Question

This unit discusses in detail the role of catalysts to lower the activation energy of reactions. The term catalyst appears in nonscientific discussions to refer to something that provokes or speeds significant change or action. Consider this example from the 2006 Associated Press article "Chernobyl cover-up a catalyst for glasnost": "For the Soviet Union, Chernobyl was a catalyst that forced the government into an unprecedented show of openness that paved the way for reforms leading to the Soviet collapse." Discuss how this scientific term has made its way into common usage. Does the term carry the same meaning in regular usage? How is it used differently in a scientific context compared to a non scientific context?
paragraph form please

Answer 1

The scientific form made its way to common usage through the similarities in meaning. A catalyst is a chemical that speeds up the chemical reaction. In the Chernobyl story, the Chernobyl incident is understood as a catalyst for glasnost because it speed up the process of passing and activating the glasnost laws that opened the government policies more to the world and the people.

The term carries almost the same meaning because both a chemical catalyst and an event catalyst speed up the process of either the chemical reaction or the change of something, be it a government policy or a simple event among people or anything similar. Sometimes however, too much usage leads to incorrect usage where the common understanding of catalysts is different form the scientific usage.

It is used differently insofar that in scientific usage, the catalysts don't get affected chemically by the chemical reaction and the reaction itself is not chemically altered. What happens is just that the speed at which occurs is faster. However, in real world usage, it is often used incorrectly as catalysts being responsible for the change. In addition, the catalyst in real world events often influences the events and vice versa, which doesn't happen in chemistry other than increasing the speed. To explain this using Chernobyl, Glasnost wouldn't have happened on its own without the Chernobyl crisis, which means that the crisis is more of a cause than a catalyst that speeds up events.-