I'm teaching a one day workshop on chemical kinetics to high school students tomorrow (part of Bryn Mawr's Science for College program). The relationship of the rate of a reaction to it's mechanism (the individual steps that produce the overall molecular transformation) is a key principle underlying the study of chemical kinetics. To explain this, one text refers to the episode of "I Love Lucy" where Lucy and Ethel work in a candy factory (while Ricky and Fred try their hands at keeping house - but that's another post. The candy boxes appear only as fast as the slowest step in the process (Lucy and Ethel wrapping) - reactions go no faster than the slowest step, called the rate determing step (or RDS).
See the clip here.
The architecture of Pi Mensae
2 days ago in Doc Madhattan
No comments:
Post a Comment
Markup Key:
- <b>bold</b> = bold
- <i>italic</i> = italic
- <a href="http://www.fieldofscience.com/">FoS</a> = FoS