Applying X-ray crystallography to sugar reveals a similar but not identical well-ordered crystal (Figure 3). In fact, salt was the first solid investigated by this method, called X-ray crystallography, which revealed a regular lattice of sodium and chlorine atoms. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that scientists were first able to look inside crystals, when German scientist Max von Laue and English father and son scientists William Bragg and Lawrence Bragg developed a method that uses X-rays to determine the microscopic structures of crystalline solids. Figure 2: Close-up views of salt (left) and sugar (right) crystals. As scientists began identifying and characterizing elements in the 17th and 18th centuries, they would have been able to determine that salt is made of sodium and chlorine, while sugar consists of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, but they would probably still have wondered how such combinations of completely different elements lead to such similar-looking crystals. Without today’s tools to identify the components in the crystals and their structures, the two would have looked as similar to them as they do to our naked eye today (see Figures 1 and 2). Figure 1: A pile of salt (left) and sugar (right).įrom ancient Greece until the birth of modern chemistry in the 17th century, people may have been confused about what made salt and sugar so different. In this module we will explore different types of solids and discuss how their structures relate to their behavior. Differences arise from the different properties of the two crystals, including the atoms that compose them and the actual structure of the crystal itself.
For example, you can pass an electrical current through salt water and light a light bulb (you might have done this experiment yourself) but you can’t do this with sugar water. Nonetheless, they have very different flavors, and they behave differently too. These pranks work well because salt and sugar are almost indistinguishable by the naked eye: Both are crystalline solids with similar structures.
Or go the other direction and you can really disrupt someone’s morning when they take the first salty sip of coffee. It’s a classic prank: Fill a saltshaker with sugar and wait for the meal to take an unexpected turn as your dining companions wonder why their chicken is oddly sweet. Understanding Scientific Journals and Articles.Using Graphs and Visual Data in Science.Scientists and the Scientific Community.Scientific Notation and Order of Magnitude.The Case of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Camillo Golgi.Factors that Control Earth's Temperature.Plates, Plate Boundaries, and Driving Forces.Solutions, Solubility, and Colligative Properties.Y-Chromsome and Mitochondrial DNA Haplotypes.Absorption, Distribution, and Storage of Chemicals.
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