How Do Chemical Reactions REALLY Happen? 

One conceptual mistake I run into frequently is the idea that materials at a particular temperature have all their particles at the same kinetic energy, and thus chemical reactions (including side reactions) turn on or off as you raise or lower the temperature. In reality, at a particular temperature, the kinetic energy of the particles is distributed along a curve with most of them in middle range and smaller and smaller amounts as the energy gets higher or lower. So at any temperature, there will (theoretically) always be *some* with enough energy to reach the threshold needed for a reaction to occur, and controlling the temperature just raises or lowers the fraction of particles that do so.

This video should be mandatory viewing for all high school chemistry courses. It's a reminder that chemistry is truly applied physics.

This is seriously one underrated channel.

This is probably the best theoratical chemistry channel right now

FINALLY! The video that will allow me to sleep at night (this is not satirical, I have been grappling with how to conceptually understanding chemical kinetics) I seriously appreciate all the help you have been in my journey to understanding chemistry.

Could you do a video re: Thermodynamic vs Kinetic Reactions, Differences, and Products? It would be great to show how the conditions of a reaction can arguably change the outcome substantially and even be controlled. A side piece on dealing with Chiral product purification/reactions would be cool too :) Did my undergrad in Chem, still fascinated and don't want to forget anything! Your videos are awesome to dive into the nitty gritties that we're just told this happens "because" oh so often.

This is something I have been wondering for so long, and you laid out the kinetic aspect I was missing. In a way its simpler than I expected, but then most scientific truth is.

I’m a sophomore studying chemistry. I really enjoy seeing the visuals and the concepts of collision theory, or Chemical Kinetics come to life. In school , those ideas of what’s going on can get easily get lost behind the scrutiny of learning how to find the numbers of for let’s say chemical kinetics / RXN rates. Really loved the video. I’m excited to progress down this path of chemistry.

When I was in school, I was terrible at math of almost any kind, until I discovered chemistry. It is such a beautiful science. I really love your videos, even though I did not become a chemist, I still love learning about chemistry and your shows are so engaging to watch. Thanks so much for your time and effort and letting me remanence about a time in my life when it was full of wonder and surprise.

Don't worry, the chemical engineers don't want you to mention fugacity either!

Very Nice video congratulations we love chemistry

I am a big fan of the animation at 21:17! It encaptivated my soul .. truly wondrous!

I love his calm voice and easy to digest explanations. His videos have helped so much in class, especially with conceptual questions

I love this channel and the insight it gives about chemistry along with O-chem

I'm glad you're making these I never took kinetics

wow!! this is a super awesome video, thank you. there aren't a huge number of channels that make chemistry engaging this way!!

I love your videos soo much. Really awaiting your videos on other topics, and I'd love to see one where you go into detail on Bonding in Coordination complexes, hopefully with MOT(carbonyl and other ligands).

Thank you and your team for such a good explanation! You make me fall in love with chemistry more and more. Chemical processes are so beautiful, they bring tears to my eyes.

This video is pure GOLD! Wow!!!!!!!

Favorite chemistry channel!

Great video! Looking forward to see video about the activation energy

I mean how could i've missed such high quality content. BRAVO! Outstanding work and passion.

I love your channel man, the way you describe things makes them easy to grasp

Glad I found this channel !

What a fantastic channel you have, i cant believe ive only just found you. Very well concisly explained. I am a home chemist in my 40's & love tinkering with molecules, i took physics at uni & now whish i had done chemistry. Thers nothing more satisfying than getting my glassware out & building molecules.

10:00 This makes me just happy, i appreciate the amount of detail

another fantastic video, thanks for the upload

i just ran into this channel and i can't thank enough cuz my professors don't have this awesome way of teaching THANKS !

Thank you for your informative videos. I seriously appreciate them.

I can't wait for the rest of the videos on kinetics! Thanks so much!

Big fan! Your videos truely enrich my 3 26! I recommended you many timed and hope your channel grows further. More people habe to enjoy this.

Watching your videos helps cooling my head off, whenever i need to. Can't wait for the 'activation energy' video

Thank you for talking so well about our job👩‍🔬👨‍🔬

oooh goody! thanks doc.

We missed you! Keep this kinda content up, I love your explanations

as always such a great video! learned a lot!

Early birthday present! Thanks!

Can u make a video on coordinate complexes?

Thanks . Really nice presentation ❤

commenting for the algorithm! cause this needs to be on more people's page

Nice work! I'd like to suggest more intro about molecular chemistry ( orbitals, etc) in reactions. Examples: H2 +O2 goes with explosion with practically any concentrations, any temperature, etc vs rusting going relatively slow and really depends on reaction conditions. Pb(N3)2 is very sensitive, very often self exploded under any conditions vs reactions require some concentration, temperature etc. One more suggestion is to talk about how chemical properties define the speed of reaction. Examples: H2+O2 -> blast always, but oil+O2 -> slow combustion always. Bonus topic, IMHO, about 'unknown' reactions. Example: plastit usually is very safe explosion. To detonate one, the one needs to apply high voltage like 15kV. For this reason, plastit is used for R&D work with explosions. But sometime plastit can detonate from unknown reason. It is very seldom. In my personal work, 2 times for several years. I had collected unused plastit into a wood box and blast happened. No reason, very seldom case, but could happen.

the wink is a nice touch

Shared the video with my students. Also wanted to ask, which software are you using for the animations/simulation

I'm watching this again, and I am again struck by the randomness and energy and solvents and so on and so on... That has got to be a frustrating job sometimes. Wow!

fantastic content and delivery! Please keep it up.

can you please explain how catalyst work in the video about activation energy?

Great video. Goode intermediate between graduate and undergraduate level study

Iron in the holds of ships has been known to melt from the heat generated by rusting. It also melts the hull of the ship, which is really terrible for buoyancy. I believe this was also a factor in the WTC debris pile, where molten steel was discovered much later.

Sometimes it is better to be presented with a (well-known chemical) reaction and then ask the question: How could that be? The example of exo-isomer to endo-isomer is on the border of what I can accept (fathom) when watching, because I don't know what isomers are, and something in the wording (molecules of a species reacting with itself) sounds wrong when there are two shapes of that same molecule - you need to assume that the molecule is defined by the species of atoms which have been combined. And then this video is about precisely the fact that molecules of same elements can have different shapes.I think one reason why some of us balks from chemistry lessons is the many assumptions, the many presuppositions, which we don't like, we don't accept them without an explanation. Think about how many years it took for bright chemists to accept the atom- and molecule models. In chemistry, isomers are molecules or polyatomic ions with identical molecular formula. In stereochemistry, stereoisomerism, or spatial isomerism, is a form of isomerism in which molecules have the same molecular formula and sequence of bonded atoms (constitution), but differ in the three-dimensional orientations of their atoms in space. In organic chemistry, endo-exo isomerism is a special type of stereoisomerism found in organic compounds with a substituent on a bridged ring system. The prefix endo is reserved for the isomer with the substituent located closest, or "syn", to the longest bridge. The prefix exo is reserved for the isomer with the substituent located farthest, or "anti", to the longest bridge. Here "longest" and "shortest" refer to the number of atoms that comprise the bridge. This type of molecular geometry is found in norbornane systems such as dicyclopentadiene. Sometimes it is better to be presented with a (well-known chemical) reaction and then ask the question: How could that be?

Speaking of setting things on fire.. that animation at 21:17 surely set me on it!

Just found your channel. I asked a question under a different video and I apologize if I've missed that and asked a repeat... Why do most chemistry videos show a beaker full of liquid, and a spinning magnet stirring the liquid, and then a series of "precipitate this, precipitate that" steps, and finally some interesting powder... I'm expecting the kind of reactions that happen in ATP-synthase. You know: the motor that sits in the skin of mitochondria adding one phosphate at a time, as the motor goes round... (I'm trying to describe part of the Calvin cycle, in case that's not clear. ;-) Why can we apparently only DRAW pictures of biochemistry, while being unable to actually DO biochemistry...? I did notice that a recent Nobel went for Attosecond lasers, so now we can almost see what happens. Are we still so far away from mimicking mitochondria? I would have thought that every engineer in there place would be building little 3-part machines to build molecules. 👀🤷‍♂️

Yessssss my day has been saved 🎉😂

Regarding surface to volume ratio, is it safer to dispose sodium metal in water in big chunks (lower ratio) than in small bits to prevent kaboom?

You know when you said this was made in Japan I was like huuuh as your Scottish accent had me guessing like you were someone in England or maybe Stirling, don't know why, but did you know the open university have no DaisyChains Audio or any audio version of there bio-chemistry related subjects and they don't know why, they have literally just been apologising too me for 5 years since I am dyslexic, and I failed 2nd year twice because I have just been giving walls of text too read as a dyslexic man and like I can't learn like that, though this is a perfect way, which is why I have a stupid playlist I have been building over the past 5 years of everything practical and like visual (or just the only English information on RU-vid, the amount of videos in English which go into Hindi drive me insane, I think I find a video and nope, but coming across your channel sure was a treat.) Being very useful, I wanna pass my final year, you know, would be nice.

Thanks!

The transcript (cc) is a great help for all non-native speakers. However, there are so many pitfalls so that I would recommend that you get a student to go over the cc. At 18:34: ... reactions for instance ion reacts with oxygen quite easily ... ion should be iron, of course. For me, a non-native speaker, the thought process is already burdened, so the "ion ==> iron" is not caught in the first view (but of course in the second or third) still it leaves kind of fog when there also are so many other strange words.

It's been a month and I'm still waiting on the indepths of the kinetics and thermodynamics of a reaction😭 Studying organic chemistry right now so that would be so amazing

2:00-2:30 that's it? Sure would've been nice to know that a fucking decade ago. As far as school is concerned chemistry is magic liquids that change color and human-written equations on paper. 11:51 but... but... mathematics is beautiful. It must be one and the same with reality!! 17:00-22:00 this is the second coolest part of the video. I didn't know fine air-suspended metal could just burn same as dust and starch. 22:39 oh. Fine metal powder frictioning with itself causes pockets of heat, which blows up and suspends surrounding powder, and that air powder itself blows up and escalates everything. Cool. 23:31 this was made in Japan? you have a new subscriber now

My first instinct would be that, by saying “molecules are floating around and the right bits need to hit for a reaction to happen”, we are excluding the combined effect of this extremely intricate, quasi discontinuous 3D texture of forces acting between EACH of these huge number molecules. The complicated movement the magnetic forces start to cause in small distances are also disregarded in all the 3D modelling we see in this video, e.g., at (1:38). I was really missing that, even if it’s something one might have hard time to model correctly. It wasn’t even attempted even if we know that the devil is in the details:) I’m sure that “the appropriate angle” is a wide range of angles in which the probability of reaction forms a curve. Is it meaningful and even possible to formulate an experiment to actually draw that curve with considerable precision? Worst of all, this curve is actually a surface, because an additional dimension, the energy (and frequency) of the collisions comes into the picture, not to even mentioning the potential other factors affecting the chance (and even the potential structure) of reactions that are happening. I’m also wondering what is supposed to make the distribution of the covalence electrons residing at the outside of molecules creating those crucial “patches of charge” that creates the slight attraction, which is pictured as a random fluctuation in local outer charge can possibly create a combined effect of general attraction as we hear at (3:25), and whether that fluctuation can or cannot be described as a wave, with frequency and even possibly amplitude. This is the first time I actually realise that the behaviour of nuclei are perfectly linear (they are evenly repelling the other nuclei while a reaction happens) while the electrons have that constant “fluctuation” of charge in themselves, which is crucial for the interaction with another entity to happen forming molecules and, later, complex molecules. Electrons, unlike protons and neutrons, are supposed to be fundamental particles. The question might automatically come: how can something so fundamental have such a complex behaviour like developing patches of different charge?

Chemistry and biology/nature are BASICALLY MAGIC AND CHEAT CODES TO THE UNIVERSE.

Great and thanks. 😇

Great video

I'm going to say yes, while expecting you to tell me that I'm somehow dumb for listening to my chemistry teacher.

Sir can you please brief the properties of elements in periodic table and periodic trends

Would it be possible to control the speed of a reaction by shaking it up with ultrasonic sound, instead of heating/cooling it?

Thank you. I got into vaporizing weed a while ago and i was wondering how to explain my end products’s color variability

In the recent experiment about gravity effect on antihydrogen atoms in gas phase apparently they don't form H2 readily as I would have believed. I don't know if it is because collisions are very rare but I would have expected 100% reaction success in case of collision. Apparently that's not the case. Would love to understand better.

I was hoping you would get into how all that relates to Gibb's free energy and solvation shells, and connect the dots a little more with homp,lumo and orbitals...

Can molecules have capacitance and inductance similar to AC analysis of electrical circuits

you are excellent

11:54 Reminds me of radioactive half lives.

Sawdust and sawmill explosions happen alarmingly often too.

Phenomenal

Would rhis relate to why phase partitions are based on equilibriums?

I completely understand now why in cartoons chemistry is always depicted as wild and unstable. It's that they don't know what they are making

As someone who has worked in a research chemistry lab, "because they're molecules and they're stupid" is very true. They also don't follow instructions and are vindictive.

this viddo is sooo fucking good

What does 326 means.

friday night mechanics. the more people come to the club with the right level of energy, the higher the chances some will bond. there are intermittants of course, only stable for a night.

4:15 is this the ideal gas law? Is 'in-elastic deformation' ONLY at low temperatures? I think I'm asking if hot gas is still as in-elastic as colder gas?

Very interesting dope video, but am I tripping or does plug look like Werner Ziegler

Off-ten is the archaic pronunciation of "often." Listen is not pronounced "liss-ten," nor glisten pronounced "gliss-ten, for example. Who decided to bring back the archaic pronunciation of "often." It would be interesting to find out who decided to start teaching that in recent history.

You should write a book about general chemistry. I will be the first to purchase.

I have not exploded any bicycles but I have used glacial acetic acid as a solvent.

if you are have trouble with solid chemistry. just put it in a ball mill it will work but be careful it might work too well and go ka boom.

May I know the reason behind your channel name as to how analytical u are there must be a significant value to 326 🤔

Is the name "Three Twenty six" a reference to the avogadro-constant (~6x10^23)?

Orientation of what?

I beg to differ, if it was like las vegas all the molecules would lose 😂

6:02 So molecules are “obviously stupid”, particles are even more obviously stupid with definitely no hidden variables (let alone tendencies), as we were univocally assured by the Copenhagen interpretation, the rules of nature are even more reliably stupid, depending only on a few predictable factors, therefore everything we can ever experience in our discoverable universe is inherently, “obviously” and utterly stupid, right?

Strictly speaking, fine powders are more like to deflagrate than to explode. This is because the technical definition of an explosion requires the reaction to create a shock wave. No shock wave, no explosion. But a fireball in a flour mill is still a big heap of no fun.

You give the anwsers to questions that are said to be stupid and irrelevant by teachers in school 🎉

Custard powder factories were famous for exploding!

is "kinetic" ment the same as "kinematics" and "dynamics", meaning movement?

My bicycles have tendency to rather evaporate than explode.

Fuck it; science is beautiful❤🎈

All of my bicycles have exploded at some point.

8:10 the molecules know what to make: tar

I haven't exploded a bicycle, but I have used hand warmers and that's pretty close, I guess.