Alcohols and Optical Isomerism

We made (and named) the four isomers of butanol today. From this, we could see that there were two possible 3D structures for 2-butanol.

Optical isomers (enantiomers) have the same physical and chemical properties as each other, except for:

• rotate polarised light in opposite directions
• only one enantiomer occurs naturally
• they may have different chemical activity with other optically-active molecules