What is the “law of conservation of matter”?
Why is there no "away" as a repository for pollution?
Also, what is the "balanced chemical equation"? How is it related to the law of conservation of matter?
Why is there no "away" as a repository for pollution?
Also, what is the "balanced chemical equation"? How is it related to the law of conservation of matter?
matter can not be created or destroyed.
Well, there is an away. All matter is trying to get to a lower level of energy CO2 and water are the lowest energy level, so they can not be pollutants as all matter is trying to become like them. even a plastic bag will eventually decompose to water and CO2.
If the equation doesn’t balance, the you have either created or lost matter. There are two other things that follow this rule to. Conservation of energy and conservation of money. They cannot be created or destroyed.
The law of conservation of mass/matter, also known as law of mass/matter conservation (or the Lomonosov-Lavoisier law), states that the mass of a closed system will remain constant, regardless of the processes acting inside the system.An equivalent statement is that matter cannot be created/destroyed, although it may be rearranged. This implies that for any chemical process in a closed system, the mass of the reactants must equal the mass of the products.
Matter can be converted to its alternate form, energy, otherwise matter remains invariant.
A balanced equation has each atom and each electron that comes into the reaction accounted for in the product side, and every atom and every electron coming out of the reaction is present on the input side of the equation. THis implies that each atom on the input side of the equation and each electron is balanced on the output side.
Not only does the ballanced equation express confidence in the total amount of mass coming in and out, it also assumes that the identity of atoms and electrons is preserved.
We could have an equation that appears to preserve mass but which would require atoms to change to atoms of different elements. In chemistry that is not expected. It does happen in nuclear physics, and in nuclear physics not only are elemental atoms not preserved, mass itself is not maintained, and has to be accounted for in terms of energy generated.