chemnovice

In response to dagaz's explaination and the sentiment of another poster who said an atom is as real as a table next to you, I wonder when we're feeling the solidity of a table surface, are we merely feeling the electrostatic force between the atoms which are essentially "energy" (quarks and bosons), does that mean we're feeling a lump of energy really? Was that just a human conception feelings that table is an object? If atoms are energy, can they undergo transitions, and transportation, under the laws of conservation of energy?

I need to have the silver nitrate and the organic compound together. So I've decided to increase the pH of the mixture by adding 1M nitric acid, so that there are excess of H+ ions to interact with the extra O after the ether has attached itself to a NO3 group. Gonna try this tomorrow in the lab, hope it would work. I've tried it with 0.1M nitric acid already, mixture still turned dark very quickly after mixing with the surfactants. Unless it was the case (I'm still puzzled) that I didn't wrap the container of the mixture completely and some light was leaked into it (from an already quite dark environment) and the light sensitivity of silver nitrate taken effect.

Prevent the silver nitrate in the mixture from oxidizing.

If that's the case, how do I prevent it from happening? My supervisor came up with a solution for me to up my nitric acid concentration, from 0.01M to 0.1M or 1M, in order to bring down the overall pH of the mixture back to pH2. Would this solve the problem?

In particular, it is Polyoxyethylene (10) cetyl ether, hydrocarbons, formula: C16H33(OCH2CH2)nOH where n~10. My supervisor kinda said the rise in pH sorta robbed the proton on the oxygen, and the silver nitrate gets oxidated... ? No idea what happened there.

I'm not exactly sure how the silver nitrate turned into silver oxide, due to the influence of the surfactant molecules. I tried to condition the mixture with 0.01M nitric acid, which would be pH2, but it's believed that when the surfactant molecules interacted with it, the pH went up. As a result, it triggered the oxidation of the silver nitrate.

I just meant part (moiety) of the mixture. I have a lyotropic system with non-ionic hydrocarbon surfactants, mixing with silver nitrate. It's believed that due to the pH of the mixture, silver nitrate turned into silver oxide once it's added into the mixture. I wonder what is the mechanism involved in there?

Hi, as a physicist, I'm learning chemistry from scratch!! What exactly is pH in molecular term? (I remember it was something like logarithm of number of hydrogen ions?) And how does the pH value of an organic mixture affects the oxidation of a moiety in the mixture, say, silver nitrate --> silver oxide? Thanks, Jack.