ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Chemical reaction network theory

Chemical reaction network theory is like trying to understand how things change when chemicals are mixed together. Imagine you have a bunch of marbles in a jar and you want to see how they move around when you shake the jar. That's kind of like a chemical reaction network, where the chemicals are the marbles and the shaking is the reaction happening.

Now, every marble in the jar is like a different chemical in the reaction network. When you shake the jar, the marbles might bounce off of each other and move around. In a chemical reaction network, the chemicals might "react" with each other and change. It's like if you were to paint one of the marbles a different color, it would change how it interacted with the other marbles in the jar.

Scientists use chemical reaction network theory to try to understand how these chemical reactions happen and how they change over time. They might use special tools to measure how the chemicals are changing, sort of like taking pictures of the jar over time to see how the marbles move around.

By studying chemical reaction networks, scientists can learn a lot about how the world works, from how our bodies convert food into energy to how different materials interact with each other. It's like learning the rules of a really complicated game, but instead of winning prizes, scientists get to answer big questions about the world we live in.