You Won’t Think Chemistry Is Boring Once You See How Beautiful It Can Be.

If you took chemistry in school, you may remember it as a fun, engaging way to explore the world. Chemistry teaches us how everything is possible. It’s possible you remember it as a daily chore of inscrutable equations and formulae…

But even if you consider chemistry to be a difficult and esoteric subject, you’ll love it once you see these animated .gifs.

The University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and Tsinghua University Press are convincing people to love chemistry. They teamed up to create Beautiful Chemistry. Beautiful Chemistry showcases the incredible beauty that science can offer. The site presents two ways to explore chemistry’s beauty: you can watch a video of chemical reactions or you can explore digitally-rendered models of molecular structures.

The videos were captured by Yan Liang, a professor at USTC, using a 4K UltraHD camera, so there are no beakers or test tubes to get in the way. With astonishing detail, you can watch chemical processes like precipitation, crystallization and other reactions. The information about the materials used is also provided. Many of the videos are time-lapse, as the reactions do take time. 

You can watch each reaction individually on Beautiful Chemistry’s site, but this is a compilation of some of the most striking. 

Beautiful Chemistry’s goal is simply to get more people interested in science, and to appreciate its beauty. In this age of visual media, allowing people an up-close look seems like a good way to grab peoples’ attention. “If our effects could get more kids and students interested in chemistry and change people’s negative opinion towards chemistry, we would be extremely satisfied,” the project’s developers explain.