World of Nitrogen

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World of Nitrogen By Isaac Asimov
Publisher: Abe lard-Schu man Ltd 1959 | 159 Pages | ISBN: 0020914008 | DJVU | 1 MB




From Preliminary Section:
The substances that go to make up your body are quite different in several ways from those that go to make up a rock. The chemical compounds in you and in all living things, are, for the most part, fragile. If they are heated or subjected to sunlight or various chemicals for even a short time, they are often changed into forms no longer useful to the body, Rocks and metal, water and salt, air and glass can easily resist a harsh environment of a kind that would ruin our body chemicals. Chemists, about a hundred and fifty years ago, consequently began to divide all chemical substances into 2 groups : organic compounds (those which occurred in living tissue) and inorganic compounds (those which occurred in non-living air, sea and soil. It was noticed that, in most cases, substances in living tissue contained carbon atoms in their make-up, while inorganic substances did not. For that reason, organic chemistry is now considered to be the chemistry of those compounds which contain carbon, whether a particular compound occurs in a living tissue or not. (If you have ever seen coal, you have seen carbon. Coal is made up almost entirely of carbon atoms.)
I wanted to write a book about organic chemistry; a book describing the important carbon-containing compounds. Consequently, I wrote \"The World of Carbon\". The only trouble was that by the time i had finished the book, I had only had a chance to describe about half of the compounds that needed describing.
You may wonder why this should be when the book was concerned with the compounds involving primarily, only one kind of atom. After all, there are 102 kinds of atoms altogether and I had earlier written a book about all of them (entitled Building Blocks of the Universe), even including a bit about carbon, and I managed to get all that into one volume. Why, then, the trouble here?
The fact of the matter is, you see, that there is more to the carbon atom than there is to all the other atoms put together. It's that very fact that makes life, as we know it, possible.




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