Le Chatelier’s Principle

This is one of the key principles we teach in General Chemistry. It is a very simple concept but with profound implications. “If a chemical system at equilibrium is stressed in some way away from equilibrium, the system will shift in such a way to relieve the stress and restore equilibrium.”

In other words, some chemical reactions reach a point at which the original reactants are forming products at the same rate that the products are reverting back to the reactants, so the net concentrations of each reactant or product remains constant. If you stress the system by changing the temperature, or by adding/removing one of the components of the system, the reaction will adjust to a new equilibrium with different concentrations than it had originally, but still constant once equilibrium is reached.

This principle is true of any dynamic system with equilibrium points, not just chemical ones.

The drought in Texas has stressed the equilibrium of the ecosystem, with the personally relevant effect of driving hot and thirsty fire ants from outside to inside my house, disturbing my personal equilibrium.

Personal Finance

With all of the hullabaloo in Washington over the debt ceiling, it reminds me of yet another area where our educational system fails our students, and ultimately our country. For the most part, we don’t teach students how money works.

We assume that money is merely an application of math, but it is a system just like Euclidian math, or grammar or stoichiometry are systems for doing tasks. Unless you take an elective or are a banking/finance or related major, you are not exposed to how our monetary system works, how wealth is created and destroyed, how the different areas of the economy have constructive and destructive interference patterns just like light or waves, and so on.