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> whether this really all makes perfect sense to chemists themselves? Yes. Obviously! Someone working in a technical field will understand the jargon and notat
by gilleain 5y ago
> whether this really all makes perfect sense to chemists themselves?
Yes. Obviously! Someone working in a technical field will understand the jargon and notation of that field.
Certainly if you are working in (say) physical chemistry, you might not be familiar with all the terminolgy of (say) organometallic chemistry, or vice versa.
The question of whether the audience might 'notice' is more tricky, but still bizarre. Certainly, changing (say) one part of a long chemical name might escape attention, but so what?
For example, one catalyst due to the prize winners is :
(5S)-2,2,3-trimethyl-5-phenylmethyl-4-imidazolidinone
if I swapped the '2,2,3-trimethyl' and the '5-phenylmethyl' parts of this, it would be likely non-standard nomenclature, and maybe someone might notice. However the information conveyed would be the same.
- superposeur 5y agoOk then! Truly impressive that chemists carry around such a store of jargon.
- gilleain 5y agoWell at least they've moved on from the days of alchemy where the tendency was to make up your own notation and jargon to obscure what you actually did :)
- mattkrause 5y agoIt might help to know these names are formed systematically. URIs can also look inscrutable, but make more sense once you know how to break them down into scheme://user@host:port/path Chemical names (mostly) work the same way. There are a fair number of rules and concepts, but once you understand them, the endless names map onto structures pretty cleanly[0]. Here are some of them: http://www.chem.uiuc.edu/GenChemReferences/nomenclature_rules.html http://www.chem.uiuc.edu/GenChemReferences/nomenclature_rule... [0] Mostly. There are some historical exceptions. Acetone should be called something like 2-propanone, for example, but...it isn't.
- shadilay 5y agoMost common chemicals are exceptions to IUPAC naming.