the.com/organic chemistry
The science of carbon's midlife crisis, forming 10 million compounds just to spite you.
means The branch of chemistry that studies carbon-containing compounds — how they're built, how they react, and how they fall apart — which covers everything from plastics to proteins to the molecules that make you, you.
from Coined in the early 1800s when chemists believed carbon compounds could only be made by living things via some mysterious 'vital force,' distinguishing them from 'inorganic' mineral chemistry. That belief cracked in 1828 when Friedrich Wöhler synthesized urea — a compound known only from urine — out of ordinary inorganic salts in a lab, with no life involved. The vital-force theory died, but the name 'organic' stuck around, a fossil of a wrong idea we never bothered to rename.
- weed-out course
- Classically used to filter pre-med students, not plants
- arrow pushing
- Electrons drawn as tiny arrows, chemistry's version of gossip
- one element
- Carbon dominates despite being one of 118 elements
- named ironically
- Once meant from living things, now mostly made in flasks