How are we continuing to discover new chemical processes? Should we not have tried all combinations of one column or period? What factor allows us to constantly find more efficient elements or processes?
In: Chemistry
There’s many reasons for this.
First, the technological limitations. Some processes have not been possible before because we could not create the required environment, be it that we could not create enough pressure, the right environmental situation or the required purity of the ingredients.
Second, it’s not just “Add A to B and presto, new thing”. Some molecules are really, really tricky (just take a look at a protein if you dare), and with some of the biological stuff we don’t even know yet how to create them artificially, let alone create them. For some it’s that even if we could make them, we didn’t realize yet how to toss the stuff together, cook it, cool it, press it and whatever other hoops one has to jump through to make them come together at JUST the right spots to be in the end what we want them to. Putting a certain atom at a different part of another atom can fundamentally change the outcome, especially in organic chemistry the place where you attach something on a benzene ring can be the difference between medicine and deadly poison, despite being the same atoms. Just arranged differently.
The comparison someone else in the thread made is pretty apt. Yes, we have discovered all the letters in the alphabet, but that doesn’t mean we know all the words. It’s even more complicated than that . A more apt comparison would be that we know all the letters in the alphabet, but that doesn’t mean we have made every crossword puzzle that could ever been made.
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