Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my.

And so. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 51, acids and bases.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

In this episode, we're going to talk about acids and bases and how they react with each other.

We'll look at neutralization reactions, the difference between strong and weak acids and bases,

and how that relates to issues of the strength of acids, the concentration,

and particularly the effect of corrosion, and how those are different because those concepts

are often confused. I'll also talk about water and its special properties of self-ionization.

I'll talk about acid-base equilibrium, the pH scale, and we'll also look at buffer solutions, which are quite

interesting. So, let's get started. First of all, the natural place to start is by defining

what we mean by acids and bases. Now, there are actually at least three different definitions

of acids and bases, but, and they sort of have a temporal sequence associated with them, the one we're going to use is called the Bronstead-Lowry definition, which is not the most recent one or sort of the most sophisticated, but it's, I think, the easiest to understand conceptually, and it will be sufficient for our level of analysis in this podcast.

So, according to the Bronstead-Lowry definition of acids and bases,

an acid is any chemical substance that donates, that donates a proton in a reaction,

while bases are substances that accept a proton in reactions. So they're just the inverse of each

other in that sense. A proton, remember, that's just a charged, a positively charged ion,

you know, a single proton. People also sometimes talk about it as a hydrogen ion, but that's

obviously just the same thing as a proton, so I'll generally talk about protons. But if you see it

written down, it's generally written as H-plus, which means just a hydrogen ion, or in other words,

a proton. So you might think this is sort of an

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