Musings of an Old Chemist

A Chemist's Perspective on the Habits and Skills STEM Students Need For Success

Tag: chemical reaction analogy

  • The Personal Growth/Chemical Reaction Analogy

    The Personal Growth/Chemical Reaction Analogy

    Key Concepts 

    Key Concept Number One: The Law of Conservation of Energy

    The law of conservation of energy applies directly to our campfire analogy by stating that all the chemical potential energy stored in the wood must be accounted for after it burns—it doesn’t just disappear, it’s simply transformed into different forms. The total energy of the heat, light, and the chemical bonds of all the byproducts is equal to the original chemical potential energy stored in the wood. No energy is lost; it has just been converted.

    In our discussion of the process of personal growth, the conservation of energy also applies. The personal energy we invest in the process — our time, focus, and emotion — is finite and must be transformed into something: either a product (your desired outcome of success) or byproducts (either intended (positive) or unintended (negative) emotional or psychological consequences of the process).

    Key Concept Number Two: The Definition and Role of an Indicator

    An Indicator in our chemical reaction/personal growth analogy is a measurable, observable, and immediate sign that the reaction mechanism is proceeding effectively and that the energy input (activation energy) is being successfully converted into the desired products. Essentially, it tells you if and how well the process is working.

    The indicator in our campfire analogy is a sustained flame producing heat and light. This is the visual and thermal evidence that the wood’s stored chemical energy is successfully converting into usable thermal and radiant energy (Heat and Light). It immediately informs us that the Activation Energy (the match/lighter) was successful and the Reaction Mechanism (the burning of the reactants) is self-sustaining.

    In the process of personal growth, self-awareness acts as an indicator. It is the ability to recognize and reflect on the state of our emotions, how effective we are in our learning process (informing us if our study habits/self-discipline are effective), and understand our behaviors. Without self-awareness, personal growth becomes a random and inefficient endeavor. It’s like “throwing ideas up against the wall to see what sticks,” a process that lacks crucial elements. This leads to a frustrating trial-and-error approach, wasting valuable time and energy.

    Therefore, self-awareness is the foundational component of our personal growth, enabling us to identify and appreciate new skills, confidence, and competence as they emerge. Simultaneously, self-awareness is crucial for detecting and managing negative byproducts like stress, frustration, or burnout, preventing them from halting the entire growth process.

    Breaking Down the Components of Our Campfire vs Personal Growth Analogy

    Let’s define start by defining our chemical reaction process as the following:

    Reactants + Catalyst + Activation Energy – Initiates – Reaction Mechanism – Yields – Products + Byproducts

    Supplies 

    What items in the campfire example or which skills in the case of personal growth, do we need to accumulate before starting each process?

    For the campfire analogy, we need: paper and kindling (small twigs and branches) to get the fire started, larger pieces of wood (logs) to serve as the fuel, and matches or a lighter to introduce heat to ignite the flame.

    Personal growth demands a combination of essential resources and skills. Essential supplies include strong communication, critical thinking, and time management skills. Additionally, we need an inherent sense of personal accountability and access to various resources such as time, money, and mentors. Information resources, whether online, textbooks, or coursework, are also crucial. Finally, a secure and supportive environment is vital for this process.

    Personal Commentary – The Importance of a Safe, Secure, and Supportive Environment

    During my tine teaching middle school science, I was mentored by a teacher who advocated for a pass/fail grading policy for students during their middle school years, grades 6-8. He believed that the significant emotional and developmental changes experienced by students aged 12-15 made it more important to focus on building essential communication, study, time management and critical thinking skills rather than pressuring them with specific grade requirements. He also pointed out the growing number of students facing poverty, living in single-parent homes, living in fear of abuse, and dealing with various crises, leading to a lack of sufficient rest, parental support, and proper nutrition. Citing Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory, he argued that these stressors needed to be addressed before students could be expected to achieve academic excellence in the classroom.

    Reactants (Campfire vs the Process of Personal Growth Analogy)

    For our campfire analogy, the reactants are straightforward; they consist of wood (fuel), which is the source of stored potential energy, and oxygen.

    Personal growth is fueled by key personality traits. These “reactants” include creativity, an open-mindedness to new ideas, a passion for learning and problem-solving, and the crucial ability to persevere through obstacles.

    Indicators

    In the campfire analogy, the sustained flame’s heat and light serve as the indicator, visually confirming the reaction is occurring and progressing.

    Self-awareness serves as a crucial metric for our dedication to personal growth. This dedication is shaped by our curiosity, persistence, and the joy we experience from the process, As lifelong learners, our progress in these areas can be measured through our academic or career achievements.

    Activation Energy

    In the campfire analogy, the initial heat needed to ignite the paper or kindling acts as the activation energy for the combustion reaction. This reaction involves the burning of fuel (wood) in the presence of oxygen, which produces heat and light. A flame from a lighter or matches provides this initial activation energy, initiating the reaction. Once started, the heat generated by the burning wood sustains the reaction, causing subsequent additions of fuel to ignite.

    Personal growth begins with activation energy—our initial investment of effort, time, and focus. This crucial first step helps us overcome our reluctance to start new projects, defeat self-doubt, and combat our natural inertia, our resistance towards change. It requires aligning our personal goals with both our internal motivations, our drive to engage in an activity purely for the inherent pleasure, satisfaction, or challenge it provides, and external motivations, our drive to perform an activity in order to achieve rewards, praise, money, grades, status, or to avoid negative consequences (like failing a class, being grounded, or later in life, getting fired from our job).

    Catalysts

    (Important: by definition,a catalyst is never used up or depleted in the reaction process.)

    If you have ever had to build a campfire you may recognize this catalyst in the campfire analogy, it is the absolute dependence on the flow of air around and through the campfire itself. This airflow is the mechanism that speed up the process of burning, providing access to the oxygen crucial to the combustion process.  

    Personal growth is driven by catalysts, which include the foundational steps of the personal growth “building” we discussed in a previous blog post, our dreams, aspirations, and goals. These are combined with both intrinsic expectations (how we expect ourselves to progress) and extrinsic expectations (the expectations of family and others) to propel us forward in our personal growth journey.

    Reaction Mechanism

    In chemistry, a reaction mechanism is the step-by-step sequence of elementary reactions that leads from reactants to products. It’s the detailed path the reaction takes. When we apply this to personal growth, the reaction mechanism is not a single, fixed procedure but a continuous, self-correcting process.

    In our campfire analogy, the reaction process is a combustion reaction, the process of combining fuel and oxygen with the activation energy provided by the match or a lighter, to initiate a chemical reaction that produces heat and light as products.

    Personal growth is a journey towards a goal or personal transformation, much like a chemical reaction. It involves a methodical process of learning, similar to the scientific method, where knowledge is gained and applied through observation. This leads to the development of strategies, which are then implemented through habits, discipline, and focus to transform effort into skill. Ultimately, this process enables us to identify and conquer obstacles.

    Products

    We define a product as the desired output of a process, or the desired outcome of success.

    In the campfire analogy, the products are heat (thermal energy) and light.

    The desired outcome of personal growth is multifaceted, encompassing skills and competencies, such as mastering a trade, or individual definitions of success, like a specific title or salary. Ultimately, however, I would argue, we should strive in the long-term to gain in wisdom.

    Byproducts

    A campfire’s combustion reaction produces unintended and undesirable byproducts: ashes, which are mineral waste, and smoke, a form of air pollution consisting of uncombusted particles.

    Our personal growth journey, unlike a chemical reaction, yields byproducts that can be either positive or negative, depending on the nature of the growth itself. When we engage in what we call “exothermic growth,” our investment of personal energy results in a positive return or outcome. This beneficial growth produces desirable byproducts such as compassion, critical thinking skills, humility, and resiliency.

    Conversely, “endothermic growth” occurs when we invest more personal energy than we receive in return. This imbalance can lead to negative, unintended emotional or psychological consequences, including anxiety, burnout, fear, frustration, and stress.

    Therefore, self-awareness is crucial. It enables us to identify and prioritize rewarding, exothermic activities while simultaneously recognizing and minimizing endothermic activities that drain our personal energy and are misaligned with our personal goals and ambitions.

    Conclusion

    In conclusion, just like a well-tended campfire provides warmth and light, a mindful approach to personal growth can yield profound and lasting benefits. By understanding the “chemistry” of our own development—recognizing the needed components, our supplies, reactants, and the crucial role of activation energy and catalysts—we can more effectively guide our journey. Cultivating self-awareness allows us to prioritize “exothermic growth” and minimize the less desirable “endothermic” byproducts, ensuring our personal evolution is not only productive but also sustainable and deeply rewarding.

  • Step-by-Step Procedure for Personal Growth

    Step-by-Step Procedure for Personal Growth

    The key to a successful analysis or experiment is a detailed procedure to follow. First, it provides a list of all the key starting materials you need to gather, along with the quantities of each. Then step-by-step instructions on how to combine these materials. Then details regarding under what conditions the reaction mechanism drives the reaction process to its completion, resulting in the product or products you desire. A quality procedure also lists the byproducts that a reaction process may produce. And finally, a section on sources of error, a detailed description of possible errors that can be made, and the effect of these mistakes on the reaction process, and which products or byproducts are produced.

    I can attest to the fact that writing a quality procedure is a challenging task. I’ve drafted my share of procedures in my career, and I’ve found that it requires extensive hands-on experience performing the chemical reaction process and an in-depth understanding of how each step of the procedure contributes to the overall desired result. More importantly, I found that the sources of error section is the most difficult section to write. Luckily, I was blessed to have college professors whose primary focus was on the documentation of every possible source of error in every experiment we performed and on every lab report we prepared in our advanced chemistry and physics courses.

    Commentary

    So, how does this concept of a detailed procedure apply in our chemical reaction analogy of personal growth? I can honestly say there were points in my life that I had no idea what I was supposed to do, what decision to make, what path to follow.  I wished I had had a detailed procedure to follow, a document that told me what decisions I should make, and when, to obtain the goals, and the success I was seeking. A set of step-by-step instructions defining what skills and traits I needed to possess, and the decisions I needed to make. And more importantly, I could’ve used a sources of error section that identified what mistakes I might make, describing how to, if not avoid them, deal with them constructively and not get sidetracked on my journey. 

    But, as I have learned and become painfully aware of at times, there is no one universal set of instructions we can follow for personal success. While there are plenty of books written on the subject, not one is universally applicable to each of us, with our individual personality traits, gifts, dreams, and aspirations.

    Creating Your Procedure for Personal Growth

    You cannot find a procedure tailored personally for you in a blog, book, or video; you produce it. It’s not a set of instructions someone else has written for your life. Instead, you create it with a combination of self-assessment and a growth mindset, the understanding that there is always more you can learn.

    Step One: Self-assessment

    To begin, you need to develop an awareness of the starting materials component for your personal growth procedure through honest self-assessment –  identifying your strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and natural tendencies (how you react in different situations). This is the initial observation stage, much like in the Scientific Method. 

    Continue to ask yourself: “What have I done in the past that’s worked for me?”, “What approach or actions to address challenges or concerns feels natural to me?”, and “What habits, good and bad, do I tend to fall into?” This self-assessment ensures your approach is personalized and realistic.  Following a generic procedure that works for someone else might produce a result in you that leaves you feeling emotionally, mentally, or physically drained.

    Remember that this journey is yours, and yours alone.

    Step Two: Utilizing a Growth Mindset

    Once you’ve identified your core starting materials, turn your attention outward. See how others have achieved similar goals. Dive into books and articles about what you’re interested in. Find mentors who have already done what you want to do, ask for their input, seek their instruction. And, try to learn from their successes and failures. Figure out what works for them and then make it your own.

    Perfecting Your Procedure: The Scientific Method

    You don’t know what to do at the beginning; you discover it. Your procedure for personal growth is not something you are handed at the beginning of your journey. Instead, your initial procedure is a hypothesis – a best guess based on your self-awareness and research. Through the process of experimentation, analysis, and revision, you refine that hypothesis. The final, tested and proven procedure is the culmination of your observation and learning. It represents the wisdom and practical knowledge you’ve gained from the entire process.

    Your  “procedure”  is not a fixed set of instructions; it is dynamic and constantly changing. As you learn more about yourself and the world around you, your procedure must adapt to who you are and your unique situation at each stage of your personal growth. What works for you today may not be what you need a year from now. Your procedure adapts as you gain new insights, as your world changes, and as your goals evolve.

    This is the power of applying the scientific method to your life: you are constantly running small experiments, collecting data on your results, and refining your methods for the next reiteration. It’s a continuous, cyclical process of learning and adaptation. Your journey of personal growth is ever-evolving; each day brings with it new challenges. Personal growth dictates that who we are today is different than who we were yesterday, and hopefully, tomorrow we will be better than we are today.

  • The Chemistry of Personal Growth: A Campfire Analogy

    The Chemistry of Personal Growth: A Campfire Analogy

    From my perspective, as a chemist, the process of personal growth is not all that different from the processes of a chemical reaction. And to understand personal growth through the analogy of a chemical reaction, it’s helpful to first examine the basic steps and components of a chemical reaction. I hope to simplify the steps in chemical reactions by focusing on energy: the energy required to initiate and sustain the reaction, and the energy released as products. This focus on energy is crucial because when we explore personal growth, we’ll similarly concentrate on the energy we invest in our own development.

    In its simplest form, a chemical reaction may be written as follows:

    Reactants  → (Reaction mechanism or process) →  Products

    For this discussion, I will use the example of a combustion reaction. Most of us should be familiar with building a campfire. Whether it is in our backyard firepit, or we are enjoying s’mores over a campfire. We can break down the individual components of this reaction as follows:

    The Reactants: These are the starting materials. When we build a campfire, our reactants are newspaper, twigs, branches, or logs, and the presence of oxygen. You may not consider oxygen when you think of your starting materials, but it is the necessary component in almost all types of combustion reactions.

    The Reaction Mechanism: It is the burning of the individual components – newspaper, twigs, larger branches, and logs, and the ignition pattern usually occurs in that order.

    The Products: Our campfire produces ashes, heat, light, carbon dioxide (CO2), and water vapor (H2O).

    Factors that affect the rate of the reaction, i.e., how fast our fire burns.

    The concentration of the reactants. Higher concentrations generally lead to faster reactions – for a campfire, the more newspaper and twigs you have, the faster the fire starts producing heat and light. However it is important to take note of the fact the rate of reaction for the newspaper and the twigs is much faster than that of the branches and logs. While the burning of the newspaper, for example, does produce some heat and light, it does not last very long. Its purpose is to be an intermediate step in the reaction process, solely to light the twigs and perhaps small branches. It would be very difficult to make s’mores on a fire whose only fuel was wads of newspaper.

    The activation energy associated with the reaction. This is the initial energy required to initiate a reaction. Think of it like the energy needed to start a snowball rolling downhill. In our example, the fuel, newspaper and wood, even in the presence of oxygen, won’t spontaneously combust. It needs an initial input of energy to start the reaction. This is the activation energy. You provide this energy by lighting a match or using a lighter. The heat from the match is what breaks the initial chemical bonds in a small amount of paper or wood, allowing the combustion process to begin.

    Sorry, spontaneous combustion only exists in comic books, the X-Files, and Harry Potter novels. 

    The presence of a catalyst. A catalyst lowers the activation energy, which speeds up the reaction. By definition, and this is an important qualification, catalysts are not consumed in a reaction. 

    My Dad would soak the firewood with lighter fluid or, heaven forbid, gasoline before tossing in the match. You would assume, as I did initially, that my Dad’s addition of lighter fluid to the pile of wood would act as a catalyst because it lowers the activation energy, making it easier for the combustion reaction to start. The wood ignites faster and releases heat and light more quickly. This is especially effective when the wood may be damp. But, since the lighter fluid is completely consumed in the burning process, it is not considered to be a catalyst. 

    In a campfire, metal ions within the embers act as catalysts. These embers, formed from burning wood, retain heat. When new wood is added, the stored heat from the embers lowers the activation energy, thereby accelerating the combustion reaction.

    Temperature: Increasing the temperature typically increases the reaction rate. The hotter the fire, the faster the fuel is consumed, requiring us to add more wood to keep the fire burning.

    Foundational Background Concepts

    Several critical concepts directly relate to chemical reactions. While these concepts aren’t part of the formal reaction process, they play an important role in the comparison between chemical reactions and personal growth.

    Chemical Change vs. Physical Change: In a reaction where there is a physical change, that reaction is reversible. Which means that the reagents can be recovered and do not undergo a permanent change in their chemical structure. As an example, dissolving salt in water. The salt undergoes a physical change. I can recover the salt granules by evaporating the water over a hotplate. As long as I don’t boil the water too vigorously, I can recovered the majority of the salt I added.

    The combustion reaction, our campfire, is an example of a chemical change. The chemical structure of our reagents, the newspaper and the wood, is permanently altered. This reaction is not reversible. I cannot take the ashes, reverse the reaction process and recreate the wood or newspaper.

    Chemical Potential Energy: All substances have stored energy due to their structure or position, which can be converted to another form of energy. In a combustion reaction, each of the reagents has “stored” chemical potential energy due to its structure, which is then “converted” during the combustion process into thermal (heat) and light energy.

    Qualitative vs. Quantitative Analysis: A qualitative analysis focuses on the presence of a product of a chemical analysis. In the example of the campfire, strictly whether the combustion process occurs, reaching an endpoint, the production of heat, or light. A quantitative analysis quantifies, measures the amount of reactants consumed and products produced. For example: “How much firewood was burned?”, “What was the temperature produced in the combustion process?” or “How bright was the light due to the flames?”.

    Use of an Indicator: Whereas one is not used in this example, an indicator is a substance that undergoes a visible change, typically a color change, to signal the current stage or the endpoint of a reaction. They must react sensitively to small changes in the surrounding environment. The color change should be clear and distinct, making it easy to identify a specific endpoint. Acid-base indicators, specifically phenolphthalein, are a good example. These change color depending on the pH of a solution, indicating whether it is acidic, basic, or neutral. 

    Exothermic versus Endothermic Reactions: An exothermic reaction is a chemical reaction that releases energy, typically in the form of heat, light, or sound. The word “exothermic” comes from the Greek roots (exo-) meaning “out,” and (-thermic) meaning “heat.” A common example is our combustion reaction, a campfire, where the energy released from the burning wood (heat and light) is much greater than the initial energy, from a match, needed to start the fire.

    An endothermic reaction is a chemical reaction that absorbs energy from its surroundings. In these reactions, the products have a higher total energy than the reactants, so energy must be continuously supplied for the reaction to proceed. The word “endothermic” comes from the Greek roots (endo-) meaning “in,” and (-thermic) meaning “heat.” A simple example is a cold pack. When you activate the pack, a reaction occurs that absorbs heat from the surrounding environment, making the pack feel cold to the touch. 

    Products versus By-products: Products are the primary and intended substances formed during a chemical reaction. They are the goal, what we expect to achieve in the reaction. In the practical, real-world context of a campfire, heat and light are the primary intended products. We don’t build a fire for the carbon dioxide and water vapor it creates; we do it for the warmth and illumination. So, in this specific case, the heat and light are the desired output, making them the main products.

    By-products are secondary, unintended, and often undesirable substances formed during a chemical reaction.  Unintended outcomes that represent the inefficiency of the chemical reaction, meaning that the reagents are not completely consumed, forming products. In the case of the campfire, the common by-products are: soot, this is unburned carbon that forms when the combustion reaction is not hot enough to convert all the carbon in the wood to carbon dioxide (CO2), Carbon Monoxide (CO), a toxic gas that forms when there is not enough oxygen for a complete reaction, and ash. While each is a predictable part of the combustion process, they are byproducts, in that they are not the intended energy-releasing outputs of the combustion.

    In an upcoming post, I will explore the parallels between the constituents and steps of chemical reactions and the process of personal growth, including the role of our foundational concepts.