What is Matter?

In chemistry class we started learning about the history of matter. While learning this we also learned that in the late, late past it didn't matter if you were right it just mattered how many followers or people believing you had. So a lot of the early scientist where wrong. The first person we learned about was Aristotle.

His idea was that there was no such thing as empty space and matter can only be made of earth, fire, air, and water. We proved his idea wrong because while learning about gas particles we learned about how the flow freely through empty space. The second was Dalton all his ideas where based around the atom. They ranged from color, shape, size, and motion of the atom. A few of his ideas where right such as atoms are invisible and indestructible, atoms of the same element are the same size and color, and atoms of different elements are different, and when you combine elements they create a compound. When learning about Dalton we did an online computer assignment that showed all of the scientist experiments. He also thought that protons and neutrons and electrons where just scattered all over the place in and atom. 

The scientist that proved Dalton wrong was JJ Thomson. He used his cathode ray experiment to show the charge to mass ratio and that the mass an electron is less than the mass of the lightest element.

Next was Robert Millikon who discovered that an electron carries a negative charge and used Thomson’s ratio to calculate the mass of an actual electron. Rutherford discovered the atom is mostly empty space and the proton and neutrons are all in the nucleus, through an experiment.

Also protons and neutrons are bigger than an electron, making the nucleus the densest part of an atom.

Dry Ice

In chemistry we did an experiment with dry ice. Dry ice is very cold and made of Carbon Dioxide. Because it’s so cold it burns you if you touch it. The difference between dry ice and regular ice is if you add regular ice to water it eventually turns to a liquid, when you add dry ice to water it skips a stage and goes straight to gas. When a solid can go from a solid straight to a gas it’s called Sublimation. First, we had to put 150 mL into our calorimeter and take the temperature of the water then go get our chuck of dry ice from our teacher. After we took the mass of our piece of dry ice when took it to our calorimeter and placed it into the water.

If you watched carefully and blew the smoke away every once in  a while you would see as the ice was subliming it created white bubbles on top of the water and if you were to touch the bubble or let it burst on its own the gas would come out.

The gas would then spill over the sides. As you watched the smoke go over the sides of the calorimeter it reminded me of the fog they have that comes out in the fog machines people use for Halloween.

Stirring the ice in the water helped it sublime faster. Even though the solution created smoke, the smoke was fairly cold. To verify it was cold there was a drop in the temperature of the water. If you were to compare how much energy it takes to separate the particles when a substance is subliming to how much energy it take in melting/ fusing. It takes 333 J/g to melt ice compared to 640 J/g to takes to see ice sublime. From this lab I learned there was a thing as sublimation.

This was my favorite picture 😊.

Hot Metal

In chemistry we've been learning about heat and energy. We found that heat is a factor of energy. Heat is the energy transferred between you things that don't have a equal temperature and are touching. The symbol for heat is a lower case letter q (q). The scientific measurement units are Joules (J), KiloJoules (kJ0, Calorie(cal), and Calories ((Cal) food). Specific heat is an object ability to absorb or release heat without it chemically change. We also learned the there is a equation that relates all these things.

• q= the heat absorbed (+) or released (-)
• m= Mass
• c= Specific heat
• (triangle)T= change in temperature

You determine the mass by mass the object you are using. You find the change in temperature by subtracting the final temperature from the initial temperature.
This equation came into play when we did a lab called " Determining the Specific Heat of Metals". In this lab we used a Bunsen burner, tongues, thermometer, iron and copper fittings, balance, graduated cylinder, and a home made calorimeter. First, we had to fill the calorimeter with 200 g of water and place the thermometer in the water and record the temperature.  After we massed the fittings we used the tongues to hold each fitting or the burner we waited until the metal change colors to predict the temperature of the fitting.

Once we recorded our predicted temperature we plunged the hot fittings into the cups or water. As we watched the thermometer we noticed the temperature continued to rise but it wasn't a hug jump. After we had all or information recorded We used the formula to calculate the heat and specific heat. Resulting from this lab I learned that the energy really does bounce back and forth through objects that have come into contact with each other until they are even and just because something is really hot doesn't mean the temperature or change dramatically.