Chemistry Is Weird

Despite the fact that most of us were exposed to the subject in high school, I’d wager that 99.99% of us don’t give a passing moments thought to the reality in our world, the reality which makes you, you – chemistry. Yet, even if you did chemistry in high school, you probably never gave a passing moments thought to how weird chemistry really is. Weirdness aside, chemistry works. We all rely on that, except when it comes to the chemistry that rules the roost of that brain thingy of yours.

Chemistry is really weird if you stop and think about it. The basics from the ground up, those fundamental constituents, protons, neutrons and electrons, have the properties of charge, mass and spin and presumably exist in a solid state at STP (standard temperature and pressure) or otherwise. In other words, they have none of the properties, apart from mass, associated with any of the properties associated with the chemical elements (like being other than a solid, liquid or gas at STP (standard temperature and pressure); having colour;

Given those elementary particles, if you start to pile them up, well charge plus charge equals a greater or lesser overall charge; mass plus mass equals more mass; spin plus spin – well I’m not sure spin is a property that can be added or subtracted.

If it could be so arranged, but we’ll make it so since this is a thought experiment, a baseball-sized collection of electrons or neutrons or protons at STP would obviously have mass, and a lot of electric charge in the case of protons and electrons. But what would the colour be? What would it taste like? What would it smell like? What would it feel like? These are unanswered and probably unanswerable questions.

But assemble these fundamentals in various combinations and all of a sudden you do get all of the elements with their associated colours and tastes and so on. That’s a bit weird for starters.

How many atoms of gold (for example but any other element would do) have to come together or be assembled before you have the properties of gold? It surely has to be more than one atom worth surely. 

But even weirder is when you start to combine the various elements with associated properties into molecules that have properties totally unlike the parent elements. You have hydrogen and oxygen as dry gases at STP that make water which is wet and liquid at STP. Silicon is a solid at STP and Carbon is a solid at STP, and Oxygen is a gas at STP, but Carbon Dioxide is a gas at STP whereas Silicon Dioxide (sand) is a solid at STP, yet Carbon and Silicon are like mother and daughter in terms of similarity. Then you have Chlorine, a poisonous yellow gas at STP, and Sodium, which is a solid shiny metal at STP, and volatile enough such that if you swallow any you will really do yourself a very serious mischief. However, Sodium Chloride is just pure table salt and a compound your body requires to survive and thrive!

Carbon isn’t a poison, Oxygen you can breathe, but you’d die in a pure Carbon Dioxide environment, or even in a pure Carbon Monoxide environment.

All of chemistry is deterministic and predictable, both inorganic and organic, with the apparent exception of brain chemistry, which I’ll get to shortly. 

You’d think chemistry would be straightforward, but chemistry can act in rather weird, even unpredictable ways. I mean, if you have an atom of Sodium and an atom of Chlorine, you get a straight-forward molecule of table salt (salty). If you have two atoms of Hydrogen and one atom of Oxygen you get, in a straightforward fashion, a molecule of water at STP (wet). Combine Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen in a certain way and you get sugar (sweet). Another arrangement can give you chlorophyll (green).

Now how is this weird? Well, the basic constituents, protons, electrons and neutrons aren’t salty, wet, sweet or green. Sodium and Chlorine atoms aren’t salty; table salt is salty. Oxygen and Hydrogen atoms aren’t wet at STP; water is wet at STP. Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen atoms aren’t sweet; sugar is sweet. The constituent atoms comprising the chlorophyll molecule (Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen and Magnesium) aren’t green; chlorophyll is green. 

So how do the properties of saltiness, wetness, sweetness, greenness, arise from those constituents that don’t have those properties? It’s not quite as strange as getting something from nothing or something happening for no reason at all, but nevertheless IMHO something’s screwy somewhere. And enigmas like these all lead back to that most fundamental of all issues – what is reality?

Or take another case – Carbon. You’d think Carbon is Carbon is Carbon, but no. Carbon can be charcoal or coal; Carbon can be graphite; Carbon can be a diamond. The various properties of these substances, all just Carbon, drastically differ. Chemistry is indeed weird.

Let’s re-ask the question: How do properties (like charge, spin, mass or presumably being either a solid liquid or gas depending on how you vary temperature and pressure) that all matter (like the fundamental particles, the building blocks of atoms/elements, in turn the building blocks of molecules/compounds) has, morph into properties that only some kinds of matter have, like sweetness, transparentness, hardness, colour, malleability, etc. or properties drastically different from their constituents – like two gases making a liquid.

I’ll just note here that while the fundamental particles, the atoms/elements and molecules/compounds have specific properties, composites like humans do not. The human body for example is collectively a solid, a liquid and a gas. Actually I don’t even tend to think of the human body as an organism but rather a colony composed of billions of micro-organisms, both the cells that make you up as well as all those other microbes that your body plays host to. But that’s an aside.

Speaking of the human body, the body (including the brain and therefore the mind) is one huge chemical processing factory. What goes in is not the same as what comes out!

When it comes to the most of your bodily bits and pieces, your body chemistry is pretty damn deterministic. You breathe in Oxygen and out will come Carbon Dioxide. If you eat X today, your digestive juices process it in the same way as when you ate X the week before. You expect your liver chemistry to detoxify those beers you had with the boys last night. If you take medication, whether it is prescription or self prescribed, you count on the fact that X + Y = Z yesterday, today and tomorrow. If your doctor prescribes various blood and/or urine tests, there’s an extremely high degree of expectation that the results of those tests will exhibit enough absolute certainty for the doctor to then follow-up on, and you will have confidence in that follow-up.

The brain is just a soup vat of chemicals, organic chemicals and bio-chemicals, but chemicals all the same. Therefore anything and everything rooted within the confines of the brain is rooted in chemistry. 

But it is absolutely amazing what chemistry can accomplish when it is part and parcel of your brain chemistry. Things don’t seem quite as deterministic then. Your brain chemistry holds sway over your sensory inputs, memory, desires, emotions, creativity, etc. and we know that those sorts of attributes in humans can be pretty unpredictable.

Still, perhaps one afternoon you smell (sensory input) your next door neighbour’s southern fried chicken cooking which then triggers off a whole potful of internal responses, all triggered in turn by your brain chemistry. The chain reaction might start off by all of a sudden feeling hungry (desire) then remembering (memory) that frozen chicken you have in the freezer and how it has been quite a while since you had a good finger-lickin’ chicken dinner but you’ll need to pop into the corner store to pick up some of those 57 herbs and spices. But then you get an inspiration (creative thought) to stuff the chicken as you would a turkey and forgo the Colonel’s secret recipe, even though you get all teary-eyed (emotions) when you recall how your significant other proposed to you at your local KFC outlet following the senior prom: all that from what’s basically just chemicals doing their chemical thing.  

If you recall something (as per the above example), presumably matter and energy are interacting since there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You don’t get something, in this case memory recall, for nothing – at no cost to you. But how can chemistry result in memory? Chemicals are products. Chemical reactions (those matter-energy interactions) produce new chemical products. Does that make memory a product (and ditto all those other nebulous mental ‘products’ like emotion, desire, morality, and creativity)? Computer memory recall isn’t chemistry of course – there aren’t any chemical reactions going on in your PC – but rather physics (energy expenditure moving electrons around, etc.) Anyway, laptops (to date anyway) don’t have those other nebulous human (and animal) traits like emotion, desire, morality, and creativity that are presumably chemistry driven. But there is more to the anomalies of brain chemistry that just equating a memory or creativity with a chemical, if in fact the two can be equated at all.

Actually I can’t accept the proposition that a molecule (however complex) can equal a memory or be a new creative idea. There must be trillions and trillions of unique memories and creative thoughts (that probably become memories) stored within the brains of the collective of human and animal societies, yet that number would vastly outnumber the possible combos of types of molecules available. It would appear that there has to be more to memory and creativity than just chemistry – it would appear so, but is it so? 

How is it that you can ‘train’ your brain chemistry to wake you up at a certain time – no alarm clock – and it doesn’t matter what time you went to sleep and how many hours of sleep you actually had? How is it that your brain chemistry likes one piece of music but not another piece, or how you can turnoff liking a particular piece of music that used to be your favourite, or type of food, or type of animal – the list is endless. How can your brain chemistry remember X one day, but not the next day? Presumably that creative thought you had today could have been thought of yesterday but wasn’t – same brain, same chemistry (apparently), different results. How does your chemistry-driven feelings for your better half change over time? How come your brain chemistry can result in sexual arousal from viewing one image but not from another image? And it’s not just human brain chemistry either. Given seemingly identical circumstances, my cats will not of necessity perform identical actions. I’m sure there is a logical chemically driven deterministic explanation, except that it’s all so complex and interwoven that it gives more the appearance of indeterminacy and free will. If 99.99% of chemistry is deterministic, I’m sure brain chemistry will prove to be also.