Скачать или смотреть Impossible Reactions Explained | The Science Behind the Puzzle

This video explores one of the most counter-intuitive discoveries in chemical kinetics and catalysis: reactions that appear “impossible” when judged by classical rate laws suddenly become ultrafast when surfaces enter the picture. What looked like a violation of chemical intuition turned out to be a window into how matter behaves when reactions are controlled by adsorption, surface sites, and collective effects rather than bulk collisions. You will see how puzzling fractional rate laws, product inhibition, and even negative activation energies forced chemists to abandon simple textbook kinetics and build a mechanistic, surface-based understanding of catalysis. The lecture connects early 20th-century experiments to modern enzyme catalysis, automotive catalysts, and computational surface science, showing how “impossible reactions” reshaped chemistry into a predictive science.

What you will learn:
Why some surface reactions run thousands of times faster than expected
How fractional reaction orders arise from adsorption equilibria
Why oxygen dissociation on metal surfaces explains odd rate laws
How tiny amounts of adsorbed material dominate reaction rates
Why reaction products can inhibit their own formation
What Langmuir’s adsorption isotherm really means physically
Why only special active sites control catalysis
How selective poisoning reveals catalytic mechanisms
Why enzymes achieve extraordinary turnover rates
What the Sabatier principle says about optimal catalyst design
Why catalysts form volcano plots rather than monotonic trends
How CO poisoning shuts down platinum catalysts
Why different surface reaction mechanisms exist
How density functional theory predicts catalytic activity
How modern car catalytic converters work
Why some reactions slow down when temperature increases
How rate laws act as quantitative fingerprints of mechanisms

Timestamps:
00:12 — The mystery of impossibly fast reactions
01:48 — Fractional rate laws on platinum
02:05 — Oxygen dissociation and surface adsorption
04:06 — How much matter a surface can hold
05:20 — Product inhibition in Haber–Bosch synthesis
05:51 — Langmuir adsorption isotherm
08:10 — Active sites and surface defects
08:31 — Identifying active sites experimentally
10:07 — Enzyme catalysis and turnover limits
10:54 — The Sabatier principle
13:15 — CO poisoning of catalysts
14:12 — Langmuir–Hinshelwood vs Eley–Rideal
15:03 — Computational catalysis
15:47 — Automotive catalytic converters
17:00 — Negative apparent activation energy
17:43 — Key lessons from “impossible” reactions

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