FREE ESSAY ON NUCLEAR REACTIONS

NUCLEAR REACTIONS

CHEMICAL REACTIONS
Chemical reactions are the heart of chemistry. People have always known that they exist.
The Ancient Greeks were the first to speculate on the composition of matter. They thought
that it was possible that individual particles made up matter. 
Later, in the Seventeenth Century, a German chemist named George Ernst Stahl was the
first to postulate on chemical reaction. He said that a substance called phlogiston
escaped into the air from all substances during
combustion. He explained that a burning candle would go out if a candle snuffer was put
over it because the air inside the snuffer became saturated with phlogiston. Stahl also
said that phlogiston will take away from a substance's mass or that it had a negative
mass, which contradicted his original theories. 
In the Eighteenth Century Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, in
France, discovered an important detail in the understanding of the chemical reaction
combustion, oxigine (oxygen). He said that combustion was a chemical reaction involving
oxygen and another combustible substance, such as wood.
John Dalton, in the early Nineteenth Century, discovered the atom. It led to the idea
that a chemical reaction was actually the rearrangement of groups of atoms called
molecules. Dalton also said that the appearance and disappearance of properties meant
that the atomic composition dictated the appearance of different properties. He also came
up with idea that a molecule of one substance is exactly the same as any other molecule
of the same substance. 
People like Joseph-Lois Gay-Lussac added to Dalton's ideas with the postulate that the
volumes of gasses that react with each other are related. Amedeo Avogadro also added to
the understanding of chemical reactions. He said that all gasses at the same pressure,
volume and temperature contain the same number of particles. This idea took a long time
to be accepted. His ideas lead to the subscripts used in the formulas for gasses.
From the work of these and many other chemists, we now have a mostly complete knowledge
of chemical reactions. There are now many classification systems to classify the
different types of reactions. These include decomposition, polymerization, chain
reactions, substitute reactions, elimination reactions, addition reactions, ionic
reactions, and oxidation-reduction reactions.
Bibliography
Chemical Reactions, Webster Encyclopedia. 1993.
Eastman, Richard H., General Chemistry: Experimental and Theory,
Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston Inc., 1970
Pauling, Linus and Peter, Chemistry, W. H. Freeman and Co., 
Bibliography
Bibliography
Chemical Reactions, Webster Encyclopedia. 1993.
Eastman, Richard H., General Chemistry: Experimental and Theory,
Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston Inc., 1970
Pauling, Linus and Peter, Chemistry, W. H. Freeman and Co.,