-12 is a very, very, very, very small number.
Which makes sense because when you're traveling in a car you're going a very,
very, very, very, very, very, very tiny fraction of a light-year every second.

Now there are probably gonna be fifty to a hundred thousand people that
watch this video. And I'm gonna guess that maybe a solid seven of you did the
math along with me with your calculator out. Now I'm not giving you a hard
time. That's just my guess.

If you want to follow along with your calculator in the future that might be
helpful. It would at very least be very nerdy. But if you have been following
along with your calculator, you might maybe have noticed something
interesting. I said 9.3 x 10-12. When your calculator...
Your calculator probably said something like 9.3487658140029 x 10-12. So
why, when I had so many more numbers to give, did I only give two? Was I
trying to save time? Well obviously not, because now I appear to be wasting
time talking about it. Do you think that it would be too hard for me to
remember all those numbers? Well obviously not, because I just did it. So I will
tell you why.

When you're doing experimental calculations, there's two kinds of numbers.

There's exact and measured. Exact numbers are like the number of seconds in a
minute or the number of eggs in a dozen. They're defined that way and thus
we know them in effect all the way out to an infinite number of decimal places.
If I say that there are a dozen eggs you know that that's 12. It's not
12.0000000001 or 11.9999999. It's 12.

But that's not true for the number of miles per hour my car was going. That
car wasn't going 60.0000-out into infinity mph. I only know the speed of my
car to two decimal places because that's all I get from the speedometer. So the
car could have been going 59.87390039 mph or 60.49321289 mph; the
speedometer would still say 60.

And no matter how well I measure the car's speed, I will never know it at the
same level of precision that I know the number of eggs in a dozen. So that's the
second type of number, measured numbers. Now the cool thing about
measured numbers, because you never ever know them exactly, is that they
tell you two things at once.

First, they tell you the number that was measured. And second, they tell you
the precision at which that number was measured. People often get their
heads all tangled up about this, but with a measured number you just have to
remember that the actual number goes out to infinite decimal places, you just
never know all of them. You can't. It's impossible, so when my scale says 175
lbs, that doesn't mean 175.000000 lbs. It means 175.something lbs.

And all those numbers after the five? We don't know them. And here's the
thing, a measured number can be pretty unhelpful if you don't have knowledge
of the precision of the measurement. So you have to conserve the precision
through your calculations or else you might end up killing someone with an
imprecise dose of insulin or something.

So we have a set of rules for what are called significant figures: these are the
digits in your number that you actually know. With my speedometer there are
two: 6 and 0. But 0 is weird, because sometimes it's just used as a placeholder.
Like if I said that the fastest plane can go 13,000 mph, which it can by the
way.

An unmanned military test glider did it in 2011. That's not an exact number,
those zeroes are just placeholders. So when a number ends in a zero, or two or
three zeroes, it's hard to tell if those zeroes are significant. But this all gets so
much simpler when you use scientific notation, which since it's science we
should. So 60 mph would instead be 6.0 x 101. We get that zero is significant
because we wrote it.

Otherwise it would just be 6 x 101. We keep that zero around because we

actually know it. Scientific notation is awesome by the way, once you get the
hang of it. If you're having trouble you can always just type it into Google or
your calculator to see exactly what number we're talking about, but the
number of the exponent just tells you how many places to move the decimal
point.

So to the 1st power you move it one to the right and you get 60. To the
negative 1st power you move the decimal point one place to the left and you
get 0.60. To the fifth power, one, two, three, four, five, and you get six with
five zeroes or 600,000. Of course your significant figures get preserved, so
2.4590 x 10-4 is 0.00024590 and you still get the same five sig figs.

Now to the magic of figuring out how many sig figs your answer should have.
There are two simple rules for this. If it's addition or subtraction it's only the
number of figures after the decimal point that matters. The number with the
fewest figures after the decimal point decides how many figures you can have
after the decimal in your answer. So 1,495.2+1.9903 you do the math.

First you get 1,497.1903 and then you round to the first decimal, because
that first number only had one figure after the decimal. So you get 1,497.2.
And for multiplication just make sure the answer has the same sig figs as your
least precise measurement.

So 60 x 5.0839 = 305.034, but we only know two sig figs so everything after
those first two numbers is zeroes: 300. Of course then we'd have to point out
to everyone that the second zero but not the third is significant so we'd write
it out with scientific notation: 3.0 x 102. Because science!

Now I know it feels counterintuitive not to show all of the numbers that you
have at your fingertips, but you've got to realize: all of those numbers beyond
the number of sig figs you have? They're lies. They're big lying numbers. You
don't know those numbers. And if you write them down people will assume
that you do know those numbers. And you will have lied to them. And do you
know what we do with liars in chemistry? We kill them!

Thank you for watching this episode of Crash Course Chemistry. Today you
learned some keys to understanding the mathematics of chemistry, and you
want to remember this episode in case you get caught up later down the road:

How to convert between units is a skill that you'll use even when you're not
doing chemistry.

Scientific notation will always make you look like you know what you're talking
about.

Being able to chastise people for using the wrong number of significant digits is
basically math's equivalent of being a grammar Nazi.

So enjoy these new powers I have bestowed upon you, and we'll see you next
time.
Crash Course Chemistry was filmed, edited, and directed by Nick Jenkins. This
episode was written by me, Michael Aranda is our sound designer, and our
graphics team is Thought Bubble. If you have any questions, comments or ideas
for us, we are always down in the comments. Thank you for watching Crash
Course Chemistry

You got a pretty good idea of what chemistry is, right? It's atoms and
molecules doing stuff and making cars and food and life and everything. And of
course it's the study of those things. But like how did we get here?

There's certainly no everyday evidence for much of what we have discovered

through the science of chemistry. Discoveries that were not derived or made up,
but just laws of the Universe that exist simply because the Universe is the way
the Universe is.

So in today's episode of Crash Course Chemistry we're going to taking a bit of

a historical perspective on the creation of the science of chemistry. A science
that didn't really even exist until a super-smart, super-wealthy French
guy put the puzzle pieces together into a coherent theory for, quite literally,
how everything works.

And if you've ever found yourself sitting at your desk reading the same line in
your chemistry book for the 22nd time, and you think to yourself "Gah, the
guy who invented chemistry should be put to death!" Well you should feel bad,
because he was.

[intro music]
 Alchemists to Chemists (1:07)

Antoine Lavoisier, was pretty fantastic. He was a geologist, a botanist, a

biologist, and a physicist. He helped define the metric system, creating an
international language of chemistry, named hydrogen and oxygen, predicted
the existence of silicon, outlined what elements were, figured out how animals
extracted energy from food, determined that an element can take different
forms on discovering that both ash and diamond contained pure carbon,
published the very first chemistry textbook ever, and there's a reason why the
Law of Conservation of Mass used to be called Lavoisier's Law.

Born into a wealthy family, Lavoisier inherited a massive amount of money

when his mom died when he was five years old. And though he did get licensed
to practice law as his father expected him to follow in his lawyer-ly footsteps,
young Antoine chose science instead.

When the opportunity arose to marry a wealthy girl whose father's massive
income came from collecting taxes for the French government, he did it, even
though she 13. A questionable decision, though not uncommon at the time, it
turned out that the family connections would be his undoing, though, not the
age of the bride at her marriage.

Marie-Anne, as she grew older, would become a colleague as well as a wife,

assisting Antoine in his experiments and his analysis of the work of others.
Indeed it was Marie-Anne who translated Essay on Phlogiston for Antoine,
which he ripped to pieces, changing everything forever.

Until Antoine Lavoisier started inspecting everybody's work, the prevailing

theory of chemical change was that some substances contained an elusive
element called "phlogiston." By burning these phlogiston-containing elements,
they would lose their phlogiston, and become new things.

Lavoisier took those theories and their research, combined it with research
being done elsewhere, and added in his own genius experiments and then tore
the chemical world to pieces, with a little thing called "combustion." He
determined that hydrogen wasn't "inflammable air," it was an element. Indeed
he named it hydrogen because it was generated from water, or
hydro-generated.

And he determined that oxygen was a vital ingredient for combustion and also
what would later be known as oxidation, something that we'll discuss quite a
lot in this course.

By hooking people up to his bizarre contraptions, he determined that burning

wood consumed the same amount of oxygen, and produced the same amount
of carbon dioxide, as people consuming food and breathing. Thus determining
that people, and all animals, are powered by some form of internal
combustion.

Law of Conservation of Mass (3:25)

Now experimenters of the day (I hesitate to call them chemists), noticed that
when you burned something, its massed decreased. Like here's a fuse, and I put
it on a scale and I burn it, and its mass decreases.

But Lavoisier determined that if all the particles in gas are collected, like if I
burn the fuse inside a closed bottle, the mass stays the same.
Stuff remained stuff. You can't lose any, you couldn't make more. This
realization, though it seems obvious to us now and its acceptance by the
general scientific community, as far as I'm concerned, was the precise moment
at which alchemy ended and chemistry began.

Lavoisier's chief contributions and ultimately his discovery of the Law of

Conservation of Mass relied on careful measurement and careful thinking. And
as you'll see, both of those things are key to success in chemistry to this day.

Decapitated Aristocrat (4:11)

Lavoisier the man was a bit of a dichotomy, having worked as a tax collector
and helping to create a literal wall around Paris to assist in the collection of
taxes, but also a supporter of the French Revolution as it began. But the
enemies he had made with his wall, and by denying certain powerful
politicians entry into the French Academy of Sciences, eventually caught up
with him as the revolution's lunacy increased, he was beheaded on May 8th,
1794.

Lavoisier was pardoned a year and a half after his execution. That's good.
Marie-Anne was delivered all of his confiscated belongings, and a note of
apology, like "Sorry we killed your husband, here's all his stuff back."

The mathematician Joseph Lagrange said of the event: "It took them only an
instant to cut off that head, but France may not produce another like it in a
century."

It's worth noting, though this isn't really science talk, that Lavoisier couldn't
have done any of his magnificently careful measurements had it not been for
his enormous wealth. He commissioned the creation of hundreds of pieces of
equipment, large and small. Only the system of economic inequality that the
French were revolting against made it possible for Lavoisier to do his work. I'll
leave you to think on the implications of that, on your own.

Lavoisier's work was, for a full century, the basis of all chemistry. Proving that
you don't have to be rich to get a law (at least temporarilly) named after you,
French pharmacist Joseph Proust built on Lavoisier's ideas of extremely careful
measurement showing that a chemical compound always contains the same
proportions of elements. For a while we called this Proust's Law, but to make it
easier to remember for the world we just call it the Law of Definite
Proportions now.

Chemical Compounds (5:44)

And then an English schoolteacher, John Dalton, followed Proust by examining

what at first appeared to be a problem with Proust's work. Carbon and oxygen,
when reacted together, would form two different proportions, not just one.

Of course what was happening is obvious to us, carbon and oxygen were
reacting to form two different compounds: carbon dioxide and carbon
monoxide. As Dalton's work continued, he found something truly
mind-bendingly fascinating.

Atoms and Molecules (6:07)

If you limited the amount of carbon reacting to exactly 1 g, the mass of oxygen
consumed to produce one compound was 1.33 g, while the mass consumed to
produce the other compound was 2.66 g, exactly double what was required for
the other compound.
This shook out for other reactions, too. When reacting nitrogen and oxygen,
and limiting to exactly one gram of nitrogen, three compounds formed. One
compound consumed 1.750 g of oxygen, another consumed 0.8750 g of
oxygen, and another consumed 0.4374 g. All of those numbers are relatable
by small whole number ratios.

Oxygen wasn't reacting with some ephemeral cloud of the idea of nitrogen, it
was reacting with individual, discrete bits of nitrogen, that couldn't be divided.
It could react in a number of ways, but it was always the same oxygen and the
same nitrogen with the same properties.

And so while in our first episode we showed you how Einstein actually proved
that atoms exist with super fancy math, Dalton had used multiplication to
become the first person to actually have real data supporting the idea of
atoms.

Dalton still, though, had it kind of wrong. He thought that the products of his
reactions were elements as well. Basically, he believed that atoms and
molecules were the same thing. We often simplify this and don't note Dalton's
confusion on this particular point, but that leaves a couple of other fantastic
chemists out of the story.

For example, Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, who in 1804 became the highest

scientist ever in history, by taking a hot-air balloon to the dangerous height of
7,000 m to take air samples. But in addition to maybe being a little bit crazy,
Gay-Lussac published a paper showing that a volume of oxygen gas is two
times smaller than the volume of water vapor it creates, indicating that
somehow, oxygen was splitting into two pieces.
Dalton, would not accept this, because it meant that oxygen was not one, but
two atoms, and apparently that just messed with his whole conception of the
Universe, and he never did accept it, even unto his death.

Avogadro and his Number (8:05)

It took an Italian house-elf--I mean genius, Lorenzo Romano Amadeo Carlo

Avogadro di Quaregna e di Cerreto. (I did it the first time.) We'll just call him
Amadeo Avogadro, but he was a count, so he had to have a super-fancy name,
and I'm mean, so I had to try and say it.

Much like Lavoisier, Avogadro's political alliances would get him into trouble.
After Napoleon's downfall in 1815, Avogadro was active in the Italian
Anti-Monarchy Revolution, possibly even sponsoring some revolutionaries with
his personal fortune. For this he lost his chair at the University of Turin, but
thankfully he did not lose his head.

Avogadro proposed, correctly, that any gas in a container of the same

size, with the same temperature and pressure, would have roughly the same
number of molecules in it, no matter what the gas was. So any difference in
mass between two flasks of the same size full of two different gases would be
because of a difference in the actual physical mass of the molecules. And thus,
Avogadro basically figured out how to weigh atoms and molecules, as long as
they were gaseous.

To support his hypothesis, which was certainly good enough to support, he

suggested that, in forming water, oxygen gas would actually split into two
oxygen atoms, what he called "elementary molecules" that could not be broken
down any further. For some fifty years, Avogadro's idea of fundamental
molecules were ignored.
Maybe because of incorrect ideas of how atoms stuck together, maybe because
Italy was a bit of a backwater of science and Avogadro wasn't considered an
important thinker at the time. But the scientific community, as it usually does,
came back around to Avogadro's ideas eventually. Not only naming his
proposal that equal volumes at the same temperature and pressure contained
the same number of molecules Avogadro's Law, but also giving him his own
number, maybe the most important number in chemistry, certainly one of my
very favorite numbers, but we'll get to that later.

Credits (9:57)

Thank you for watching this episode of Crash Course Chemistry. If you were
paying attention you now know the story of how we went from alchemists,
who thought that the element of fire hid inside of substances just clamoring to
get out, to chemists, who understood the Law of Conservation of Mass, as
proposed by a decapitated aristocrat. Greater understanding of how chemical
compounds work, thanks to a pharmacist and a schoolteacher. And eventually
a complete understanding of what atoms and molecules are, thanks to a
neglected Italian house-elf--nobleman.

This episode of Crash Course Chemistry, it was written by myself, filmed and
directed by Michael Aranda, and edited by Nick Jenkins. The script was edited
by Blake de Pastino and Dr. Heiko Langner. Michael Aranda is also our sound
designer. Caitlin Hofmeister is our script supervisor and our graphics team is
Though Café.

If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments below. Thank you
for learning with here at Crash Course Chemistry

4
Hello, I'm Hank Green; welcome to Crash Course Chemistry - today, we're
talking about the most important table ever.

Not the table where they signed the Declaration of Independence, nor any
table of contents, nor this table right here, nor the stone table of Aslan, NAY!
It is the periodic table of elements, a concise, information-dense catalogue of
all of the different sorts of atoms in the universe.

Today I want to talk a little bit about the creation of this table, which is, to be
clear, one of the crowning achievements of human thought. To start out,
though, let's close our eyes and pretend.

[intro music]

Dmitri Mendeleev (0:45)

Imagine you're in Siberia. And you're a thirteen-year-old boy. And your father,
who was a professor but had gone blind, leaving your family of more than ten
brothers and sisters destitute, has just died. I know, downer.

Your mom, to support the family, has re-opened an abandoned glassmaking

factory in the small town where you live, largely because she wants to make
enough money to send you to school someday. A year passes - the factory
burns down.

But your mom, she sees your potential; she knows that you have a keen
scientific mind and will not see that squandered. So, with your siblings out of
the house and on their own, she packs up your belongings, straps them to a
horse, and with you in tow, rides 1200 miles through the Ural Mountains on
horseback to a university in Moscow. There, on your behalf, she pleads
earnestly and effectively, and they reject you.

So together, you ride another 400 miles to St. Petersburg, to the school where
your father had graduated as a scientist, and as luck, or extreme, insane,
undeniably Russian persistence, would have it, they accept you, and your
saddle-worn butt, as a pupil. Your mother, having completed her mission,
promptly dies.

If you're doing your imagining as I told you, you might feel a tremendous debt
to your mother, and a very deep desire to ensure that you achieve something
on par with the sacrifices she made for you. And maybe that's one reason why
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev became the crown jewel of Russian science, and a
theorist who revolutionized how we see the world.

Mendeleev spent a great deal of time in laboratories as a student, studying the

burgeoning new field of chemistry. He worked with all the elements that you
could work with at the time, and his knowledge gave him unique insights into
their properties. Those insights would come in handy.

Mendeleev's Organization of the Periodic Table (2:32)

Let's all imagine we're Mendeleev again - I like doing that - and that we know
a bunch of stuff about chemistry - which, you know, we don't, yet - but we're
imagining.

So it's the 1860s, and about sixty elements are known to mankind, and their
atomic weights are mostly known as well. So the simplest thing was just to sort
them in order of their atomic weights. But interestingly, you, because you're a
cleverpants, realized that the most significant relationships seem to have
nothing to do with the atomic weight.

Lithium, sodium, potassium, and rubidium were all extremely prone to

reacting with chlorine, fluorine, iodine, and bromine; beryllium, magnesium,
calcium, and strontium were all similar, but less reactive.

But with a quick inspection, you, and to be fair, a number of other chemists,
realize that there was a relationship between atomic weights, but it's periodic.
At the beginning of the list of elements, characteristics repeat every seven
elements.

On the side here, we now know that it's every eight elements, but in the
1860s, elements were studies based on their reactivity, so the non-reactive
noble gases had not yet been discovered - so the period occurred every seven
elements.

As the mass of the elements increases, the repetition starts to get a little less
periodic, although it's certainly still there; it just isn't perfect.

Some of your colleagues, they're saying: "Well, such is life." It was perfect
repetition early on, but later in the list it gets a little fuzzier. But not you; you
become obsessed. Obsessed with the perfection of the periodicity. You write out
the names and weights and properties of elements on cards; you lay them
across your desk, shuffle them, tear them to pieces in frustration, until one day,
you realize - that you're simply missing cards.

The numbers aren't working, not because there's something wrong with your
ideas, but because some elements simply haven't been discovered yet. Armed
with this insight, you insert gaps into the table, and things suddenly fall
perfectly into place. Seven-element periods for the first two rows, with
hydrogen in its own category, eighteen-element periods for the next two
rows.

You're so certain that you predict the properties of these missing elements.
And a French scientist comes along and says that he has, in fact, discovered
one of them, you argue with him, saying that you discovered it first in your
mind.

And when you see his data, and it doesn't match yours, you publish a paper
saying his data for the new element he discovered is wrong. That's how certain
you are of yourself of this beautiful new theoretical framework you've created.
You know what the really crazy thing is? You're right! That French guy's data
was wrong!

You, never having examined the element he discovered, knew more about it
than he did, because you are Mendeleev, Master of the Elements.

Okay, we're done imagining for the episode; that was fun though.

Relationships in the Periodic Table (5:03)

Different groups Mendeleev had identified are a lot of the same groups that we
study today.

Starting at the left, we have the soft, shiny, extremely reactive alkali metals,
so reactive, in fact, that they have to be stored in inert gases or oil, to prevent
them from reacting with the atmosphere. Alkali metals want nothing more
than to dump off an electron and form a positive ion, or cation. And they're
always jonesing to hook up with a hottie from the other side of the table. So of
course, seeing as they're so reactive, you don't find hunks of them lying around
in nature; instead, chemists must extract them from compounds containing
them.

Next, you have the alkaline earth metals - reactive metals, but not as reactive
as the alkali metals, for cations with two positive charges instead of just one.
Calcium, shown here, undergoes a very similar reaction to sodium with water,
just a little more slowly, producing a little less heat.

The middle body area of the table is made up of a nice, solid rectangle of
transition metals - these are the metals you think of as metal, with iron, and
nickel, and gold, and platinum. The majority of elements are metals - they're
fairly unreactive, great conductors of heat, but more importantly for us, good
conductors of electricity, they're malleable, and can be bent and formed and
hammered into sheets, and they're extremely important in chemistry but
overall surprisingly similar to each other.
On the far right, just over from the noble gases, the halogens make up a set of
extremely reactive gases that form negative ions, or anions, with one negative
charge, and love to react with the alkali and alkaline earth metals.

The rectangle between the halogens and the transition metals contain a
peculiar scatter shot of metals, metalloids, gases, and nonmetals; these guys
don't end up as ions unless you take extreme action and start shooting other
ions at them, so generally a bit boring over here, though lots of interesting
covalent organic chemistry (we'll get to that).

Down below, in their own little island, are the lanthanides and actinides,
metals that were largely undiscovered in Mendeleev's day because they're so
similar that it's next to impossible to separate them from each other.

And finally, on the far, far right, also undiscovered when Mendeleev built his
chart, the completely unreactive noble gases.

Why Mendeleev Stood Out from his Colleagues (7:09)

Like a lot of other obsessive scientists, Mendeleev never thought he was done
with his table, so he held it back for quite a while, only publishing it as part of
a new chemistry textbook he was working on as a way to make some quick
cash that he needed.

And, as with many other scientific revelations, there were a number of other
people hot on this discovery's trail. As many as six people published on the
periodicity of elements at roughly the same time as Mendeleev, but a few
things set him apart.

1. He was obsessive - he knew the data better than anyone else, and had spent
a ton of time working on a theory that many people thought was just an
interesting little quirk. And

2. He realized in a way no one else did that the idea of periodicity had
far-reaching consequences. It seems as if he had a deep belief in the cosmic
importance of what he was doing, almost of religious fascination. Mendeleev
believed in God, but also he believed that organized religions were false paths to
the unknowable nature of God.

I like to believe that he thought he saw some divine pattern in his tables, and
Mendeleev felt as if he was coming to know God in a way that no other man
had. To be clear, this is pure conjecture.

And as we now know, the periodicity of elements is a physical phenomenon.

It's a function of electrons, which are in some ways pretty dang peculiar, but
certainly not at all mystical. But we'll get to that peculiar physical reality in
the next episode.

How the Periodic Table Could be Improved (8:28)

The periodic table that we know and love - I love it anyway - if a

representation of reality; a way of understanding and sorting the universe as it
exists. But that form of the table is not by any means set in stone; indeed, a
contemporary of Mendeleev envisioned the table set onto a screw, or cylinder,
with the elements wrapping around from one side to another.

While Mendeleev's table looks more like a map up on a wall, de Chancourtois, a

geologist, envisioned more of a globe. Unfortunately for de Chancourtois, no
publisher could figure out how to print his cylindrical three-dimensional table,
and so he published his paper without a graphical representation of his
Periodic Cylinder of the Elements, and it was largely ignored.

I guess they didn't have paper craft back then, and I am a huge fan of this
cut-and-tape model of the periodic table; you can make your own - there's a
link in the description - and there are also a ton of other designs for periodic
tables that have various advantages over the one that we're all familiar with.

Our periodic table, as it stands, it really a little bit unhappy with itself, frankly;
the lanthanides and actinides really should be part of the table, but we
separate them out, because it's hard to fit that on a piece of paper; really, this
is what it should look like.

And really, it would be best if it wrapped around into a circle, so that fluorine,
and neon, and sodium were all next to each other, instead of being on opposite
sides of the map, because they're just one proton away!

Mendeleev's contribution, nonetheless, is more powerful than at first it seemed.

He ended up forming a guide to help future chemists understand things that
wouldn't be discovered for 25, 50, even 100 years. Indeed, after Mendeleev's
theories were published and accepted, the overwhelming cry form the scientific
community was "Why? Why? Why?"

And although Mendeleev was not himself concerned with this stuff, he actually
denied the existence of atoms, or indeed anything he couldn't see with his own
eyes.

It turned out that the answer to the first "Why", was the electron. Sneaky little
electron; Mendeleev, if he'd been around to see their discovery, he would have
hated them. But you, you will have a healthy respect for them, after you learn
all about them on the next episode of Crash Course Chemistry.

Credits (10:33)

Thank you for watching this episode of Crash Course Chemistry. If you were
paying attention, you now know:

The terrible, beautiful, and wonderful story of Dmitri Mendeleev,

How he organized the elements into the periodic table,
Some of the basics of the relationships in that table,
Why Mendeleev stood out from his colleagues, and
How the table as we know it today could stand some improvement.
This episode of Crash Course Chemistry was written by myself, filmed and
directed by Caitlin Hoffmeister, and edited by Nick Jenkins. The script was
edited by Blake de Pastino and Dr. Heiko Langner, our sound designed is
Michael Aranda, and Thought Café is our graphics team.

If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments below, thank you
for learning with us, here in Crash Course Chemistry.