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This has stimulated me to get around to posing a question I've meant to for some time.chemisttree said:Ewww! Yuck! The Chemistry Prize is again plagued by biological contaminants...
Chemistry gets classified among the 'Natural Sciences'. Yet there is nothing very natural about it. Most of the chemistry you will ever see, you will see only in the laboratory or the factory. You not merely only see it in the laboratory, it only happens there. In daily life you will see results of artificial chemistry that has happened, not the chemistry happening. In fact its being outside ordinary experience is one good reason why the chemistry laboratory should be part of every education! Chemistry is profoundly revealing of the inwardness of Nature but it is in a sense not natural.
You do not see chemistry in nature around you the way you see countless examples of the physics you learn, or biology at a certain level. Although for physics that is not quite as true as it at first seems. An important part of that is of course electricity and magnetism, whose study requires conductors, magnets, things that are fairly insignificant in the natural world and are essentially products of chemical technologies. But you can see fairly direct manifestations of most the themes of physics courses like gravitation, optics, radiation, vibrations, sound, heat, diffusion, friction, surface tension, etc. etc. in everyday Nature all around, and even more if you allow everyday technology all around us. And biology. But chemistry, you do not see.
There is combustion, forest fires and rusting and so on, but the combustion is recombination of elements that have been biologically separated, the iron that rusts is a human technological product, so we cannot count these as non-biological 'Nature'. The abscence of natural nonbiological chemistry is sharper if I limit 'chemistry' to 'thermal chemistry' which most biochemistry and most taught chemistry is - excluding, that is, photochemistry and free radical chemistry which happens naturally in our upper atmosphere involving I suppose despite the rarefaction fairly large total masses but which are fairly minor parts of mainline chemical teaching and research.
I have a feeling I might be missing something, that there is some chemical reaction that happens or has happened on a vast scale, but I feel if there were many reactions like that some would come to mind. Well now I reflect I suppose the rocks and minerals have different atoms close together, but a lot of them are noncovalent so I tend not to count that, then e.g. the O and Si , were they ever really separated, did they come together and react? If so was it just once and a long time ago with not much going on now? Somehow this ancient history is not much talked about in chemistry courses and books. So the chemists cannot blame me too much for what I say if it is wrong, it is their fault!
So am I right or have I overlooked something when I say that in Nature, at least today and a very long time past, most chemistry is biochemistry?
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