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CARBON

Carbon. Interesting stuff. Exists as various forms. Dirty black powder that gets into your carpet, the stuff of pencil-points, charcoal, and soot. But carbon can also exist as DIAMOND. With a valency of four and loads of interesting chemical reactions, carbon is one of the most interesting elements to chemists. In fact chemistry itself exists as two forms: Inorganic (no carbon) and Organic (with carbon). Half of all chemistry is carbon-based, and prior to the invention of advanced artificial intelligence, ALL chemists were carbon-based.

Carbon continues to bring surprises to science, the most recent (up until 2002) being the discovery that carbon can form molecules that look like footballs (C60) and have some very odd properties indeed!

Oxides of carbon include carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Another famous carbon compound is C₂H₅OH . Then there's calcium carbonate which is used for writing on blackboards.

Carbon Sequestration is a belief which some people have belief in!

One way to create pieces of carbon is to start off turning bread into toast, but then continue the process for too long. Also see toastographs

Charcoal is a solid black material used for a variety of purposes, most notably for art. Like chalk, but black, it's possible to achieve a great range of tone when drawing or sketching on paper. (If you were looking for a place called "Charcoal Mortgages", it's spelt slightly differently).

Carbon (element 6) has an atomic number 12, but also exists as radioactive carbon-14. The predictable behaviour of this over time allows items to be carbon dated to find out how old they are. Carbon14 has a half-life of 5,700 years, so it's OK for dating things that are up to fifty thousand years old. If you want to date things that are millions of years old, you need to use isotopes with longer half-lives.

Yes it is true that this page about the element carbon is an incomplete account, but the fact is that carbon is so interesting that even if the page was the size of an encyclopaedia it would still not be a complete account of the wide and ever-increasing diversity that is CARBON CHEMISTRY.