It didn't exist for me until you just posted that and i had to google what it was. You ruined my laifu.
My brain hurts just from trying to read the explanation of that term... Glad i dropped Chemistry in High School.
Stoichiometry is just a method to keep chemistry equations organized. You don't have to follow stociometry but then you can't easily use molar balance or keep track or equations. Pro-tip: Just do the stoichiometry full and meticulously. It may take slightly longer but you are much less likely to make a mistake and thus you will get a higher grade.
Because you gotta be ridiculously anal if you want to make things' colour be correct. Especially colourless is the worst. I mean like glass and plastic suitable to make lenses, prisms, etc. Absolutely the worst. Or if you believe the lie that is pepsi and coke (they'll get the police to arrest you if you take the "secret" from one to the other), the taste is not easy to get consistently right. I was, however, really surprised when my supervisor told me to write a chemical formula with a half in front of oxygen, because the important variable we wanted to focus on was the single oxygen atom's bond with our material, as opposed to the double. The half makes it superbly clear what we are talking about. And seriously, the maths in stoichiometry is not difficult. You start out with basic Excel level silly algebraic calculations, and most of your calculations there will stay at this level of difficulty. The computer can do it for you. The most difficult I can think of, is when they interact with physical kinetics and thus have crazy pH dependences and all. Those are more tedious and need care, but again, are still quite simple maths, despite the complicated looking equations. You just need to get used to them. I love it when chemistry gets colourful. Sadly, I did not get to touch the equations involved when Universal Indicator changes all its colours due to pH changes. It must be complicated, but surely the computer can do most of them.
I always liked stoichiometry, it was easy marks. Once you get the hang of it, it becomes quite easy. You're basically just crossing the t's and dotting the i's to make sure conservation of mass is in play. Outside of general chem, I maybe only had to use it twice though, I think once in orgo, and once for electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, but even then it was veeeery basic.
It helps you determine how much product you might get. i.e. in terms of a burger 2 bread + 1 filling --> 1 Burger (+ 1 drink) You have 6 bread and 2 filling, how many potential burgers can you make? 6 bread x (1 burger/2 bread) = 3 burgers 2 filling x (1 burger/1 filling) = 2 burgers (limiting reagent) Thus, you can only make 2 burgers. Now if you have 2 bread and 5 filling? 2 bread x (1 burger/2 bread) = 1 burger (LR) 5 filling x (1 bread/1 filling) = 5 burger You can only make 1 burger. For chemistry/simple stoichiometry all you need to do is to find the moles, know the limiting reagent, and determine the amount of your product you could make. Of course you can do stoichiometry the other way to find how much reactants are needed. i.e. you want to make 3 burgers and you have 9 bread, how many fillings do you need? (3 filling) Or, can you make 2 burgers if you have 2 bread and 1 filling? (no) (Also, stoich is good for business. Say, if 2 filling cost $5, 12 bread is $1, and you sell your product/burger for $3. You would be able to determine how to get your max profit. For, chemist since some chemicals are expensive, they want to determine how much reagent can give them the most amount of product. (Or, if they want a certain amount of product, how much reagent is needed.) Also, they can be reassured that for excess reagent, it will not be a factor that controls the reaction. In my case, mechanism is a struggle.
Interestingly I don't understand it, but I like to assume it's related to the conversion of mass problem and if solved, science fiction is fiction no more!
Oh yeah, if your question is more philosophical, the answer is that the universe has quantisation/discretisation. This is highly non-trivial and cannot be proved; had to be established empirically. If spacetime itself is made of dots, then that explains why we have stoichiometry, but we do not know why spacetime has to be made of dots. If spacetime is smooth, then why material has to obey quantum theory is not obvious. No matter the case, stoichiometry works because you are quite literally counting how many nuclei and protons in them are participating in reactions. Those have permanence like little indestructible lego blocks. Also, what units do murica use for stoichiometry? Our civilised world uses only moles and moles per dm^3, at most one or two more, say the gas constant. This is partly why we say that stoichiometry is easy. No crazy list of numbers to memorise, only 3 or 4 important numbers. My friend tells me that murica at least uses 2 crazy units for the gas constant, and that is just self-amputation.
What Ai-chan doesn't understand is, why do Americans call 'alkaline' as 'base'. So 'basically' means 'alkalinily'? 'Base of operations' means 'alkaline of operation'? 'Based person' means 'alkalined person'?
Ai-chan is confused because English is just crazy. The correct opposite word to "acidic" is "basic". Acidic lowers the pH, basic increases the pH. However, while acidic stuff almost always dissolves (at least a little; and weak ones dissociates a little), the vast majority of basic stuff are really so bad at dissolving that it makes sense to separate the ones that dissolve from the ones that do not. From here on, basic means it does NOT dissolve. Of the ones that dissolve, the alkali metals, i.e. Group I metals Lithium, Sodium, Potassium (Li, Na, K, ...) dissolve particularly well (explosively so). These give the name alkaline. And since we really only care about the ones that dissolve when you want to introduce the concept to students, alkaline solutions become the opposite to acidic solutions. This means that basic substances increases the pH but only up to about 9, and the only way to get them near 13, you have to have alkaline stuff. Alkalinity then becomes the word for how strong the alkali is. The Group II metals are also interesting and sometimes give alkaline solutions. Calcium, in particular. These metals are called alkali earth metals. It just happens that in English, basic, and base, have other meanings. A base is also a place your organisation works from, with connotations of military use. Basic also means easy. Or main line of work. Brainless. When used in these alternate ways, alkaline will never be used like that. So alkaline is a better word because it can never make that confusion. When we need to use the word basic, often we would say that we mean "like alkaline", first. A person can be basic (as is stupid, or if it was meant to be nice, then it means easy to satisfy, think Zen like, i.e. don't need a lot of stuff). But people cannot be based. They can be based at a place they would then call their base (of operation). But the word you meant must be biased. Biased means something completely else. The root word for that is bias, which means slanted in one direction. You know the word most commonly in sports that have a referee, that is almost always used to imply that the referee took money from one side so that they would be nicer to one side.