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Can you synthesize any chemical just by looking at its equation?
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[QUOTE="The Bill, post: 5455054, member: 589147"] I didn't say I have a degree in chemistry. I said I took first year chemistry and organic chemistry. That's as far as I went in chemistry in my own academic career. Just from that, though, I learned that just because you can write a chemical equation doesn't make that equation make sense in reality in that form. In particular, the same set of reactants can often react in several valid ways. Often, the product one wants is not the product most favored by the physics of all the possible reactions. And since many of the possible reactions do happen, one ends up with a stew of all the probable compounds made from the building blocks of the reactants, rather than a clean sample of the desired product. Often, to get a good yield, one has to do it a roundabout way through several other reactions to increase the favorability of the desired product being produced at the last step. Basically, from what I gathered when I was at university in the 90s, past some point of complexity synthetic chemistry is something of an art form. You should find and ask a synthetic chemist to see if this is the case. [/QUOTE]
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Can you synthesize any chemical just by looking at its equation?
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