I love this sticker for one main reason. It is my job to help people see that there is science in everyday life. It’s not actually a completely foreign concept. The concept of chemistry can seem scary, but in truth, we all do various forms of science, including chemistry, all day long. Cooking is one great example.
When you decide you’re going to make a cake, mixing together flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, baking powder, butter, eggs, and milk is only the beginning. You’re combining exactly the right ingredients in exactly the right proportions. Beating it all together and introducing heat at the correct temperature for an exact period of time then allows the cake to undergo a series of reactions, where it changes from a cool liquid to a warm, gooey, delicious solid that we will not want to share with anyone. (Maybe that’s just me.) Did you know that was chemistry? Yep. Delicious chemistry.
The part of chemistry that tends to scare people is the unknown. So, the best way to conquer that fear is to dig in and learn more about chemistry. Consider this interesting concept.
Two billion years ago, life was brand new on Earth. Single-celled organisms, called cyanobacteria, lived in ocean waters and through photosynthesis were able to make oxygen as a bi-product and pump it into our atmosphere. Earth’s early atmosphere had high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide, methane, and more than 200 times the amount of carbon dioxide we are experiencing today. Tough times for living creatures, but chemistry saved the day! The addition of oxygen into our atmosphere over millions of years provided an environment that allowed larger and more complex organisms to grow and develop. Life was finally being supported by a very important element, oxygen. That’s a major chemistry coup for all of us!
One thing I HOPE you’ll take away from these “What is…Science?” posts is that fields of science never stand alone. Biology and chemistry make “magic.” Chemistry and geology make “magic.” Biology and geology make “magic.” And let’s be honest, by magic, I mean great science. The fact of the matter here is that multidisciplinary studies, where we consider the combined impacts of different fields at the same time, always provide a better image of what’s really going on here on Planet Earth. Tricky, tricky Planet Earth.
So, if you’ll indulge me a bit, I would like to return to the cake baking discussion briefly. Knowing what you know now about primordial Earth, I’d say we’ve come a long way from single-celled cyanobacteria just trying to survive by oxidizing sea water to gain energy. Considering that your chemistry efforts today include breathing that awesome oxygen and baking a cake, life now seems pretty sweet.
Go forth and learn about chemistry!
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*And if you’re looking for the answer to the question on our Chemistry event banner, you could say sodium (Na+), chloride (Cl-), and sulfur (S-2). Sodium chloride is salt, so obviously there’s a lot of that at the coast, but sulfur compounds are very evident in salt marshes by their smells. And although those might be some of the most abundant and obvious, there are also lots of other elemental options on the NC coast, so if you’d like to discuss, feel free to drop us a line!