7. Chemistry and matter

CHEMISTRY AND MATTER

Science plays such an important part in the modern world that no one can now feel that he understands the world in which he live unless he has an understanding of science. The science of chemistry deals with substances. At this point in the study of chemistry we shall not define the word substance in its scientific sense, but shall assume that you have a general idea of what the word means. Common examples of substances are water, sugar, salt, copper, iron oxygen - you can think of many others. Chemists study substances to learn as much as they can about their properties and about the reactions that change them into other substances. Knowledge obtained in this way has been found to be extremely valuable. Since some substances (like morphine and cocaine), may have undesirable properties along with the positive ones, we should test such substances for their powers of deadening pain and of producing addiction very thoroughly. Some methods carried out in laboratories were really dangerous. No doubt that the twentieth century may be called the chemical age.