Video Transcript
When you go to the grocery store you probably see several products proclaiming themselves to be 'organic.' While the agriculture industry has made their own distinction between what they define as organic or inorganic, chemistry would actually classify all food as organic.
In chemistry, the distinction between organic and inorganic isn't clearly defined, but generally organic compounds are compounds that include carbon atoms, while inorganic compounds are compounds that don't contain carbon. There are a few important exceptions to this rule, such as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. So, organic compounds can also be defined as molecules that make up living things, while inorganic compounds make up non-living things. Organic compounds include plants and plant materials, the proteins and fat that makes up our bodies, and the DNA in our bodies. Inorganic compounds include salts, metals, and related compounds.
There are several properties of chemical compounds that we use to compare different compounds. These properties include:
We can use these properties to compare organic and inorganic compounds. For each of these properties there are exceptions, but we'll be talking about general trends.
Most organic compounds have covalent bonds, while most inorganic compounds have ionic bonds. The ionic bonds allow inorganic compounds to dissociate into positive and negative ions in water, making them highly soluble in water, meaning easily dissolved. On the other hand, most organic compounds are insoluble in water, although they are soluble in other organic compounds.
Viscosity, which is basically thickness or ability to resist deformation, is based on how strong the intermolecular forces between molecules are. The stronger the intermolecular forces, the higher the viscosity. A purely hydrocarbon, organic compound will have very few intermolecular forces between them. The more other elements (such as oxygen or chlorine) are included in the structure, the more intermolecular forces the molecule will feel. But overall, the intermolecular forces of organic compounds are weak, thus their viscosity tends to be low.
Inorganic compounds tend to feel more intermolecular forces, such as dipole-dipole forces and hydrogen bonding. Thus, they tend to have a higher viscosity.
Density, which is how compact something is, is based on the size of the molecule versus the weight of the atoms in the molecule. Most organic compounds have a lot of hydrogen atoms because hydrocarbons are common bonds. Hydrogen has a very low density; in fact, it's the lowest density atom. Since organic compounds tend to have more hydrogen atoms than inorganic compounds, this makes organic compounds typically less dense than inorganic compounds.
We've mentioned how organic compounds tend to have covalent bonds, while inorganic compounds tend to have ionic bonds. The ability for inorganic compounds to ionize allows them to be better electro-conductors. Let's think about how conductivity works: it's the movement of electrons from one location to another. If there are charges, such as with ionized inorganic compounds, then the electrons can move more easily. Thus inorganic compounds are typically more conductive than organic compounds.
Reactivity, in this case, refers to how easy or difficult it is for a substance to react to stimulation. A stable organic compound is typically very unreactive, and it takes a lot to get it to react. This is because in order to break the bonds of organic compounds we are breaking covalent bonds, which are much stronger than ionic bonds. This means that inorganic compounds have a faster overall rate of reaction than organic compounds.
In reactions there are typically intermediates. These intermediates are compounds that aren't stable, but are necessary in order to get to the final product. For example, if we break a hydrogen-carbon bond on an organic compound, in order to replace the hydrogen with an oxygen, we will momentarily have either a positive charge or a negative charge on the carbon. Carbon does not like holding any charges. Thus organic intermediates are highly reactive, and will quickly react with whatever is available.
So, let's look at a few organic and inorganic compounds:
Let's first look at the chemical formulas of each compound:
2
O4
3
(PO4
)2
From the chemical formulas we can see that urea and methane are organic compounds (they include carbon atoms), while phosphate and table salt are inorganic.
Now, let's look at the properties of each in this table here:
Compound Solubility Viscosity Density Conductivity Reactivity Urea High Very low High High Mid Methane Very low Very low Very low Low Low Phosphate Low Mid High Mid High Salt Very high High High High HighFor several of these properties, they are exactly as we would expect them to be. Methane, for example, is very low or low in every category, just as we would expect for an organic compound. Yet urea (another organic compound) is only very low in viscosity, and high in solubility, density, and conductivity. How can that be, given what we just learned about the common properties of organic compounds? Well, if we look at the chemical formula of urea, we can see that it only has one carbon-hydrogen bond, while the other bonds look a little more like those found in inorganic compounds, so it makes sense that it would act more like an inorganic compound.
It's really important to understand that the properties of organic and inorganic compounds are only overall trends, and sometimes these trends can be broken.
In chemistry there are two groups of compounds, and they are typically studied separately. Organic compounds are generally compounds that include carbon atoms, and typically hydrogen-carbon bonds. Inorganic compounds, on the other hand, generally don't include carbon atoms. We looked at five major properties that allow us to compare the two:
We can compare those five properties we examined in order to see the differences between these two groups.
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