The Philosopher's Stone and the Basilisk

In an earlier post I discussed reading the first chapter of Lawrence Principe’s The Secrets of Alchemy. I’m now about two thirds through this superb book, and picking up all sorts of useful information about the world of alchemy, some of which will be incorporated into my classes next semester. I’ve been formulating a class activity involving alchemical thinking as an example of illustrating the process of inquiring about nature – delving into its secrets, so to speak.

Back to the book. In terms of making the philosopher’s stone, it was really interesting to learn that while there was much confusion and disagreement over the ingredients needed to make the stone, there was general consensus about the preparative process. Principe writes: “The prepared substance or mixture is placed in a glass vessel with an oval body and a long neck, often called the philosophical egg (ovum philosophicum) on account of both the size and the shape of its belly, and its function in giving birth.” Apparently before applying heat to this initial setup, the flask was sealed shut by melting, and that this was called the “seal of Hermes” (after Hermes Trismegestus) that gave rise to the phrase “hermetically sealed”. Warning bells go off in my head. Danger! Principe writes that indeed there are “many accounts of exploding apparatus” and that the problem was exacerbated because “the glass vessels of the time were made with very thick walls and therefore more prone to cracking and thermal shock”.

The mixture undergoes a lengthy process of heating, potentially over the course of months. Observance of certain colors at particular times indicates if the reaction is proceeding accordingly. Principe points out that while this seems easy to us with our modern equipment, “the early modern chymist had only carefully sized pieces of charcoal added at regular and frequent intervals day and night, and the manipulation of air vents on brick or iron furnaces, to maintain and control the heat.” On the other hand, “we do this effortlessly today with the flick of a switch thanks to electricity and thermostats.” I, for one, am very thankful that I can cook over a modern stove. The refridgerator is a boon. And the microwave is really useful for a variety of things. Ah, modern science and technology!

What I found even more interesting is that this process can be used to make other interesting “beasts”. I’ve now put On the Nature of Things (attributed to Paracelsus) on my list of things to read. The writer claims that this process can be used to produce a homunculus, a small human-like creature that is “endowed with knowledge and powers”. The starting ingredient is human semen, heated gently in a sealed flask, along with some other special ingredients (a “chymical preparation” that included human blood), over the course of forty days. Given the sexism of the time, it is perhaps not surprising that “the same text claims that if one takes menstrual blood instead of semen, and treats it in the same manner, the result is not a homunculus but a basilisk – a hideous creature so noxious it kills by its glance alone.” I wonder if there was a connection between the first Harry Potter book being about the Philosopher’s Stone, and the second book featuring the basilisk prominently.

Principe writes: “The possibility of producing life in the laboratory did not appear problematic for medieval and early modern thinkers. The spontaneous origin of life from nonliving matter was considered a matter of course… What did provoke a host of moral and theological issues was the notion of artificially producing a rational life-form akin to a human being. A combination of wonder and outrage accompanied tales of the homunculus to the seventeenth century.”

Interestingly, scientists today are making similar attempts as they study the origins of life. What is it that separates life from non-life? Given a demarcation (if we can agree on one), what will it mean if scientists are able to start with a non-life chemical mixture and produce what could be recognized as a living creature? Is this the revival of the theory of spontaneous generation? We live in interesting times. Then again, so did the alchemists. I’m just glad we have harnessed electricity. I can’t imagine living without it. (Well, okay I can imagine it, but I don’t like it.)

Below: A picture of Brother Basil Valentine, a Benedictian monk and also a hermetic philosopher. The philosopher's stone is symbolized as a basilisk resting in a philosophical egg (on the table). This picture is found in Principe's book. I found the web version at the Alchemy Web Site.

Wild Dreams and the Matrix Reloaded

Perhaps I have been thinking too much about thermodynamics the past week, as we have been discussing entropy and free energy in my last three to four chemistry class periods. Maybe you’ve experienced this before, it happens to me every now and then. Sometime in the middle of the night, you’re in a hazy state in between waking and sleeping and having strange wild ideas. I started to think about the ergodic hypothesis and moments later I was imagining scenes from The Matrix Reloaded. I think these strange dreams might be connected to my reading a couple of chapters of Harry Potter Book 5 every night before bed.

Whoa! Let’s back up. How might these things even be connected in one’s wildest dreams?

First, the ergodic hypothesis is worth repeating. I’ll use the Wikipedia definition: “In physics and thermodynamics the ergodic hypothesis says that, over long periods of time, the time spent by a system in some region of the phase space of microstates with the same energy is proportional to the volume of this region, i.e., that all accessible microstates are equiprobable over a long period of time.”

We were discussing in class how improbable it was that all the gas molecules in a room simultaneously all move to one corner and how it was much more probable they would be “spread out”. One way of thinking about the macroscopic quantity of entropy is that we “chunk” our microstates in such a way that randomly distributed states are grouped together. We can’t distinguish these microstates from each other and so the random spread out state is assigned a high overall probability since there are many, more ways to generate microstates of the “spread out” state versus the “clumped together” state.

Over a long period of time though one should eventually visit a microstate of the “clumped together” variety (if you could wait long enough). This might be the “anomaly” (Neo) in the Matrix. When Neo finally reaches the Source and meets the Architect, he discovers that he is yet another iteration of a series of events that have cycled through. Each of these rare events, when the anomaly reaches the source, might be one of those rarer “clump together” events where the anomaly becomes significant. And then things go back to the “spread out” state as part of the cyclic series of events.

Since I hadn’t seen the Matrix Reloaded in ages, and I had been thinking about anomalous and rare events, I decided on a whim to check out the DVD from the local library and watch it yesterday night. I’m a fan of action movies and don’t mind watching something with lots of neat special effects and nice choreography that go along with the action sequences. I had also forgotten all the cheesy lines in the movie, which were very amusing, for example: “You don’t really know someone until you fight him” (or something to that effect). I also have a bad memory when it comes to what happens in the storyline so much of the movie feels novel to me again.

In the movie Neo keeps having this recurring dream (which I assume is connected to his being the anomaly). The same thing happens to Harry Potter in Book 5. Neo is looking for the special door (the one that takes him to the source although he doesn’t know it yet) while Harry, in his dream, is looking for and trying to get past a door in the Department of Mysteries. While Neo is in the Matrix, you could say in a sense that he is “dreaming” – he’s plugged in and somehow the electrical impulses from his brain animate his character in the Matrix. In the non-dream world, Neo looks like he is in a deep sleep, although one might categorize him as lucidly dreaming and strongly able to control the actions in his dream. He can also be physically negatively affected by his dreaming. If you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world.

Harry’s situation is different in a sense that he does not seem to be controlling the dream. However he is hooked up in some way to Voldemort, and able to experience what Voldemort feels and what he sees (when possessing the snake at least). Because the two are not in proximity it is unclear why they are “entangled”. Maybe the magic of the curse that joined them together was indeed some sort of quantum entanglement. So when Voldemort feels or thinks something, there might be a change in some of his quantum states. The corresponding entangled particles in Harry react to those changes. These changes seem passive although once Voldemort recognizes the connection he actively uses it to plant a false scene into Harry’s consciousness. There are some similarities to Legilimency because Occlumency is what Harry needs to learn to “block” the connection.

What happens when we dream? Clearly there is a fair amount of brain activity. There’s actually an interesting study with a graph that has made its rounds over the Internet. Here’s a link to a blogger that shows the graph and also has a link to the research paper. Where do you see the flatlining? When the student is watching TV or IN CLASS! Given that Lab and Homework are separate categories and have plenty of activity, "in class" might be passively sitting in class listening to a professor lecture. Perhaps those active strategies I’m trying to employ in class do aid learning – that’s not so easy to tell in this study. It does show us a certain type of brain activity of one student over seven days. I wonder what we would see if the student listened to a lecture while sleeping!

Educational Decree Number Twenty Three

I am reading my way slowly through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. As mentioned in a previous post, I had delayed reading this book because I recall Harry being particularly whiny, but also because there would be a number of education-related themes I would find interesting and would like to muse about in my blog. That brings me to today’s topic: Educational Decree #23.

Backdrop of the story: Headmaster of Hogwarts has falling out with Minister of Magic, who is afraid of his power and position being challenged (that in itself is material for a separate blog post). The Minister therefore enacts a number of educational decrees to allow his underling, one Dolores Jane Umbridge (who’s name sounds like “umbrage”), to infiltrate the school and essentially take control of it. In Decree #23, Umbridge is named “High Inquisitor” (a poor but telling title) and has the power to inspect the standards of teaching.

Assessment is now one of the key things that faculty in colleges and universities all over the U.S. are grappling with – it’s called the “A-Word”. There are plenty of Arguments with Administration about Assessment being foisted upon faculty. Assessment, in itself, is not a bad thing. In fact it can be a good thing. The way it is executed, however… well, let’s just say there are plenty of bad examples to go round. In Harry’s encounter with Umbridge’s first class, she actually seems to start off as a good teacher. She clearly identifies the Course Aims and puts them up on the board. Then she just has them read the textbook in class, which is about the worst use of class time I can think of. I recently finished reading Teaching Naked by Jose Antonio Bowen, who argues cogently how to best use class time for active interaction with students, and to use technology as a strong supporting tool for the outside-of-class preparation for the in-class interactions.

Back to inspecting the standards of teaching: While Umbridge’s motives are misguided, she does actually visit classrooms to observe teachers in action. She takes notes. She talks to students about their experience. She talks to the teachers, makes the effort to learn a bit more about them and their methods, and she follows-up with the results of her inspection. This is more than I can say for how teaching is evaluated in colleges and universities. The device most often used is the end-of-term teaching evaluation that students fill out. They are often filled with questions of the “Rate from 1 (worse) to 5 (best)” type. There is space for comments, but the results are most often compiled and tabulated as an average from the Likert Scale questions, thus reducing a teacher’s effectiveness to 4.63 or some other similar number.

I’m very fortunate to be in a department of very strong teachers and colleagues who clearly care about student learning and constantly try to improve their teaching. For faculty members on the tenure track, there are three full reviews before the candidate receives tenure (by passing all three). For the teaching part of each review, the candidate submits their student evaluations and their course materials. At least six other people in the department make classroom visits in the first two reviews, and for the third review everyone tries to visit if their schedule permits. This isn’t just senior faculty members evaluating junior faculty members – everyone participates! Since we’re a collaborative and congenial group we actually give and receive feedback. (Our adjunct faculty are also reviewed although there are fewer class visits.) We don’t do any post-tenure review, although I think we should.

Visiting other people’s classes is one of the things that helped me improve as a teacher. In my first two years as a faculty member, I visited the classes of everyone else in my department so I could get a sense of different styles and approaches used. I learned a lot of useful things through observation and follow-up conversation, both things that would work well and things that would fall flat. I’m glad that the department had a culture where I felt welcome to visit. As a result, I have welcomed anyone else to visit my classroom. It is not my sacred space, nor do I feel like someone else is acting as High Inquisitor. In fact I get to enjoy the post-class conversations I’ve had with my colleagues who have visited. Many of my more experienced colleagues were able to point out things I did not notice and I was able to improve on them.

I think of all these classroom visits as part of my professional development as a teacher, both when I visit and when someone else visits my classroom. Often when we think about professional development, we think about sending folks to a “course” of some sort where some “expert” or “consultant” talks to us, often about things we already know, for some huge sum of money that the institution pays for. Now, I think there is room and sometimes need for the outside consultant for some things, but there is a free-of-charge, culture-building, wealth-of-experience right there in one’s own institution. We should take advantage of it!

Investigations and the 4th Law of Thermodynamics

I’ve been working my way through Stuart Kauffman’s Investigations. The question to be answered is a profound one: “What is Life?” Short answer: We still don’t really know. Kauffman has been thinking about this problem for quite a while and has developed a model of “autocatalytic sets” to investigate the transition from chemistry to biology. His papers are not the easiest to read, but his ideas sure are interesting! I’ve been following some of his work although there is much that I don’t quite comprehend (yet).

In his book, Kauffman suggests a candidate fourth law of thermodynamics: “As an average trend, biospheres and the universe create novelty as fast as they can manage to do so without destroying the accumulated propagating organization that is the basis and nexus from which further novelty is discovered and incorporated into the propagating organization.”

That was a very long sentence, which is also chock-full of information (no pun intended). Here’s his next sentence which summarizes/defines Life, which is its own paragraph: “Autonomous agents themselves, self-reproducing systems carrying out one or more work cycles linking exergonic and endergonic processes in a cyclic fashion that propagate the union of catalysis, constraint construction, and process organization that constitute that autonomous agents are but the most miraculously diversifying examples of this universal process in our unfolding, ever-changing universe.” (This is on p85 of Chapter 4 for those of you who want to read the context of these sentences.)

Here’s a short and sweet version from one of the NASA working definitions of Life: “A self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”

Of the definitions I’ve heard my favorite is: “I know it when I see it.” This statement was famously used by Justice Potter Stewart commenting on something completely different back in 1964.

But back to thermodynamics (which I’ve been thinking about this week because my students are learning about it in my General Chemistry class). Aren’t there already four laws?

Yes, you heard me correctly, there already are four laws. Many people think there are only three because we tend to forget about the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics, which folks back in the day used as a starting assumption (but no one stated as a Law), thus allowing them to formulate the other three laws. So technically Kauffman is proposing a fifth law of thermodynamics, which would then be the Fourth Law. Confusing isn’t it?

My version of Laws Zero, One, Two and Three:

0. Things are just going downhill

1. You can’t win, you can only break even

2. You can’t even break even

3. Unless Hell freezes over

I think I’ll summarize Kauffman’s Fourth as:

4. And yet things move and have their being

(This is inspired by Galileo’s Eppur si muove or “and yet it moves”, which he probably did not actually say, but was attributed to him later, and also Acts 17:28 in the Bible which uses the phrase “live and move and have our being” most likely recorded by Dr. Luke on behalf of the apostle Paul.)

Kauffman’s suggests that built into our laws of physics and chemistry is the propensity to explore molecular space. We don’t know exactly how this is built in, but it boils down to being in a non-equilibrium situation (from a thermodynamic point of view) where not all “space” has been explored. Another way of saying this is that the universe is not ergodic. Kauffman postulates that only parts of the “adjacent other” get explored in reality, and what gives rise to the peculiarity of our universe is a cosmos that co-constructs itself. I can’t say that I fully grasp Kauffman’s ideas (I will have to grapple with them more) but I have a suspicion that he may be on the right track at least in broad strokes.

I couldn’t find an online version of a old comic strip (I’m pretty sure it was Zits) that ponders this very question. One character, while pondering, muses: “There’s something about life I just don’t understand.” His buddy responds: “What is it?” To which the original muser says “Exactly.”

Origins of Alchemy

It’s nice to have a leisurely Saturday. I still wake up early, but because I do not have to go to work, I can enjoy second breakfast like a hobbit. So sometime between 10:30-11:30am I was having a tasty scone, sipping Irish tea and reading the first chapter of The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence Principe. This is a book that should indeed be read slowly and leisurely as it is chock-full of interesting history, and from my (limited) point of view as a non-historian, a great deal of painstaking research has gone into this book. The author is a professor in both the departments of History AND Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. He even repeats some of the alchemical experiments as part of his research for the book. I’ve been looking forward to this book for a while since I’ve typically begun my first-year chemistry class by discussing alchemy to set the tone!

I’m sure I will have a lot more to write about as I slowly work my way through the book, but just reading through the first chapter set my mind abuzz. Principe begins by discussing early alchemical efforts in antiquity. There aren’t a lot of documents from this period, and they can be difficult to decipher. In particular, these early alchemists were rather secretive, in the sense of protecting trade secrets. Metallurgy is where alchemy has its roots. A number of the documents were recipes for the patination of metals (the coating of one metal on top of another) so as to pass off one metal object for another. Coins, valuables, jewelry, were frequent targets. Gold and silver, or something that at least looked like them, were coated on top of cheaper metals. Apparently the Roman emperor Diocletian tried to find and burn a lot of the treatises because he was introducing a new coinage and trying to fight the debasement of currency.

The focus of the chapter is on a Greco-Egyptian alchemist named Zosimos (circa 300 A.D.), “revered as an authority for the rest of alchemy’s history, and the first about whom we have any reasonably substantial or reliable historical details.” What is interesting is the blending of theory and practice. Alchemists like Zosimos were not just mixing things randomly, they had guiding principles. A key idea was that metals have two parts: soma and pneuma, representing “body” and “spirit”. The former is nonvolatile and forms the basic essence of being a metal. The latter is the variable that features the particular properties of a metal. Zosimos uses fire “to separate the spirits from the bodies”, i.e., chemical reactions initiated by burning substances.

As I was reading this it made me think about the Gnostics who had similar dualistic ideas, and were known for believing in secret knowledge (hence the gnosis). They were active around the same period in antiquity. It also made me think about whether scientists have become the new gnostics in the way we have gotten super-specialized, each with our bits of knowledge inaccessible to most of mankind. Sure enough, several pages later, Principe discusses the link between the two. Just before getting into the details, he writes: “This recognition brings up a huge point for the entire history of science: how do practitioners’ philosophical, theological, religious, and other commitments manifest themselves in the study of the natural world, whether in alchemy or elsewhere?” Then after going through the details, Principe summarizes with the following paragraph, which I think is both interesting and illuminating, so I will reproduce it here.

“We completely miss the fullness and multivalent complexity of pre-modern thought if we dissect it into modern categories. Zosimos had no reason to isolate his philosophical or theological commitments into special categories separated from the balance of his thought. Today there is a tendency to imagine that such “mixing” (it is mixing only from our perspective) somehow impedes rational and clearheaded work on practical matters, yet this is not only a modern prejudice but also far from true. Zosimos’s methods – like anyone else’s – of thinking about, conceiving, and interpreting his work could not help but be influenced by, and draw on, the totality of the way in which he conceived the world as a whole. Thus, it is incorrect to say that alchemy for Zosimos was itself a religion, and an exaggeration to say that his alchemy was Gnostic. Yet it is equally wrong to imagine that Zosimos could (or should) “turn off” his ways of thinking, his mental landscape built upon contemporaneous Gnostic, Platonic, and other commitments, when at work on practical alchemical processes. Even modern scientists cannot do that, although some of them convince themselves that they can (perhaps under the trickery of a daimon named Pure Objectivity).”

This makes me think about thinking. Meta-thinking perhaps? I’ve been trying to get my students to think more about their learning, hopefully through writing blog posts and participating in the online discussion forums through the LMS. (Ours is Blackboard, which I find a little clumsy.) It’s also uncanny how I was just having a discussion a couple of days ago about scientists using methodological naturalism as an axiom in “doing science” but that this does not necessarily commit one to philosophical materialism on the one hand or religious faith on the other hand, and that the two should be untangled. But maybe it’s not that easy to untangle them.

Principe also discusses the origins of the words chemistry and alchemy. One popular idea was that it comes “from the Coptic kheme, meaning ‘black’, alluding to the the ‘black land’, Egypt, in reference to the color of Nile silt.” What’s cool is that chemistry could be the “Egyptian art” or the “black art”. Yes, I practice the Black Arts! Principe thinks that the most likely root is the Greek cheo which has to do with melting, fusing and a word that signifies metal. Then chemistry becomes the art of metallurgy. It could be both, says Principe, and I personally like the “black art” etymology even if it may not be true.

That was just Chapter 1! It gave me a lot to think about, and a lot to look forward to. If this is something you’re interested in, I suggest getting the book and reading it yourself. There will likely be more blog posts on Principe’s book and this topic.

Liberal Arts and the Laffer Curve

It’s funny when you read two completely different things and they generate a mashup of an idea.

As part of my regular reading in higher education news, I came across the following article: “Valediction for the Liberal Arts” by Victor Ferall Jr., who is also the author of Liberal Arts at the Brink. The book discusses the decline of the liberal arts and its replacement by vocational, career-oriented majors and professional programs. His present article says: “As the book’s title suggested, I thought the future of liberal arts education was bleak, but not hopeless. Now, I believe I was too optimistic.”

Ferrall argues that with the influx of students funded through the G.I. Bill, that the motivation for attending college moved towards career training and preparation as the path to a better life. Conversely, “taking liberal arts courses seemed a waste of time and money.” To sustain themselves (and grow), colleges and universities began to offer more vocational and career-oriented options. In surveying the national mood, Ferrall quotes prominent voices in the U.S. pushing for more job-skills related training in education: “If higher education fails to focus on occupational training, it will damage the nation’s economic future.”

The conclusion is bleak: “If liberal arts college leaders are unable or unwilling to undertake an organized campaign to educate all Americans – not just high school seniors and their parents but also the high school counselors; business leaders; friends and neighbors; local, state, and national government officials; and countless others who now urge students to study something directly connected to getting a job and not waste their time on the liberal arts – it seems highly likely no one will. There no longer is reason to believe the decline of liberal arts education will be stayed or reversed.” Ferrall states that he has not seen higher education leaders come together to prevent the liberal arts from going over the brink. I’ve only taken some snippets from the article, so you should read the full article on Inside Higher Education if you’re interested. Some of the comments in the article are thoughtful and well-worth reading too.

What is interesting is that the opposite mood is seen in Asia with several nations both large and small vying to be educational hubs (in many senses of the word). Governments in some of the Persian Gulf states and smaller countries in Southeast Asia have put in a lot of money to attract “Western” institutions (i.e. primarily North America and Europe, although Australia is becoming a big player too) to set up shop. The strategies are highly varied among these hubs – some are education hubs, some are talent hubs, some are knowledge-innovation hubs (to use the typology in Jane Knight’s International Education Hubs). The heavyweights, India and China, are also getting into the game. In China, the new “outposts” of NYU-Shanghai and Duke-Kunshan have hit the news recently. India is a particularly interesting case where private donors have started Ashoka University, which seeks to “to provide a liberal education on par with the best universities around the world.” The rationale behind this is the belief that the American-style liberal arts education will foster the creativity needed for the next generation to bring economic (and whatever other) success to the nation and solve the complex problems of the world. At least that’s the pitch you will hear. (As a faculty member employed at a liberal arts college, I’m very good at giving the same pitch.)

This brings me to a book I am currently reading: How Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician who is also an engaging and entertaining writer. If I had read his book when I was a college student, I probably would have signed up to be a Math major, and I might have enjoyed my Real Analysis class, which was probably the wrong first math class to take in college. (I did not know what was going on most of the time.) Ellenberg reminded me of why Cauchy convergence was both interesting and important. (Yes, I actually remember that from my math class. Apparently I must have learned something.)

In the first chapter, Ellenberg introduces the Laffer Curve. The chapter is titled “Less Like Sweden” and has a graph that puts Libertopia and Black Pit of Socialism at opposing ends of a line. Increasing prosperity and decreasing Swedishness is linked to Libertopia. On the other hand increasing Swedishness and decreasing prosperity is linked to Socialism. USA is nearer the Libertopian end but trying to move a bit more towards socialism; Sweden is on the Socialist end but trying to move towards Libertopia. Doesn’t that seem ridiculous? The illustration is motivated by a blog with the provocative title “Why is Obama Trying to Make America More Like Sweden when Swedes Are Trying to Be Less Like Sweden?”

The point Ellenberg tries to make is that Linear thinking can lead to mistakenly juxtaposing two categories as being diametrically opposed to each other and that there is only one clear direction to move along the line. One way is better, the other is worse, depending on what you’re aiming for. I’ve decided to try drawing similar graphs to Ellenberg’s based on Ferrall’s bleak analysis of the liberal arts here in the U.S. and the contrasting interest in Asia where the education has primarily been strongly vocational, career-oriented and emphasizing specialization early. A liberal arts education advocates specializing later and having more breadth.

 

But what if the relationship was not a line but a curve? Here’s my version of the Laffer curve that might explain why the U.S. is moving in one direction and Asia is moving in the other. Now, I don’t actually know what the relationship is between national economic prosperity and the type of education. It might not look like a Laffer curve. It’s likely to be much more complicated and certainly more multi-dimensional.

So what should you do? Well, as a scientist at a liberal arts college, I will say tongue-in-cheek that your best bet is to major in science at a liberal arts college. It’s the best of both worlds! That’s where you can be at the peak of the Laffer curve. You get the breadth and you get the technical skills. Okay, let’s be a little more serious. Maybe what a nation-state needs is an array of different kinds of educational institutes. Vocational programs are good for some students; liberal arts programs are good for others. Career-oriented majors are a good fit for some students; a broader interdisciplinary education is a good fit for others. Perhaps there is no one-size fits all, although I’m inclined towards the idea that some exposure to the liberal arts is a good thing regardless of institutional type. This does not have to be at the tertiary level, in fact one might argue that it should happen earlier given that in most countries, a university education may be out of reach.

First Week of Class Report

I survived the first week of my new revamped course, and I have to say I really enjoyed putting together the material and watch my students mull over some interesting questions about energy and nuclear chemistry. The majority of my students read Feynman’s article before coming to the first class, and in the following two classes we looked at the source of nuclear energy (coming from the mass defect), and fission and fusion reactions. In one of the group exercises, I had eight groups calculate the binding energy per nucleon with a different isotope in each group and we were able to generate the binding energy curve in 15 minutes. I did underestimate my class preambles before group work resulting in less time for full class discussion (10 minutes at best), however we managed to talk about the solar irradiation curve and think about the “type” of energy we get from the sun, and how much reaches the surface of the earth. This is our transition into thermochemistry coming up this week, and I have a series of activities planned around fuels. We will look at fossil fuels, natural gas, calculate fuel efficiencies, discuss practical considerations, and maybe even come up with “designer” fuels.

I’m using a flipped classroom approach, in the sense that students do reading and have online homework to make sure they understand the basics before coming to class. In class is where we solve interesting and more challenging problems and discuss the trickier concepts. Overall my students have so far been good about coming prepared but as the semester wears on and they get busy, this may be progressively more challenging as their other classes pick up the pace. I typically start my class at a blistering pace and then ease off towards the end so that the weight of my class load contrasts with most of their other classes. While this is good in the long run for the students, they might have gotten a little shell-shocked from class this week. (So far no one has complained about the workload.) I’ve tried to design the out-of-class work to take no more than 6-7 hours per week. Since this is a 3-credit hour class, the students will spend an average of 9-10 hours for this class, which is about right, and they should be able to balance the workload.

The problem is how much time I am spending on the class. This past week I spent close to 25 hours on this single class. That’s closer to rookie class prep time, or what happens when you teach a brand new course (which I suppose is almost what I’m doing). For the typical 3-credit hour general chemistry courses I’ve taught, I also spend 9-10 hours per week on average, similar to the students. This includes class time, class prep, grading, and Q&A in office hours and over e-mail. I have to try and get this down to 15 hours a week if I’m going to survive. I got no research of my own done although I did help my research students move their projects forward, and I barely kept up with my administrative work as department chair. This coming week I need to work faster or be less ambitious.

The other thing I’m still working on is how to handle online class discussions. I would like what the students are learning in class to spark interesting thoughts on things that might seem unrelated to the class. I sent my students a proposed online participation plan to read over the weekend. I suggested one blog post with a minimum of 250 words per week, and three other entries (of any length) that could be blog posts, replies, discussion board threads, etc. In preparation for some of my classes I post videos with a few food-for-thought questions so that students have some fodder for online posting if they don’t have other ideas. I’m working on a rubric of how to grade the online work and my initial idea is to have students submit a portfolio three times over the course of the semester highlighting their best online contributions. Anyway, I’ll talk this over with my students in class this coming week and figure out how to proceed. Since I want them to take charge of their learning, it makes sense to give them some say over the syllabus and grading.

One thing I do like to do is give students examples so they know what to expect. Hence I wrote up a 308-word blog post shown below. I might cross-post some of them on this blog and vice versa so that I won’t have to do double work to keep up.

Nuclear Chemistry and an ARC Reactor

Going through nuclear chemistry this week, and thinking about different sources of nuclear energy, motivated to delve into figuring out how Iron Man’s Arc Reactor might work. Could it be possible to design a related compact energy source that is safe and reliable?

An article from the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/quora/what-is-the-theoryconcept_b_3456241.html) outlines what we know about the miniature Arc reactor and speculates on the science and science fiction in building such a device. What caught my interest is the use of palladium in the reactor core, mentioned in the movies. In particular the author suggests the coupling of Pd-107 and Pd-103, whereby Pd-107 undergoes beta-decay, ejecting an electron that is eventually captured by Pd-103, and thus an electric cell is created.

Now if you wanted the energy of the sun in the palm of your hand, could palladium help you do that? Many moons ago, I studied reactions on metal surfaces, in particular trying to understand platinum catalysts. Palladium, which should be closely related to platinum and have “similar chemistry”, does something different with hydrogen. Palladium seemed to have the capacity to store subsurface hydrogen. One might speculate that compacting the hydrogen in palladium may provide conditions for the hydrogen to undergo fusion reactions and create vast amounts of energy. Sadly this is unlikely to work given there is no good mechanism to overcome the barriers needed for fusion, and the large amounts of energy involved would probably destroy the crystal structure of palladium possibly rendering the whole system useless.

Palladium was involved in the infamous case of “cold fusion” when Pons and Fleischmann prematurely reported that they had made a breakthrough device that allowed fusion nuclear reactions to take place at room temperature.  Maybe the Arc Reactor is just a pipe dream, but if it could be constructed, someone will be earning a lot of fame and money.