Of Tea Leaves and Time Turners

Book 3 is my favorite in the Harry Potter series, so I was excited to re-read it this weekend. One thing that jumped out at me in the early part of the book is the trepidation and excitement of new classes. It’s been a while since I have taken a new class as a student, however over the years I’ve had the opportunity to teach new classes or revamp old ones in very different ways that the class feels new. At this point I have now taught 12-15 different courses or “preps” as a college professor and I’m looking forward to more!

The first new class Harry takes in his third year is Divination. Interestingly Professor Trelawney starts her class in the same way that Snape started his Potions class, i.e., with an admonishment. “So you have chosen to study Divination, the most difficult of all magical arts. I must warn you at the outset that if you do not have the Sight, there is very little I will be able to teach you.” This sounds like one of those dreaded weed-out classes common in the sciences, and my field of chemistry might be the guiltiest of the lot. Some years I have actually started my Quantum Physical Chemistry course by telling the students that this would probably be the hardest class they would take as a Chemistry or Biochemistry major. However I hasten to add that as they persevere through the course, they will discover and learn things at the heart of chemistry that will excite them. I also encourage them to come prepared for class and to visit my office early and often to get help on the (dreaded) problem sets.

Having pondered the subject of memory in Book 2, it is interesting to consider Divination, in terms of reading the future, as the opposite of memory. Why is it we remember things past but the future seems veiled? Why is the Arrow of Time unidirectional? There is an argument that makes use of probability, entropy and equilibrium in closed systems but that somehow feels unsatisfactory when pondering the deep mysteries of time. Now in the case of Trelawney and perhaps many a modern day seer who claims to read the future, common sense guesswork and broad strokes may be all that is needed. Human beings are narrators. We are particularly good at building and weaving stories to make sense of the events in our lives. A broad reading of the tea leaves or fortune cookies provides lots of room to play with when constructing a narrative. Maybe in a future post I will analyze more closely each of Trelawney’s pronouncements.

Of course one could accurately predict the future if one has already experienced it. The crux of the Prisoner of Azkaban narrative is the use of the Time Turner allowing Harry and Hermione to “know what will happen”, albeit at a different vantage point and with some amount of confusion on Harry’s part. Time travel, time loops, time paradoxes – these are all staples of sci-fi and have featured in many recent blockbuster movies (Interstellar, Edge of Tomorrow, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Men in Black 3, Looper, to name a few). As a part-time quantum mechanic, I have enjoyed reading, thinking, and speculating over the physics and metaphysics of the matter (or matter for that matter – pun intended).

However, let me ask a different question instead. Would you really want to know your personal future? When I was younger, I certainly did. But now I’m not so sure, and I think living life fully (one might say magically) is to experience it in the moment. It might be much blander and less interesting to go through life knowing what was going to happen especially if you had no power to change it. Not to mention, if the ending is “bad”, there is no hope. (It’s unclear if good and bad would exist the same way in a completely predictable choiceless life.) But even if time travel is possible, could you change your past or future? What would the limitations be?

Let’s ignore the brain-burning paradoxes for a moment and speculate on something simpler. If you had a time turner what would you use it for? Save the world? Or figure out ahead what will be on the next chemistry test?

A funny graphic I found browsing the web some time ago says it all.

P.S. Surprising tidbit I noticed in Book 3: In Potions class, when the shrinking solution is tested on Trevor (Neville's toad), he is turned into a tadpole. Trevor went back in time so to speak, instead of just getting physically smaller. Seems like a theme to me.

Doubt, Inquiry and a Liberal Arts Education

When I first started my career as a professor in a liberal arts college, I spent most of my time thinking about chemistry classes, my chemistry research, and my role within the chemistry department. Over time however, I have become increasingly interested and concerned with what goes on in other departments, what type of overall education our students are receiving (beyond my department), and whether the liberal arts education that we offer is cohesive or coherent.

As part of educating myself, I have started reading and thinking (and discussing with my colleagues) the nature of a liberal arts education, and the role that the sciences play within this framework. This past week I finished Michael Roth’s Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014). Roth takes the reader through the ideas and history of liberal education in the U.S., but much of what he discusses is strongly relevant in the discussions surrounding the direction of higher education in the twenty-first century.

In the final chapter of the book, Roth devotes a chunk of time to discussing the ideas of Dewey. Roth writes (p168): “Learning in the context of living means modifying one’s behavior on the basis of experience; it means trying things out and revising one’s attempts through collaboration. It’s not that one gets and education in order to do things in the world; it’s that doing things in the world and getting an education are part of the same process. One is not prior to the other.” This sounds very much like what many of us would like to do in the sciences by having scientific inquiry as part of the core curriculum that all students should experience. Furthermore, our major courses should reflect a research-rich curriculum. These, along with Living Learning Communities are buzzwords in higher education at the moment.

Roth goes on to say (pp168-169): “Conformity is the enemy of learning because in order to conform you restrict your capacity for experience; you constrict your plasticity. Doubt is the antidote to conformity because doubt about the way things are (or are said to be) encourages inquiry… With learning, there is always risk, and educators harness the energy of that risk for creative purposes.” This certainly encourages to be a bit more risk-taking in my teaching as I’m hoping to attempt in one of my classes next semester. I’ve also challenged the students to join me in the risk-taking attempt.

Doubt, however, is not something one typical associates with science courses. Having taught an interdisciplinary scientific inquiry course composed of first year students, only some of whom are considering being science majors, the idea of scientific doubt is very foreign to the students. It took a while to get them to be less worried about “what is the right answer” and move to “how does a scientist inquire?” The idea of uncertainty, which they have no problem grasping in thinking about life issues, seems to them antithetical when discussing “the facts” of science.

One approach I have used is to raise the “doubt” questions in the historical context of the scientific issue at hand to exemplify how inquiry works in different scenarios, with the hope that as students mull over current scientific problems, they will make use of the inquiry skills they have learned. Another approach is to pose a puzzle (students often enjoy these as long as they are pitched at the appropriate level, not too obviously easy or excruciatingly difficult) that requires them to work together towards a solution by probing the puzzle through inquiry. Do I successfully “harness the energy for creative purposes?” Not always, but I keep trying and incrementally improving my approach. Now that’s a skill I would like my students to learn!

The Chamber of Secrets: Where Memories Lie

As part of starting this blog, I thought it would be fun to re-read the Harry Potter series. I was able to find another three-hour block to immerse myself in the Chamber of Secrets. Because I have been thinking about the brain recently, I found it uncanny that the subject of memory is prominent in Book 2. One might even speculate that the phrase “chamber of secrets” can be applied to the brain (the chamber) and memories (the secret contents).

Memories are strange things. We don’t quite know where they reside or how they are stored or indexed, although neuroscientists are working hard at trying to understand all of this. False memories can be planted, and it is almost certain that what we might think of as “true” memories are easily changed and embellished over time unless we had a way of keeping the “original” ones intact. Events that one experiences can certainly be recorded and stored by strapping a video recorder to one’s head or wearing a Google Glass. But prior to these recent inventions and having cheap digital data storage, our memory of events experienced can be quite fleeting.

Tom Riddle preserves a memory of his sixteen-year-old self in an enchanted diary. I was struck by the similarity to Harry’s experience with the diary to a later experience with the Pensieve. Although if this was indeed Riddle’s memory, it seems inconsistent that Harry lands in the Headmaster’s Office prior to Tom’s arrival, and in fact behind closed doors. Maybe it’s an inconsistency in this earlier book prior to the Pensieve being introduced and the explanation of how it worked. However, maybe in this case, the diary is different and not just a container of memories, but certainly an independent actor in its own right.

However before Harry learns about the diary, he and all of Hogwarts is introduced to the very annoying Gilderoy Lockhart. What is Lockhart’s specialty? Memory charms! He tracks down magical folks who have carried out daring deeds, modifies their memories, and then claims those great deeds for himself. For some reason this time around, reading Book 2 got me thinking about how memory erasures work. I also recently re-watched Men in Black 3, where the equivalent approach is to use the neuralyzer on Earthlings (akin to Muggles) who have witnessed alien activity. I haven’t done the research to know if electro-stimulation methods have been used in psychiatric patients to erase memories in real life. It certainly has been used for other reasons. (Oddly enough I also watched the new version of Total Recall recently on DVD.)

To modify or in this case erase a recent memory, the spell Obliviate is cast with the aid of a wand in the Harry Potter world. I imagine that the spellcaster points his or her wand at the forehead of the “victim” while carrying this out. (Perhaps this residual image comes from the movies.) In the Men in Black world, the neuralyzer flashes a blue light at the onlookers while the men in black are protected if they wear appropriate (and presumably special) eye-protection.

Now if one thinks of brain storage and activity as a series of electrical signals, then one could disrupt those signals with electromagnetic (EM) radiation. The EM pulse strategy is a staple of science fiction plots to disable electrical activity. (Now as a chemist, I would say there is plenty of chemical signaling in the brain, but presumably this can also be disrupted by EM radiation.) The EM pulse idea (with its bluish glow) can be plausibly attributed as the mechanism of the neuralyzer in the where the radiation “enters” through the eyes (which just witnessed the event) and disrupts the forming of the memory in the brain. The Obliviate spell might do the same although the books do not make it clear where the entry point is if one is needed. Is that how spells work over distance? We can’t see the mechanism with the naked eye but maybe spells manipulate that which cannot be seen – electromagnetic waves, which then go on to manipulate other material objects. In the case of memory modification the objects could be the “physical” memory storage devices (I would say “chemical”). But maybe all spellcasting has a similar basis in the way matter is manipulated via EM waves, and that this becomes most obvious in battle spells with their flashes of red and green jets of light as depicted in the movies.

So much to speculate on, so little time! I will probably have to work on a multi-part feature on magic and science, oh, somewhere in the near future.

C2O

I was in the grocery store when the following caught my eye.

Instead of thinking "Oh, that's clever and catchy. Instead of H2O, they call their coconut water product C2O", I automatically thought to myself: "Is C2O a stable molecule?"

When I teach Lewis structures in class, we use examples to build up four general rules of thumb to draw good structures.
1. Octet! (Especially C, N, O, F)
2. Small formal charges (+1 and -1 are okay)
3. If there are formal charges, negative goes on the more electronegative element
4. Resonance helps!
(In class, we actually go through the reason why these general rules work. I'll skip this so you won't feel like you're in chemistry class. The horror!)

So three seconds later, I have thought of the following structure for C2O.

The problem is that there is the carbon on the left does not have an octet. The structure is somewhat analogous to the interesting resonance structures of carbon monoxide (that we discuss in class). Yes, I think about this about ten seconds after.

Both the structures shown are important because even though both atoms follow the octet rule in the structure on the right, the formal charges do not follow element electronegativity. The whole formalism for Lewis structures is interesting because we attempt to statically represent the dynamical electrons to give ourselves some conceptual understanding of what the electrons are on average doing in the molecule. We cannot actually pinpoint the location of any electron to perfection thanks to the real Heisenberg (not W.W. for the Breaking Bad fans). The structure on the left sort of looks like the C2O structure except you cannot use the same "moving electrons around trick" to get octets around each atom.

Then I thought that one way that C2O could be come stable is by dimerizing to form (C2O)2. I've now used up probably about a minute of grey matter.

The octet rule is now satisfied. I don't even know if this molecule actually exists or if anyone has made it.

One that I do know exists is C2O2.

Now wouldn't this be better as a formula for COCO-nut water and make better advertising? I've now probably "wasted" 3 minutes total thinking up all of this while still at the grocery store.

Well, no. Because ethenedione is not good for you, nor is it an ingredient in coconut water. (Thank goodness!) What is in coconut water? Companies advertise this as an electrolyte replenisher so it's really just salt water with some sweetness so you don't spew it out of your mouth when attempting to drink it. And the whole point of C2O is its analogy to H2O in an esthetic and non-chemical sense.

What did I learn from this? That my brain automatically thinks about chemistry given half a chance in most any situation. The first time I read the word "unionized" in the popular press, I read it as un-ion-ized, i.e., a chemical species that remains neutral rather than turning into an ion (an electrically charged species). I was all confused for a bit before figuring out my error. However, every time I see the word, I still automatically read it as a chemist for a split second before I quickly realize that context matters. An even worse example was when the word "staycation" showed up on a headline and I actually pronounced it "stay-cat-I-on" and couldn't figure out what it was and someone else had to explain it to me (after a lot of laughing). Maybe no one else but a chemist will find it as funny.

And thus concludes my possibly useless chemistry lesson for the day, which I have found amusing as I muse upon it. Three minutes of thought. An order of magnitude longer to write down the thoughts and preserve them for posterity. Is this what blogging is about?

Quiz for non-chemists: There should be enough information in this article for you to draw a good Lewis structure for CO2. (Now that's a worthy molecule for a great many posts in the future...)

fMRI: Legilimency for Muggles?

(Image from http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/nueroscience/4226614)

This past week I have been reading Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld. In essence the authors caution the reader to consider the limitations of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and its seductive color pictures showing how the brain lights up under different stimuli. The use and misuse of fMRI is pervading many fields outside of neuroscience: advertising/marketing, lie-detection tests, morality/ethics, and how-to-make-yourself-smarter schemes.

One of the recent well-publicized studies by Lindstrom and colleagues was to observe the brain activity of subjects while exposing them to stimuli from an iPhone. (You can read Lindstrom’s NYT Op-ed here.) The fMRI results suggested a match with areas of the brain “associated with feelings of love and compassion” rather than addiction. This made for great media headlines, i.e., that you do indeed truly love your iPhone.

Some of the wilder claims suggest that fMRI could potentially be used to read minds. Expose minds to lots of different kinds of stimuli. See which areas light up. Enter this into a large database. If your database is large enough and can discriminate among areas and strength of stimuli, you can now make use of it to interpret subsequent fMRI scans. This reminds me of Legilimency in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

When Professor Snape first describes Legilimency, he refers to it as “the ability to extract feelings and memories from another person”. “He can read minds?” Harry Potter blurts out. Snape then retorts that Harry has “no subtlety” and “[does] not understand fine distinctions”. Like Satel and Lilienfeld, Snape cautions against the simple interpretation. “The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure” Snape says, adding that it is also “a complex and many-layered thing”.

Snape then goes on to say that “those who have mastered Legilimency are able, under certain conditions, to delve into the minds of their victims and to interpret their findings correctly”, that the “Dark Lord always knows when someone is lying to him”, and that “only those skilled at Occlumency are able to shut down those feelings and memories that contradict the lie”.

In one of the chapters of Brainwashed, Satel and Lilienfeld describe the use of BEOS (brain electrical oscillations signature) tests to determine if someone was lying or concealing evidence. The standard polygraph lie-detector can be beaten using a variety of measures. Nor is there any surefire way to detect lying accurately and consistently while eliminating all false positives and negatives. This has not stopped entrepeneurs from marketing the use of fMRI as a lie-detector among other things.

What does fMRI actually do? It measures the change in oxygen concentration and blood flow. These are used as proxies to measure brain activity. Where do the pretty colors come from? First, the brain baseline activity needs to be measured – the subject tries to keep their mind as blank as possible. (Sounds like the first step of Occlumency to me!) When the subject is then engaged in a particular task, shown images, listening to sounds, etc., brain activity is measured again. The baseline activity is then subtracted from the task activity by a computer program, which also filters out background noise and then maps a color-coded image on to a “brain template”. Brighter colors typically refer to larger differences between the task and baseline activities. A final image typically comes from the average results from a group of subjects.

One important thing to note is that fMRI represents the neural correlates of a particular task in terms of changes in oxygen concentration and blood flow. fMRI does not tell you that a single specific area of the brain is responsible for a certain specific task. Many areas light up for a given task. Similar areas may also light up due to different tasks. There is no one-to-one correlation between brain activity and a measured task, image, smell or sound. Reverse-inference, trying to predict what someone is thinking based on these signals, is fraught with difficulties.

Phrenology was a common practice 200 years ago where head-shape “experts” looked at the small hills and holes of the skull to predict characteristics and traits, and perhaps even hidden talents and dispositions. Is fMRI the new phrenology? It’s perhaps too early to tell. The authors certainly caution the reader to “entertain some healthy skepticism” when reading a news headline proclaiming that “Brain Scans show” whatever it is being purported.

In the meantime, it is unclear that Muggles will have the ability to become capable Legilimens anytime soon. As to being an Occlumens, well, crooks and swindlers have been practicing it for millennia.

Breaking Bad

I just finished watching the final season of Breaking Bad yesterday. Wow! The descent into madness brings the story to fitting end.

How I am like Walter White:

·      Went to chemistry grad school at Caltech. Check.

·      Did not pursue startup company with classmates. Check.

·      Went into teaching instead. Check.

·      Experienced hair loss in midlife. Check.

·      Has an iconic black “hat”. Check.

·      Progressed into position involving managing chemicals and money. Check.

Okay, maybe that’s stretching things a little. Although some of my labmates in graduate school started a company, I don’t remember its name any longer so I’m guessing it did not make billions of dollars.  I almost went into high school chemistry teaching after my postdoc but through an interesting turn of events ended up teaching at the college level. I have only a little hair loss but am convinced my bald patch is widening. My black “hat” is really a cap, but it is indeed  iconic. Students recognize me very easily and when they can’t remember my name (not Heisenberg, and thankfully no student has called me that yet), they simply refer to me as the professor with the backwards cap. I suspect staff and administrators do the same. Last but not least, since I am department chair, I am in a position managing a fairly large budget that goes to personnel, instrumentation and chemicals.

Unlike Walter White however, I am very unskilled and have “poor hands in lab”. This probably explains why I am a computational chemist. Using a computer I can actually build NC₁₀H₁₅ with 100% purity. I can even calculate its molecular properties although these are an approximation partly thanks to the principle formulated by the real Heisenberg. I can color all my molecules blue in any hue, although by default only nitrogen is blue. Carbons are grey and hydrogens are white. I do wear a lab coat when I teach chemistry lab or when my office gets too cold. I should probably also have a proper full medical check-up done at some point, maybe when I reach the age of 50 just in case. Unlike Walter White though, I don’t have enough skills to do any good lab synthesis. So I can't resort to a Breaking Bad fallback plan (at least not in the same way).

It was my students who first told me about Breaking Bad. (I don’t own a TV and therefore don’t watch.) I had started watching a few TV series on DVD but after a season or two, I typically found that the show no longer holds my interest. The storytelling feels contrived and I no longer feel immersed in it, so much so that I start “being a scientist” and picking apart the show. Then it’s no longer fun. My brother is an aficionado in military hardware from both world wars. On the occasions we would watch an old war movie growing up, he would annoyingly point that out the German tank was actually an American tank with a German insignia. Or that the heavy machine gun used by the Russians was actually British. We would have to keep telling him to keep quiet and just enjoy the movie. (He also enjoys pointing out where newer movies do a better job in terms of authencity.) I happen to enjoy movies with sci-fi, technology, superpowers or magic, particularly if they are coupled with lots of action and pyrotechnics. However to enjoy these movies I have learned to “suspend disbelief” and just go along for the ride.

In his book Don’t be such a Scientist, Randy Olson says that sometimes accuracy is NOT the most important thing in communication. Instead, one really needs to think carefully about the message, the audience, and the medium used. Not having accuracy as the top priority is anathema to most scientists. We are trained to be nitpicky and critical. However you don’t have to be a scientist to complain when the movie adaptation of your favorite book (possibly the Harry Potter series) is butchered by not adhering to the true or accurate story as told in the original writings. More on that in a later post when I analyze some of the Harry Potter movies.

There isn’t actually much chemistry in Breaking Bad, at least in terms of the central science. (There is other great chemistry in the show!) I admit that my critical radar would automatically perk up whenever science was discussed. This was most often in the first season when the scene would cut briefly to Mr. White teaching his class. The show also isn’t high-octane action all the time. Instead it slowly and surely builds the story while keeping the viewer engaged and immersed. There are times where I get completely immersed in my class prep or in my research project when working through a complex idea. There are even some admin tasks (usually involving a puzzle like course scheduling) that can be immersive. (I also get immersed in the act of teaching, but that's a different story.)

Chemistry is complex, non-intuitive, and perceived as a “hard subject” (to which I don’t disagree). How do I create an immersive environment in the classroom? How can I help my students see the value of and enjoy engaging and immersing themselves in the material? These are questions I will continue to wrestle with as a teacher and a scientist.

A Letter to my Students

In a post last week, I mentioned reading three books (Elizabeth Green’s Building a Better Teacher, William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep, Randy Olson’s Don’t Be Such a Scientist), that pushed me to think about significantly reconstructing my chemistry class next semester. Green encouraged me to think much more carefully about how to construct class activities that really lead to deep learning in the students. Deresiewicz prompted me to think carefully about de-emphasizing grades, and Olson reminded me of the importance of learning how to communicate science. (It can be taught!) Olson's book also prompted me to start this blog and try to practice communicating science and education without the "incomprehensible" style and jargon I would use when writing a scientific peer-review manuscript.

On the one hand, making a major overhaul to my second semester General Chemistry course really excites me. I will be teaching the Honors section so I will have some very strong students, most of whom are likely good at doing well in the traditional science classroom. On the other hand, this is going to be a LOT of work! It doesn't help that I'm also department chair and starting up a new research project. I will also be taking on some new undergraduate research students in my lab, and my research has a little bit of a learning curve.

Anyway, after some hemming and hawing, I finally decided to take the plunge and commit to at least making a stab at an overhaul. I have written a letter to inform the students who will be registering into my course over the next week or so. I posted it today so it's now "out there"! I hope to keep blogging about the experience, and maybe in some mysterious way this will help me to persevere and not give up mid-way through.

Here's my (slightly edited) letter:

Dear students,

I would like to do something different in [Honors Chemistry] this coming semester. First let me tell you what I typically do (and what you see in most science classes in most universities).

First, I have a typical syllabus: You can see the syllabus from the last time I taught this course in Spring 2012. The bulk of the class grade comes from exams (85%) and based on the grading scale and numerical scores on all the assignments, you can be aware (or worse, hyper-aware) of your grade at any time.

Second, the coverage of the material typically follows the sequential presentation of the textbook. There are many good reasons for this, i.e., topics do build upon each other, Mastering Chemistry assignments follow the textbook topics, you are given "comfortable" textbook reading (or what I refer to as "pre-packaged or pre-digested" concepts, facts and problems). This however can result in a certain rigidity to the class that often does not correspond to how you will tackle important and complex questions in the "real world". (You can see that I already tried a few integrative topics in 2012 but they only took 2-3 class periods.)

Third, although my classes are quite interactive with lots of back-and-forth question and answer between you and me, as the instructor I am the one who talks the most during class. (You can verify this with anyone who has taken a class with me.) What this means is that I learn the material best. Yes, it's true. The person who is "forced" or "volunteers" to articulate and explain the material (right or wrong) is the one who internalizes it best.

Therefore I would like to propose we try something different for this class because I think it will help you to learn better and you might find it more interesting. It might also mean a bit more work on your part because you may not be used to having more open-endedness in your science classes. (It will definitely be more work on my part.) Here is my proposal:
 
First, I would like grades to be de-emphasized and for exams not to count for the bulk of your class grade, but to instead build in significant group and project work. Individually you will still need to understand the material. Therefore there will still be the typical final exam (maybe worth ~25%). Instead of the typical "midterm" exams, I will give you take-home exams where you find a 55-minute block outside class and do the exam under "exam conditions". I will score the exams but they won't count towards your final grade. (This way you will know whether you do understand the needed course content and how to prepare for the final exam.) For your other assignments (which will come in various forms including problem solving, quizzes, group projects, reflective writing), I will assess them, but instead of writing a score/grade, I will just provide written comments. You will always be welcome to come by my office individually and discuss how you're doing in the class grade-wise if you're worried, but I hope you won't need to. (I will also let you know how you're doing in the course at a few key points during the semester.) I will always be open to suggestions and expect to solicit your opinion about which assignments will be the major ones

Second, I would like to leave the rigidity of the textbook and instead mix-and-match different material, including bringing in significant source material outside of the textbook. (We will still use the textbook for some of the basic oncepts.) You may not be accustomed to this initially, but I think that approaching the same topics with an integrative lens centered in real-world complex problems will be much more valuable to you than the sequential follow-the-textbook scheme. This will push you and me out of our comfort zones. In particular, some of our class sessions may seem "messier" and less organized as we venture into studying the material in a more complex and messier context. My previous students will vouch for me being super-organized as a professor, but it will be more difficult to do this in our more fluid (rather than rigid) classes. The idea makes me nervous (in a good way), though I think the experience will be valuable in the long-term for all involved.

Third, I will be asking you and your classmates to take the lead in discussing the material. I'm sure I will still talk a lot, answer lots of questions, ask you lots of questions, and the like. But I want the focus to shift away from me, the professor, as the "sage on the stage" to the "guide by the side". The best way to learn is to take charge of your own education, and I hope to instill in you the desire to be a life-long learner and to help you start doing this in college. For some of you, having this responsibility will push you out of your comfort zone, but I think the long-term benefits are well worth it. After all, you came to college to learn, and I became a professor to help you in this endeavor.

If you have any questions or concerns you'd like to discuss you are welcome to stop by my office. My weekly timetable can be found on my website.

Making Potions

Potions Trivia Quiz:

1. What is the first potion that Harry Potter has to brew in his first year?

2. What is the last potion that Harry Potter has to brew in his first year?

If you easily answered these two questions without any help, you have a good memory or your mind is filled with Potter-trivia. Answers are at the end of this post.

Now that I have finished grading my exam, here are the results of my no-credit question about what Potion my Muggle students would want to concoct. Keep in mind that those who did answer the question probably didn’t ponder it for more than a couple of minutes. There were three dominant answers: Felix Felicis, Polyjuice Potion, and something that would help one do better in chemistry class or exams. I suppose that last one is not surprising given the exam context. Interestingly, I only got one response of the more broadly philanthropic category – a potion that would cure cancer. Granted the sample size was small with 20+ students opting to write something. (There was also a difficult extra credit question at the end of the exam, which more students attempted, instead of my no-credit frivolous question.)

Of the first year classes that Harry takes, many of them don’t require the explicit use of magic. History of Magic, as taught by Professor Binns, seems like a very boring history class that a Muggle may encounter. (Disclaimer: I personally enjoy reading history and I think it can be taught in an engaging way!) Herbology involves the care of plants, some of which possess magical traits, but seems not to require using magic. It might be akin to Botany in the Muggle world. Astronomy has its counterpart in the Muggle world although the emphases might be different. In that sense there are many similarities between a Hogwarts and a Muggle education.

Potions class is a lot like my Muggle expertise, Chemistry. Professor Snape starts off the first class admonishing against “foolish wand waving” although the text does not discuss whether the students went through safety training, which is mandatory in all our chemistry lab courses. Given the in-class accidents that frequently involve Neville Longbottom, this seems to me something crucial. Do the Hogwarts students wear close-toed shoes, lab coats and safety glasses? Do their robes offer any special protection? Would that even help given what they are brewing? Should there be protective spells cast before class, perhaps some version of Impervius?

Although Potions, like chemistry lab, involves the mixing of different substances, brewing a potion has the goal of making a specific product with specific properties. In this sense, it is akin to doing synthesis in chemistry lab. My colleagues and I would colloquially call the activities in chemistry lab as “making and measuring”. Harry’s Potions classes in the early stages cover mainly the “making” but not much of the measuring other than asking whether the Potion was correctly prepared following the standard recipe. 

If memory serves, the first somewhat detailed recipe described is the Polyjuice Potion. It’s unclear what many of the ingredients have to do with the effects of the potion. The shredded skin of a boomslang could allude to changing one’s appearance – shedding one’s skin sort of. The crucial ingredient seems to be adding a bit of the person you want to morph into. This reflects an alchemic way of thinking. The alchemists, in attempting to synthesize the philosopher’s stone that could turn base metals into gold often used sulfur and mercury as ingredients, since these have some outward macroscopic similarities to gold in color and sheen. Aristotle’s “Four Elements” as the fundamental basis of matter suggest that you can transmutate one substance into another as long as you get the right combination of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire) in the mixture. We “modern” folk know that this basis of matter is wrong and that no amount of chemical mixing of different substances would turn something that was not gold into gold. If you only move around the valence electrons (essentially almost all chemical reactions with the exception of nuclear chemistry), you will not change the element (which would require changing the number of protons).

However, the alchemic approach is the one that makes sense to our senses, so to speak. The ancient practice of science or natural philosophy made use of the senses to separate the “real” from the “fictional”. The cutting edge of science today involves much that is far removed from our senses. As chemists, we have fancy instruments to measure, at the atomistic or molecular level, what we make in the lab. But most people don’t have access to such equipment. Our present view of the atom is so strange that one might say it defies the senses. “Truth is stranger than fiction” is a common expression in scientific discovery today. This is part of the excitement of being a scientist, delving into strange realms like the explorers of old.

Solution to quiz:

1. Potion to cure boils

2. Forgetfulness Potion (end-of-year Exam)

How to Read

I did not learn how to read fiction until I got to graduate school. Really!!? (I’m sure that’s what you’re thinking, dear reader.) Okay, okay. I did not appreciate how to read stories or imaginative literature in an immersive fashion until I discovered Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. Adler’s book is a manual for reading different “kinds” of things. Adler’s book is quite dry actually, and it reads like a manual. I don’t remember most of his advice but one thing stuck out: When reading stories that appeal to the imagination, try and find a space free of distractions and a chunk of time long enough to read the book in a single sitting if possible. While I had read fiction growing up, the Harry Potter books were the first ones in which I took Adler’s advice.

It makes me wonder whether my reading style led me to a steady diet of mainly non-fiction. With the exception of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, I mainly read non-fiction through my teenage years. By the time I was in my twenties, busier in college and working part-time, my reading habits consisted of 20-40 minutes before bed or a 30-minute chunk sometime during a break. This was the average time needed to read the average non-fiction chapter as long as the book was not too dense. I am usually reading several books at a time instead of sequentially finishing one before starting the next. This is still my main practice and I enjoy how ruminating on my readings can sometime coalesce in a magical way into an idea. Last month I read three books that may seem quite different (Elizabeth Green’s Building a Better Teacher, William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep, Randy Olson’s Don’t Be Such a Scientist), but they pushed me to significantly reconstruct my chemistry class next semester. More on that in a post next week, but in the meantime back to reading Harry Potter.

I first heard about Harry Potter while in graduate school in the U.S. before PotterMania took the country by storm. An undergraduate introduced me to the first book that a relative of his had obtained in the U.K. He claimed that once you started reading it, you could not put the book down. Apparently it was so compelling that this single battered copy was being passed from one person to another like wildfire. He was willing to lend me the book but I would have to wait a couple of weeks as there were a bunch of people ahead of me who had signed up to borrow it. I was skeptical at first (having not much interest in fiction at that point) and promptly forgot about it. Several years later I was browsing a Borders bookstore and espied the heavily advertised set of the first three books in their hardcover Scholastic editions. I remembered what my friend said and decided to buy it as a gift for my spouse who enjoys reading a lot. She couldn’t put the books down once she started reading! After she had finished and told me how excellent the books were without giving away the story, I was persuaded to have a go. This was when I decided to apply Adler’s rule for the very first time, reading the three books over three successive weekends by setting aside a 3-4 hour block for each book. It was a truly immersive experience, and since then I have applied it to any new fiction that I read! (I still read mostly non-fiction.)

As part of starting this blog, I decided to re-read the first book. I dutifully set aside all of yesterday (Saturday) afternoon. What did I notice this time around? Let me just share three things.

1. Having an agenda makes you read differently and notice different things. Given this blog, one of my goals was to take note of all scenes involving Potions. In the first class, Professor Snape gives a fantastic attention-grabbing opener about the “subtle science and exact art of potion-making”. I was encouraged to do a better job conveying why chemistry is so interesting and worth studying and also be sure not to call my students dunderheads as Snape does.

2. Halloween is significant and my memory is bad. I’m now doubly glad that I started this blog on Halloween. It’s the day that Voldemort visits and destroys the Potter home in Godric’s Hollow. It’s also the day that the three principal characters, Harry, Ron and Hermione, solidify their friendship after their encounter with the troll. I had forgotten the significance of Halloween in the first book.

3. Seeing the movies affects the reading of the books. While I appreciate the movies for providing excellent visuals in bringing to life places and scenes (I particularly enjoyed Diagon Alley and the great hall in Hogwarts), I now automatically picture the characters as personified by the actors and actresses. In fact I can no longer remember how I first pictured the characters before the movies. There was probably some fluidity and “building up” as the series progressed. In preparation for the release of a new book I would read all the previous books in succession, and my imagined picture of how the characters looked or how their voices sounded changed subtly with each reading. But now there is a fixity to the characters, and I can no longer imagine them looking and sounding differently. I have purposefully not watched the movies multiple times, but after eight movies, I find it difficult to imagine different-looking characters.

Moral of the story: Harry Potter is still enjoyable after multiple reads (and I have read it multiple times); this speaks to the power of a well-crafted story with characters that you care about. But it will never be the same as the first magical reading where you don’t know what is going to happen next. In a sense, life is like that, and I’m very glad (now that I’m older and have more hindsight) that I do not have a crystal ball to tell me what the future holds. It is much more magical to experience it the first time around, both through good times and bad.