15 mindblowingly awesome chemistry gifs

Yeah, an article like '15 Mindblowingly Awesome Chemistry GIFs' is going to be rampant clickbait, but when the clickbait is this pretty, it's tough to avoid clicking through.

Like the 'melting metal with magnets'...

That's just cool...

Crash course - chemistry

The Green boys are outstanding.

There's almost nothing else to be said about them - between the novels, the magazine, and the various YouTube channels, they've offered up a lifetime of intelligent entertainment already and show no signs of stopping.

And their Crash Course series (in chemistry and fourteen other topics) are wonderful introductions (if sometimes a little quickly spoken) to the topics, and the graphic style and illustrations help to augment their explanations.

Well worth your time, but I will warn you that they present their information thoroughly and rapidly. Be prepared to watch through a couple of times if you're not already somewhat familiar with the topic about which they are elucidating.

Valentine's Candy Science - Cool Science Experiment

What a waste of perfectly good candy...especially the Not-Quite-Everlasting Gobstoppers.

Steve Spangler has a few hundred videos from his various YouTube channels, all of which are between cute and very cool.

This one is worth looking through if only for the still photo chosen for the above video and the ease with which that image can be recreated.

To Scale: The Solar System

To Scale: The Solar System from Wylie Overstreet on Vimeo.

I am trapped on terra firma, unable to rise above and see the world from a perspective that makes me anything other than an intimately connected resident of the Earth.

I can calculate the amount of emptiness in the solar system and even in the galaxy and universe, but I still can't actually conceive of that level of nothing.

This video helps...a little.

And it's just gorgeous and brilliantly planned out.

My favorite chemistry quote

Any visible lump of matter - even the merest speck - contains more atoms than there are stars in our galaxy. When we lift an apple we feel the total weight of a colossal number of almost weightless atoms. When we hear the ripple of water we are hearing shockwaves as a myriad of almost imperceptible molecules crash down and collide with other molecules. When we dress we pull across our bodies a great web spun from the infinitesimal dots and held together by the forces acting between them. When we see a flame we are seeing the release of an almost negligible droplet of energy, but in such a Niagara that the heat sears and consumes. - PW Atkins, Molecules (page link)

I love that quote. Love it more than any other quote I have ever heard about chemistry.

The simple notion that everything we are...everything we see...everything we can ever touch, see, hear, taste, or feel is made up of dots of nothing so miniscule as to almost not exist singly...that the combined might of these imperceptible bits of nothingness can crush, deafen, poison, blind, or stun you with their beauty and grandeur...is amazing to me.

And I won't ever be able to say it more eloquently than did Atkin in Molecules (Though I am partial to the original volume, the one I have on the shelves in my classroom.

Khan Academy - chemistry

I remember a few years back hearing that Khan Academy was going to revolutionize education.

Then I took a look at some of the videos and realized this wasn't so much a revolution as an evolution. Salman Khan's videos are just those of a guy recording his voice while drawing on an electronic screen. At their core, that's all they are. They're just lectures.

They are, however, well constructed lectures. Khan puts a lot of thought and preparation into his lectures, ensuring that he has his patter down...well...pat and has every graphic he might need immediately at hand.

His website (the link above, Khan Academy) has expanded to include self-check questions that accompany his lectures, so that is a bit of an improvement, admittedly, from a simple lecture that you watch.

And his videos are available whenever you want them, ready to be watched again and again, slowed down or sped up until you have the content down perfectly.

His chemistry videos (all 104 of them), by the way, are admittedly outstanding.