Welcome to Chemistry
“We chemists are here for this: to make mistakes and to correct ourselves...We must never feel disarmed: nature is immense and complex, but it is not impermeable to the intelligence: we must circle around it, pierce it and probe it, looking for the opening or making it.”
- Primo Levi, 1984
Contact Information
Email: janicedelmar@rhsm.org
Home Phone: (801) 583-8223
Quotations on Chemistry:
“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.”
- Edwin Powell Hubble, 1954
“An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.”
- Max Planck, 1949
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny...’”
- Isaac Asimov
“The most important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.”
- William Lawrence Bragg
“Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.”
- Henri Poincare, 1905
“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth”
- Evelyn Fox Keller, 1995
“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.”
- Claude Levi-Strauss
“Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active technique of inquiry.”
- John Dewey, 1920
“The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.”
- Celia Green, 1972
“ Alchemy may be compared to the husbandman [who] told his sons that he had left unto them gold buried underground in his vineyard...gold they found none; but by reason of their stirring and digging the mould about the roots of their vines, they had a great vintage the year following: so assuredly the search and stir to make gold hath brought to light a great number of good and fruitful inventions and experiments, as well for the disclosing of nature as for the use of man’s life”
- Francis Bacon, 1605
Welcome to the RHSM Upper School Chemistry Website!
The above images from centuries past depict alchemists at work in their laboratories. For many hundreds of years, inquisitive individuals have sought to answer a range of questions about the natural world. Chemistry, the modern descendent of alchemy, provides a means of answering some of these questions.
Chemistry is defined as the study of matter and the changes it undergoes. Since matter is the stuff of which the Universe is made, the study of chemistry has a very broad scope. It is sometimes called “The Central Science” because a knowledge of chemistry informs a study of so many of the other sciences like Biology, Physics, Medicine, and Biochemistry.
This Chemistry course is designed to provide you with an understanding of how matter behaves at the macroscopic and molecular level, and to present examples of the relevance of chemistry in your everyday world. I hope you find the year an exciting and challenging adventure.
Disclosure Statements
Particle Tracks in a Bubble Chamber
Patrice Loiez/CERN/Science Source/Photo Researchers, Inc.
Joseph Wright
The Alchemist in Search of The Philosopher’s Stone, 1771
Heinrich Kunrath
The Alchemist’s Laboratory, 1595
