CHEM 6A Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Metric Prefix, Scientific Notation, Scientific Law

• School: UCSD
• Department: Chemistry and Biochemistry
• Course: CHEM 6A
• Professor: Amy Lea Moore

Document Summary

Chemistry: the study of substances, their properties and interactions with one another. Scientific method: process that uses controlled experiments to answer questions. The scientific method uses hypotheses to generate answers in the form of laws and theories. Hypothesis: idea proposed as an explanation to certain phenomenon, based on observation. When supported by more experimentation, it may evolve into a theory. Scientific law: statement that summarizes the relationship between the results of experiments. Theory: principle that explains the nature of a scientific law. To get the results, the scientific method uses different kinds of data. Quantitative data: measurements in the form of numbers. The mass of 1. 0 cm3 of au is 19. 3 grams. Qualitative data: measurements in the form of descriptions and characteristics. To simplify the representation of numbers, they can be written in scientific notation. Where c is a number between 1 and 10 and e is a whole number (exponent).