Friday Night Lightbulbs

I’ve been experiencing a little insomnia on Friday nights since the semester started. Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep, or I wake up in the middle of the night, because my mind is working on crazy and creative ideas! It’s my own fault, really. I decided to start a new arm in my research group related to creative projects. I invited three sophomores who were in my Research Methods course last semester (where we discussed creativity!) to take part in this ‘experiment’. We are getting together on Friday afternoons to bat around ideas, even if they sound crazy!

Each of the students has their own project, somewhat nebulously defined – although I’m hoping it will take shape as we refine our ideas into something workable. All three have strong interdisciplinary interests, so there is overlapping interest in the projects. They all exhibited ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking in my classes and are also enthusiastic about a wide range of things – I think their energy is infecting my older tired neurons in a good way. I’ve also assigned myself an interdisciplinary creative project outside of my typical bread-and-butter computational work, although still related to my chemical origin-of-life interests, but that’s a subject for a later post.

On our first Friday, I posed the question of how molecules would introduce themselves to other molecules in a meet-and-greet. What is the language of molecules? How would they define themselves in their own language, rather than one imposed by human chemists? This led to a raucous discussion involving the sight, smell and sound of molecules. Finding Dory was involved. But we also talked about fundamental concepts regarding chemical signaling and waves (physics). My insomnia that Friday night led to a frenzied sequence of thoughts culminating in the idea of a short story, tentatively titled Searching for the Beluga Whale Molecule. No, I haven’t written it yet. To use Dorothy Sayers’ expressions in Mind of the Maker, the Idea is present but it has not incarnated itself in Energy or imbued the Power. (Okay, maybe a bit of it spilled out in our following meeting.)

What have I been contemplating this weekend? Ideas from my students! The one who is working on a chemistry-music nexus is contemplating defining boundaries. She told us about this weird phenomenon where if a spoken phrase is repeated on a loop, your mind (after a few repeats) hears it as music. To hear this in action, visit this site and click on Demo #1. It was ‘trippy’ (the aptly-chosen word of another student) and we got into a discussion about perception, inflection, and eventually, polymers (a large molecule with chemically repeating units). We got there because another student asked “What is the connection to chemistry?” That’s a question I would have normally asked, but a student beat me to it!

The other two students are helping me come up with creative approaches and assignments for both semesters of General Chemistry that I can use next year in my classes. I would like to inject an element of creativity (I think it can be taught and modeled) as we cover the ‘standard’ chemistry content. One of them, working on the Photoelectric Effect, outlined the germ of a creative exercise to imagine oneself as an electron in the experiment. What would you see or experience if you were the electron? Widening the lens, what would be the metal atom’s point of view in a lattice as it was hit by light? Would it be different if light knocked on the door as a wave or a photon? The other student is working along the lines of having the students design (or imagine) a large space-station to sustain long-term human life, using the concepts of energy and equilibria. Since I’ve been reading Energy for Future Presidents (by Richard Muller) this week, ideas about next-generation fuels have been swirling through my mind. On top of that I’ve been imagining myself as an electron traveling through different contexts. Now that’s trippy.