Questions:
- What's the limit to how many compounds you could make?
- Do you think one of the compounds would be the strongest material in the world?
- Do you think one of the compounds would cure cancer? Diabetes? Hunger? Arrogance?
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Science Question for March 2013
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15 comments:
About a hundred and eighteen factorial. Uh huh.
I don't know about the number of compounds, but I'd like to visit the best lab in the world. There are a lot of hypotheticals here.
I'd guess there are a million compounds that contain hydrogen. Maybe more. The total number of possible compounds is probably way up there, and it might be beyond our imagination.
Some compounds have hundreds of individual atoms in them. I'm saying a hundred to the hundredth power.
Lots of the compounds wouldn't be useful. It would be better to figure out which ones would do some good and then concentrate on them only. Save some time. Some of the compounds would probably kill the lab tech, too.
These theoretical science questions are good, because they make people think. It's just an exercise, anyhow.
Depending on the chemical reactivity of each element and what exactly are the surronding elements it can react with and conditions the number can be from many to the numbers estimated above. Will it be strong or not will depend on elements in jar, remember that after hundreds of years of chemists and scientists mixing chemicals we have not found all possible new materials so in that respect you can find stronger materials, a cure for cancer, or others by pure discovery or simply luck.
Imagine this...you'd be able to create everything that's ever been created before, plus lots more. I think Nature has already made more compounds than that lab could make. (given present technology). This question is way out there.
2,167,102 chemical compounds are known to man to date
Yeah...what are they? I've heard there are at least ten million hydrocarbons. You Wiki might be short.
Of the 10 million or so compounds that are known today, about 9 million of those are carbon containing compounds. Nearly everything you touch contains something organic. Gasoline, oil, most of the medicines you take, the plastics you encounter are all organic based compounds. Needless to say, organic chemistry is a very large area of chemistry.
There are a huge number of possible chemicals. Estimates range from 10^18 to 10^200. For comparison the number of grains of sand on the Earth is about 7.5 x 10^18, the number of particles in the universe is between 10^72 and 10^87. Clearly, if there really are more chemicals than this, then not every one even physically exists in the universe. The most abundant compound in the universe, by far, is diatomic hydrogen (H2) anyway.
there are more grains of sand than that in my shoe
There's no need to look further for the strongest material. Graphene is the world's new wonder material. It's a layer of carbon atoms just a single atom thick -- the atoms are arranged in a hexagonal pattern. It weighs almost nothing...0.77 grams for a square meter. Graphene is 100 times stronger than steel of the same thickness.
What kind of strong? Tensile strength? Toughness? Yield strength? Hardness? Here's some good info.
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