Abstract:
The modern human experience places a large emphasis upon the material world. From the day of our birth to the day we die, we are frequently preoccupied with the world around us. Whether struggling to feed ourselves, occupying ourselves with modern inventions, interacting with other people or animals, or simply meditating on the air we breathe, our attention is focused on different aspects of the material world. In fact only a handful of disciplines"certain subsets of religion, philosophy, and abstract math"can be considered completely unrelated to the material world. Everything else is somehow related to chemistry, the scientific discipline which studies the properties, composition, and transformation of matter.