Secondary II • 3yr.
Hello alloprof
How can conservation of matter be experimentally verified?
thank you
Hello alloprof
How can conservation of matter be experimentally verified?
thank you
Explanation from Alloprof
This Explanation was submitted by a member of the Alloprof team.
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It should first be stated that the law of conservation of matter implies that the reactants’ mass is always equal to the products’ mass.
Thus, this law can be experimentally verified by measuring and comparing the mass of the reactants and the products of a chemical reaction. In theory, these two measures should be equal. In practice, there may be a very small difference due to random errors in the lab.
Be careful: products or reagents must not be able to escape when measuring their mass. Thus, in some reactions which involve gases, the chemical reaction whose initial and final masses are being measured must be kept in an entirely closed system to ensure that no gas escapes and distorts the results.
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