A year ago, I watched Christopher Nolan’s Tenet for the first time as I was covering Entropy in my G-Chem II class. One of the students had told me I should watch it when we speculatively discussed entropy and the arrow of time. I found Tenet messy and confusing the first time, although I understood the overall gist of what was going on. This weekend, I decided to re-watch Tenet because once again we are in the entropy chapter of G-Chem II. While I noticed things I had missed the first time, I still think the story is not tight enough. Too many things going on, loose ends, some inconsistency (for reasonable cinematic reasons), and it’s still a bit of a mess. I think more editing was needed before the theatrical version was released. As my spouse perceptively said, it would be interesting to see a director’s cut with voice-over. (We haven’t done so.)
The most interesting bit in the movie is to cinematically convey what it ‘feels’ like to go against the arrow of time. They didn’t film it and then run the reel backwards. It was filmed in the forward direction with the actors trying to play the part of moving backwards and forwards in the strange jerky motions we observed on the screen. It must have been utterly confusing for them, but I think they did a good job overall – the movie felt ‘kinetic’. The science itself is dubious. The difference between entropically inverted objects is mushed with the notion of anti-matter. The idea of having to carry your own oxygen tank is inconsistent with other things that you can interact with when you are making your way through an inverted world.
I was amused by the discussion about exothermic reactions turning into endothermic ones. I suppose my constantly admonishing students to pay attention to sign changes in thermodynamics is something my students will note if they watch the movie. While the second law of thermodynamics inexorably moves towards ‘disorder’, there is no problem with systems and subsystems within the thermodynamic universe becoming more ordered. This happens all the time in chemical reactions. Every time you burn a fuel to release energy in an exothermic reaction, the chemical substances are transforming from higher entropy to lower entropy (i.e., becoming more ‘ordered’) rather than the other way around. The heat released however increases the ‘disorder’ of the surroundings at a much higher magnitude, and thus the chemical reaction is ‘driven’ forward in one direction.
Having had my second exposure to Tenet made me think about students being exposed to chemistry. You don’t know what’s going on the first time, and maybe the second time you gain a little more understanding. But it might still be messy and things might not make sense. You sorta think you know what’s going on, but it may take a third exposure to disabuse you of that notion. That was certainly true for me. My first go-around of chemistry in secondary school, I had no idea what was going on. It felt like my weakest science subject. Physics and biology made more sense. In my second go-around (junior college / pre-university), it made more sense and I seemed to do better on exams. Only as an undergraduate did I fall in love with chemistry and things started to click – third exposure. And then in graduate school, the fog cleared even more. That’s my fourth time around if you’re counting. More murkiness cleared as I began to teach, and it’s only now that I can claim I have expertise in understanding and teaching chemistry.
In my G-Chem classes every year, inevitably a few students will thank me for helping them make sense of chemistry. These students often tell me what terrible teachers they had in high school, and that they didn’t understand anything, but now the material makes more sense to them. I’m glad I’ve helped clear up some conceptual things about chemistry, but their previous teachers may not have been terrible. It may simply have been first exposure to a challenging, confusing and the non-intuitive nature of chemistry. I’m glad they feel better about their second exposure, but when they take my exams, it reveals that several of them still do not have a good grasp. I try to tell them not to feel bad about it, and that I had a similar experience myself. I’m not sure they believe me.
Many, if not most, of my students, did well in high school. Academics, to some extent, came relatively easy for them, especially the ‘honors’ students. Now for the first time, they are encountering the academic struggle and it’s unnerving. (I experienced doing poorly in school before I entered university.) Some of them feel there’s something wrong with themselves, others are apologetic and even feel they are letting me (the instructor) down when they are doing poorly, and they tell me they are trying. I try to be sympathetic and say it’s okay to not be acing the class, and that the subject material is indeed difficult – but I think my words ring hollow. I need to work better at displaying empathy (it’s not something I’m naturally good at).
We’re not all geniuses when we see something for the first time. Maybe even the second time. Many things that we learn in school are not ‘natural’ and we humans haven’t evolved to learn them by osmosis. We need to work through it – the hard way. And that’s okay. But the pace of life has quickened, and it feels more urgent to the younger generation to be able to pick up something more quickly, otherwise they feel like failures. This, I don’t think is their own fault as individuals. They’re caught in an accelerating system, entropy inexorably moving forward, that makes life feel crazier, messier, and less comprehensible.
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