Greetings from Mr. Dorsey!!

 

My goal is not to make the students fall in love with chemistry and physics (although, that would be very special to me if that occurred), but to help the students understand this amazing world around us in a different way. 

 

I no longer plan to use this website to post materials since I will be primarily using Microsoft Teams and OneNote with my students. Parents, you also have access to your child's account. Email me and I can certainly help!

 

Now you might be asking yourself, why do oranges and lemons smell differently? Well here's the answer. The citrusy smell in both is due to a chemical compound known as limonene, but, you may have noticed that they smell differently. So now you might be asking, "but if it's the same chemical, then why are they so different?". Well, limonene is a mirror molecule, meaning that the same atoms combine to make limonene, but there is a "right-handed" version and a "left-handed" version that are mirror images of each other - kind of like how your left and right hand are mirror images that can't be flipped or superimposed. This causes the limonene in oranges to smell differently. The (+)-limonene is the left-handed version that is found in orange peels and the (-)-limonene is the right-handed version that is found in lemon peels. In the molecular structures below, the dashed line represents bonds extended away from the viewer (these 2-D drawings are doing their best to represent a 3-D molecule) and the solid wedge shape represents bonds extending towards the viewer. So there ya go.