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The Thomistic Institute

Is It There? Confidence and Uncertainty in Chemistry | Professor Lori Watson

The Thomistic Institute

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8729 Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2023

⏱️ 44 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given on July 15th, 2023, at the "Thomistic Philosophy & Natural Science Symposium" at the Dominican House of Studies. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events Speaker Bio: Dr. Lori Watson is a Professor of Chemistry at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. She is a synthetic and computational organometallic chemist primarily interested in unsaturated transition metal catalysts used for C-X activation. She also has a secondary interest in the coordination chemistry of Lanthanide and Actinide complexes used for Ln/Ac separation chemistry. She is also interested in teaching and learning in inorganic chemistry and is a founding member of the IONiC Leadership Council (Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists) which has launched VIPEr, an online resource to support a virtual community of practice for improving inorganic chemistry education.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

0:06.0

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

0:13.0

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

0:19.0

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at

0:22.5

to mystic institute.org.

0:26.5

Here's Wikipedia's version, where you've got, you know,

0:30.6

on nucleus, we've got the neutrons and protons.

0:33.7

I was really nervous about the title of your talk yesterday.

0:36.6

Protons exists. You have your new... And then you have this kind of electron cloud, which we sort of draw as sort of a fuzzy cloud

0:44.5

that we have some 95% confidence that your electrons are within the circle that you draw.

0:50.7

So you have all this electron density around the nucleus.

1:17.6

And so there's a lot of ways to figure out chemical structure, but one of the easiest and most use when you can persuade your compound to be a crystalline solid. You can use something called x-ray diffraction. And a crystal, if you remember, has evenly spaced atoms or molecules within a geometric shape. Okay? It could be a rectangular prism or, you know, a little wobbled one way or the other.

1:22.6

But it's a regular array of your atoms or molecules.

1:25.6

And what you can do is take x-rays and shine them towards

1:30.3

your crystal, which you have epoxy, using epoxy that you get from lows, onto a little glass

1:37.2

fiber that you put on a thing that can move around, and you shoot x-rays at it. And what happens

1:43.5

is the x-rays will diffract off of your electron cloud, right?

1:47.5

And they'll hit a detector, it used to be photographic film, no, it spans here.

1:52.4

And it'll make a spot, right?

1:54.4

And so when your x-rays come and diffract, that's your signal that there's actually something there, right? There's some electron

2:01.6

density that your x-rays are diffracting off of. And it turns out that the intensity of that

2:07.8

diffraction tells you something about how much electron density is there, so it can tell you what

...

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