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

Oh, my.

And the world. Hello, my name is James Fodor, and you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, in which I discuss a wide variety of topics in the natural and social sciences in an attempt to better understand the world in which we live.

This is episode number nine, and the topic for today is matter and molecules.

So in this episode, we're going to look at, well, matter and the properties of matter.

We're going to have a bit of look at the states of matter, physical and chemical change.

We'll examine the nature of atoms versus elements versus molecules and how those are all different.

And conclude with a look at some more interesting topics of molecules, for example, chemical formula and macro molecules and the different

other different types of molecules that exist. Okay, so we'll start off with just looking at matter itself.

What is matter? Well, you might know from the famous equation E equals MC squared,

where E stands for energy and M stands for matter, that

energy and matter are related. So in a sense matter is a form of congealed energy in that

you can convert a lot of energy into a small amount of matter or a small amount of matter

into a large amount of energy. That's how nuclear power works by converting a very small amount of matter from uranium into a large amount of energy. That's how nuclear power works by converting a very small amount of matter

from uranium into a large amount of energy. So fundamentally we don't really know what matter is,

but one good definition that I came across is that matter is anything that occupies space and has mass.

So that obviously includes virtually everything we know of. Trees, houses, planets, stars, dust, people, etc.

It doesn't include things like light or fields, and, well, that's about it really. There aren't too many things that don't have any mass.

Photons don't have mass, and there may be There aren't too many things that don't have any mass. Photons don't have mass.

And there may be some other subatomic particles that don't have any.

But, so apart from a few things like that, pretty much everything that we know of is matter.

And all the matter that we interact with in a daily setting is composed of atoms. Now there is matter that is not composed of atoms, mostly very small subatomic particles like neutrinos that we don't really observe,

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