20 Years of Harry Potter

Technically, the first book in the series Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in late June of 1997, so this post might be a month late. So I’m posting my reflections to coincide with Harry Potter’s birthday!

To celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the books, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) featured an exhibition titled Harry Potter’s World: Renaissance, Science, Magic and Medicine. There were two lectures at NLM on June 27 and June 29 celebrating the occasion. The first one that focused on fandom I found less interesting even though I was less knowledgeable about this area. (I did learn about “wrock” music.) The second one by Stephen Greenberg titled Monsters in the Stacks was excellent, and I recommend it (archived here). Greenberg is an engaging and humorous speaker, and it was fun to see pictures of rare books related to the Harry Potter world.

While I was familiar with a number of the connections to alchemy mentioned by Greenberg including references to Paracelsus and others, I learned a number of new interesting factoids. In a sound-bite both funny and sad, Greenberg offhandedly said “What is alchemy anyway? It’s chemistry that doesn’t work.” Technically, that’s not true. The alchemists helped to invent and refine many experimental chemistry laboratory techniques. In the Q&A, someone who was amused by Greenberg’s wisecrack about non-working-chemistry commented that this made her an alchemist because “I practiced it when I took chemistry in college.” It just goes to show how much more work we need to do as teachers of chemistry.

Listening to Greenberg (who specializes in rare books) made me want to visit NLM. Incidentally I will be going to DC in late August for the American Chemical Society (ACS) national conference. I wasn’t originally planning to attend the Fall meeting since I took a bunch of students to the Spring meeting in San Francisco back in April, but I was invited to give a talk in a symposium of interest to me. I’ve only been to DC once for the Fall ACS conference back in 2009. The highlight of my time in DC was the Smithsonian mineral gallery, and hopefully I can find time for a return visit. Incidentally the ACS logo contains an alembic (a distillation apparatus) – Greenberg showed one of these from a page in one of the old books. His explanation of how these books were made and printed was fascinating.

But what have the Harry Potter books done for me the last twenty years? I think they helped spark my interest in the history of chemistry, and finding out more about the alchemists in particular. (This is an excellent book about the history of alchemy.) It also got me interested in the history of medieval monsters and beasts, now commercialized in an unprecedented way with Fantastic Beasts, a Harry Potter spin-off. By situating Harry Potter in contemporary England but connecting it to a medieval literary past, Rowling’s books helped spark a curiosity in historical areas I didn’t know much about. Interestingly Tolkien, my most-read author, didn’t spark similar interests possibly because Middle Earth and its predecessors were situated in a different realm. I also read Tolkien when I was much younger, before I knew I was interested in history, chemistry, science and philosophy. Reading Rowling’s books as an adult and academic has given me different touchstones.

Harry Potter helped start this blog when I was casting about for a theme. Ensconced in education, the prominent role of Hogwarts provided me with many things to think about related to education. While I don’t think Hogwarts provides an ideal education by any means, it does raise interesting questions about the role of theory and hands-on practice, different teaching styles, what’s important in an education, and how/why one gets admitted into a school in the first place. Education can be magical. But not all magical education turns out that way. Besides broader educational issues, I’ve also enjoyed thinking about the theory of magic and what a Potions class might resemble, through this blog. While Harry Potter related blog posts have decreased over time, I’ve kept up with writing about things of interest to me – and I see that as a good thing!

Happy Birthday, Harry Potter!

Thinking about Origins-of-Life

Last week I was at the ISSOL 2017 conference. Unlike the huge American Chemical Society national conference, this one only had 250 attendees and no concurrent sessions. The schedule however was jam-packed with talks, posters and panels in the morning, afternoon and the evening. ISSOL is the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. The international conference takes place once every three years. I was at ISSOL 2011 in Montpelier, France, just as I was shifting into origins-of-life research, but I missed the 2014 meeting in Japan due to other commitments.

The conference was hosted by UCSD, home of the Sun God, a prominent art piece commissioned by the Stuart Collection. Students organize a Sun God festival every year. I could have attended back when I was a postdoc at UCSD, but I chose to skip it. The Sun God featured prominently in the ISSOL 2017 conference logo. Here’s a picture from the tote bag I received at the conference. At the opening of the conference, one of the main conference organizers explained the appropriate significance of the logo. The Sun God is perched at the coast. Interfaces of rock and water are likely environments from the origin of life on Earth. The prominent sun featured on the chest of Sun God represents the solar energy influx that drives the non-equilibrium process of life. And if you look closely at the ocean waves, you can see a succession of water droplets that could represent protocells increasing in number!

I did the usual conference things: presented my work, met new people, reconnected with people I’d met before in the field, and learned a lot of the latest development in prebiotic chemistry, molecular evolution, exoplanet hunting, and Mars missions. I took a bunch of notes on my ISSOL notepad with my ISSOL pen (also stamped with the Sun God logo) and I’ve been slowly perusing them this week back in my usual office digs. While I won’t divulge any actual scientific details (since I haven’t sought permission from other presenters), here are some of my personal highlights and observations.

1.     I had several ideas for new projects that are related to current projects. I’m excited about the new prospects and feel re-energized about research explorations. I also see some potential collaborations down the road.

2.     While there were no earth-shattering breakthroughs, there was significant headway made in addressing a number of thorny origin-of-life conundrums. In particular, the community is moving away from staking out one’s turf of genes-first, metabolism-first, or membranes-first. Rather there was a strong sense of exploring co-evolution in these areas.

3.     There was a growing recognition that “messier” experimental conditions combined with state-of-the-art analytical techniques lead to more interesting results. Thermal and hydrative cycling, pH variation and buffering, and just some clever chemistry were featured.

4.     If you’re sending a probe to another planet or moon, there is a lot of very clever technology that must be developed that is lightweight, durable, and multi-tasking. Having recently finished reading Wonderland, I see echoes of how the sense of curiosity leads to technological breakthroughs. Astro-research isn’t strictly a necessity for life on Earth, and some would argue that the money should be directed elsewhere, but it’s amazing to see the creativity in technological development that takes place.

What constraints does chemistry place on the development of biology? That’s the subject of A World From Dust, a book by Ben McFarland. The catchy subtitle How the Periodic Table Shaped Life might relate to origin-of-life chemistry, although that’s not what the book is about. I read McFarland’s book over the last couple of weeks in concert with my preparing and attending the ISSOL conference. Introducing the book, the author states his aim of exploring Stephen Jay Gould’s famous analogy that replaying the tape of life would lead to organisms vastly different from what we see today in our sample size of N=1. While he thinks that forms of the organisms may vary, chemistry and environmental factors provide strong constraints on what may emerge and the evolutionary paths ‘explored’.

The book’s content is mainly focused on the metals and their role in life, predominantly as active centers in enzymes, with vignettes related to ion-channels and nucleic acid stabilization. McFarland strongly utilizes the work of the chemist R. J. P. Williams who published a book titled The Chemistry of Evolution: The Development of our Ecosystem. I read Williams’ book some years back and it is geared more towards scientists while McFarland’s is for a more general audience. Increasing entropy via maximizing energy rate density and increasing oxygenation of the biosphere are also linchpins supporting McFarland’s narrative.

McFarland spends much of the book discussing examples of metallo-enzymes, in accordance with his background as a biochemist and professor at Seattle Pacific University. There are many examples, and I think highlighting fewer with a little more depth would have made for less choppy reading. I skimmed certain parts but I found his book much more readable than Life’s Solution by Simon Conway Morris. McFarland’s book has the same overall thrust – chemical rules constrain and therefore lead to convergence of biochemistry – while Conway Morris attempts to throw the kitchen sink at you with example after example of convergence in biology. Being a chemist, I found McFarland’s vignettes more interesting. However, missing from the book, except for occasional allusions, is the diversity of organic chemistry. Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen (or CHON) are the main constituents of the molecules in extant life. Sulfur and Phosphorus and the metals are also important, perhaps in the processes of life and less so in terms of structural diversity. That’s a good thing to keep in mind because the ISSOL conference also featured discussion on molecular organization to effect the chemical reaction cycles of living systems, and not just focusing on building molecules of the right “structure”. Systems chemistry is important.

I’ve also been playing the new commercial version of Bios Genesis this month. I suspect thinking about the conference and origin-of-life questions was a motivating factor! I should probably post another replaying-the-tape session report with the new components. While I generally kept track of final player scores at the end of the game, I didn’t pay as much attention to tracking the early parts of the game when life first emerges. (I kept close track when playtesting to see if there were any biases due to the asymmetric powers of each player.) From what I recall, the blue (genes) and yellow (specificity) players had earlier starts at ‘creating life’ in my games this month. One might playfully refer to this genes-first or membranes-first (as opposed to metabolism-first or entropy-control-first) Of course in the game, having ‘chromosomes’ in all four colors are important for your organisms to survive so they’re all important if you don’t want your newly created organism to die off in a turn or two.

In my most recent game, parasites were excluded from the game. While I see their potential importance scientific-theoretically, and that they allow for some interesting gameplay options, I’ve found my games bogged down by parasites simply preventing life from flourishing and making it hard to get to some of the interesting later stages. I find that less fun and a bit more tedious from a gaming perspective. Certainly when introducing new players to the game, I think parasites should be left out (a suggestion I made to the designer). In the games I’ve played, parasites were essentially used in a ‘take-that’ strategy to slow down other players. Perhaps I need to think about other strategies where they can be used.

It’s been a great month for origin-of-life thinking: a conference, making good progress on one of my research projects, reading a lot, and playing Bios Genesis! I’ve ignored class prep for the upcoming semester, so this morning I started doing a little bit while the computational cluster was down for some updates.

Wonderland: Games

I had been looking forward to Chapter 5 in Steven Johnson’s Wonderland to read about one of my pastimes: playing games. The chapter starts out with a brief history of Chess. The author uses chess to illustrate the main thrust of his book about playing games. He writes: “[It is] one of the key ways in which the seemingly frivolous world affects the ‘straight’ world of governance, law and social relations. The experimental tinkering of games – a parallel universe where rules and conventions are constantly being reinvented – creates a new supply of metaphors that can be mapped on to more serious matters.” Such metaphors include “raise the stakes” and “wild cards”. Alan Turing, one of the giants of computing and A.I. wondered about whether machines can play chess.

No history of boardgames would be complete without mention of The Landlord’s Game. According to Johnson, the inventor Lizzie Magie “worked at various points as a stenographer, poet and journalist… and was also a devotee of the then-influential economist Henry George, who had argued… for an annual tax on all land held as private property – high enough to obviate the need for other taxes on income and production… Lizzie Magie appears to have decided that radical tax reform might make compelling subject for a boardgame.” Thus the ancestor to Monopoly was born, as can be seen from the 1906 picture of the gameboard. I won’t repeat the story of how Clarence Darrow “invented” and successfully marketed Monopoly; Johnson and many others have covered this.

The most interesting part of the chapter was on Games of Chance. Johnson begins with astrigali, a dice-like game that was the precursor to Backgammon. He then discusses Cardano’s famous The Book of Games of Chance where probabilities of dice rolls are discussed. Today, probability and statistics have widespread use and a firm theoretical basis. Johnson, though, ponders why it took so long to develop the basic theory of dice rolls – after all, folks had been gambling over the centuries on dice-like games. He proposes that “the answer to this riddle appears to lie with the physical object of the die itself.” [Die is singular for dice.] Early dice were not uniformly made, and were idiosyncratically biased. Johnson writes: “Seeing the patterns behind the games of chance required random generators that were predictable in their randomness.

To think that the edifice of probability and statistics was built on regulations placed on dice-makers forbidding the use of “loaded, mark of clipped dice” because there’s always a huckster around the corner trying to swindle you in a dice game. Hucksterism goes through much greater lengths in today’s technological society, but that’s a different story. Johnson writes: “By the time Cardano picked up the game, dice had become standardized in their design. That regularity may have foiled the swindlers in the short term, but it had a much more profound effect that had never occurred to dice-making guilds: it made the patterns of the dice game visible.” I even used these patterns when playtesting Bios Genesis to figure out how catalysts were generated by rolling triples given N dice.

This month I finally cracked open the new version of Bios Genesis and played several games. It had been over a year since I played, but I’ve been thinking about the origins of life this month (subject of my next post) and found myself sufficiently motivated. I did have to re-learn the rules again (they’re complicated) but I can now show you some of the newer graphics and make some comments about the game. To see the older graphics and read more about the game, you can read this session report. The following pictures were taken mid-game and I apologize for the blurriness. (My hands shake when I take photos.)

Here are the event cards (shown above). One is drawn at the beginning of every turn. We are three turns into the Archean Era, and are in a Tropical Waterworld. A Huronian Snowball has just hit leading to new areas where life may be seeded. (These are called refugia in the game.) Cosmic refugia and Terrestial refugia are active as shown by the non-shaded meteorite and mountains icons on the left of the card. The icons on the bottom panel indicate what takes place. Two new refugia are revealed. Then there is release of oxygen. (Organisms without protection against oxygenation of the atmosphere are in trouble.) Finally the snowflake in the blue circle indicates that the temperature is cold.

The two new refugia revealed are a Warm Pond and Eutectic Brine. The cubes represent “manna” that can be used to generate catalysts (in cycles!) and may form the seeds of chromosomal material if micro-organismic life is able to take root. Dice rolls determine how the manna is cycled through the system and if life can be “created”. The cube colors represent different key constituents in life: red for metabolism, blue for genetics, yellow for specificity (membranes), and green for managing entropy (i.e., increasing the efficiency of energy transduction).

The overlaid pictures above show my bacteria that Amyloid Hydrolysis bacterium that arose from the oceans. It has acquired ATP Synthase and Chemiosmosis Respiration allowing it certain special powers as indicated by the circled icons branching off the ‘helices’. I’m the Blue (Genes) player. My organism is being parasitized by a Salmonella virus from the Green (Entropy) player which is also equipped with Nitrogenase. Below is a picture of the Red (Metabolic) player’s macroorganism, Arrow Worms.

Overall I like the new graphics, even though they took some getting used to. It’s also nice to have actual cards on cardstock (rather than pieces of paper). I think a game’s aesthetic increases the enjoyment in playing – if it’s a good game. (If it is a lousy game, beautiful components don’t do anything for me.)

I’ve found that over time, I enjoy games such as Bios Genesis more and more because they are simulations that allow one to trace “what if” scenarios. I suppose it’s a good thing I don’t play video/computer games because those could be much more immersive environments that I might find hard to leave. Towards the end of his chapter on Games, Johnson traces the development of SpaceWar!, perhaps one of the first computer games. It had crappy graphics but being able to live-control those blips on the screen drew folks in. As we think about machine intelligence and forms of A.I., games have been the starting point. They also make the big news: Deep Blue versus Kasparov, Watson versus Ken Jennings, and just two months ago AlphaGo versus Ke Jie. But those algorithms also fuel scientific research delving into the mysteries of conscious life. The boundaries of playing games and more serious matters are increasingly blurred.

Wonderland: Technology, Movies and Hucksterism

In my second post of Steven Johnson’s Wonderland, I will discuss Chapter 4. The chapter is titled “Illusion: The Ghost Makers” and its main theme traces the rise of the Phantasmagoria and its connection to other forms of mass public entertainment today. Today’s horror-movie genre has its roots in these “fantasy” shows.

Johnson traces the history of these “ghost” shows starting with Schropfer in Germany. Subsequently Philidor in France raises the spectacle to a new art form with “three new contributions to the genre. First, he began rear-projecting the spectral images on a thin, semitransparent curtain that was otherwise invisible to the spectators… [He] also pioneered the technique of placing the magic lantern on wheels [thereby creating] the illusion that the specters were growing larger as they approached the terrified spectators. [Finally] he gave his spook show a name, one that would haunt the imagination of Europeans for decades to come: The Phantasmagoria.”

As to why people are attracted to such spectacles, I leave that up to your imagination. I personally don’t see the point of paying money to feel fear viscerally even though my mind knows that what I’m seeing isn’t real. There might be a sociobiological narrative purporting to “explain” this phenomenon, but clearly our imaginations allow us to immerse ourselves in the story. One doesn’t need a live show or an IMAX movie experience. A good book is sufficient. In Sold on Language, Sedivy and Carlson write have a section titled “The Leaky Insulation of Fiction.” Here’s a quote from their book.

“Fiction acts as a protective layer around an invented world that keeps certain actions from getting out into the real world… [but] what makes fiction really interesting and really useful are the ways in which the real and the unreal have a way of bleeding together. The [leaks in the wall] give fiction a power that goes well beyond mere amusement… We know that the events happening in the pretend world aren’t happening in the real world. But this doesn’t stop us from feeling as if they were real… You’ve experienced this if you’ve ever stayed up all night because you couldn’t put down the detective novel you were reading, or if you groaned in frustration when your favorite TV series ends in a cliffhanger. You were gripped by the need to know what happens next.”

But let’s get back to Johnson’s story. In the early nineteenth century, a Scottish scientist (and ordained minister) named David Brewster became very interested in the Phantasmagoria. (Apparently he invented the kaleidoscope, the “PlayStation of the late Georgian era”.) Why did he go to the West End to view these spectacles? Johnson writes: “He was there in part as a debunker, a skeptic discerning the secret craft behind the spectacle. But he also sensed that something profound was lurking in the trickery, that the showmen were exploiting the quirks in the human sensory system… He was [also] there to [take] notes for a book that he would come to call Letters on Natural Magic.”

As a scientist who enjoys thinking about history, religion, and magic, I think I would have enjoyed chatting with Brewster. These topics weave in and out of my blog posts. (I also discuss higher education, because I’m steeped in that milieu.) The version of Sherlock Holmes played by Robert Downey Jr. and directed by Guy Ritchie explores the intersection between science and magic through a modern action movie lens. The alchemist scientist-sorcerers are another example in the era where the wall between science and magic was blurred. This reminds me that I should really get around to writing my Potions book or Theory of Magic book. But I digress.

Here’s what I thought was most interesting about Johnson’s chapter. “Brewster had realized that, just as Enlightenment science had unlocked many doors for creating magical distortions of reality, it had also unlocked doors for detecting the laws behind that reality. The ability to understand the world advanced at roughly the same pace as the ability to deceive.” I had to stop and re-read that last sentence several times until it sank in. Let me repeat it, slightly paraphrased.

The ability to understand the world advances at roughly the same pace as the ability to deceive.

Indeed, it seems that with every technological advance made by well-meaning humans, hucksters are right there trying to take advantage with deception. The ability to make photographs also brought fake photos. When photos went digital, so did the doctoring of photos. When paper money started circulating, so did fake paper money. When coins were minted for currency, there were folks trying to make imitations using a cheaper material.

In my chemistry for non-science majors class, I regularly discuss Penta water. As the technology to “process” water advanced and the market for bottled water products increased, so did products such as Penta water. The scientific claims are nonsensical to a chemist, but would the general public recognize such hucksterism? Water products are a magnet for hucksters to ply their wares, the latest of these being Hydrogen water. I’m not going to provide a link to such nonsense. I’ll simply say that adding molecular H₂ to your water product will not get it in your system when you drink the “water”. Even if a tiny amount did, it would diffuse out so quickly as to make no difference. If for some reason H–H bonds of H₂ started breaking and reacting in your body with anything, you’ve got much bigger problems. Enough said.

The last thing I want to mention is Johnson’s discussion of showmen “exploiting the quirks of the human sensory system”. He points out that the entire TV and movie industry is based on our inability to separate images faster than twelve frames per second. Instead of seeing separate still images, we perceive continuous motion. I enjoy watching movies in the cinema. It’s an immersive experience, but one that relies on both the limits of human perception and the leaky wall in fiction that bursts into our imaginative lives. A Wonderland, indeed!

Wonderland: Music Looms

I mentioned Steven Johnson’s Wonderland in my previous post. The book traces six stories of how the human desire for novelty and playfulness lead to industries, inventions, injustices, and other things of import. The six chapters cover Fashion, Music, Taste, Illusion, Games, and Public Spaces. At first glance, these might not seem important from an instinctual struggle-for-survival view. The fun in reading Johnson’s book is seeing how he links one innovation to another starting from human curiosity and enjoyment of that which is both novel and surprising.Here’s how Johnson describes it in the book’s conclusion.

“It is in our nature to seek out things that surprise us. But the ‘surprise instinct’ also helps us answer a more complicated riddle: the innovative power of play, the way in which play compelled us to new cultural institutions that had little to do with our biological drives… Genes tend to steer us toward predictable goals… family, shelter, food. But the surprise instinct propels us in the opposite direction… Sometimes change happens out of necessity, out of the drive to satisfy our basic survival needs. But just as often cultural change happens because human beings are bored with the old experiences, and have a hunger for something new. This is the strange paradox of play and its capacity for innovation: play leads us away from our instincts and nature in part because of our instincts and nature.”

Today’s post focuses on Chapter 2: Music. Johnson considers biologically-driven arguments that relate our enjoyment music to some adaptive value in early Paleolithic societies. Without a time machine, we won’t know if these speculations hold any water. In the quote above, he hints that it is human to be creative; but why this is so remains unanswered. In any case, Johnson quickly moves from bone flutes to the Banu Musa, Islamic age builders of early automatic devices. (This led to the famous Digesting Duck and other automatons of eighteenth century Europe.

Johnson focuses on one particular design: “The Instrument Which Plays by Itself.” According to Johnson, “the notes played by the organ… were triggered by what came to be known as a pinned cylinder – a barrel with small ‘teeth’… As the barrel rotated, those teeth activated a series of levers that opened and closed the pipes of the organ. Different patterns of ‘teeth’ allowed different melodies…” And here’s the crucial bit: “[The] melody could be encouded onto these cylinders by capturing the notes played by a live musician on a rotating drum covered by black wax, strongly reminiscent of the phonographic technology that wouldn’t be invented for another thousand years.” The Banu Musa even called this process ‘cutting’, a word familiar in the world of music recordings.

A self-playing instrument is certainly novel. It’s not imperative that it exists for human survival, but it certainly is delightful and surprising. The first time I saw a self-playing piano, I stared at it for quite a while. It was strangely mesmerizing, or perhaps mesmerizingly strange. But going back to Johnson’s thesis, what makes this instrument a crucial landmark was its programmability.

Jacques de Vaucanson, French inventor of the Digesting Duck, also created a famous music-playing automaton known as the Flute Player. His fame led to a royal appointment where he planned to revolutionize the weaving industry. The goal was to design a machine that “could be taught to weave a vast set of potential patterns out of silk.” Vaucanson’s prototype looms did not catch on, but a later French inventor Joseph-Marie Jacquard perfected them. “Recognizing both the genius and the limitations of the pinned cylinder, Jacquard hit upon the idea of using a sequence of cards punched with holes to program the loom… [It was] a kind of binary system, the holes in the cards reflecting on-off states for each of the threads.” For those of you familiar with Charles Babbage and the history of computing, this all sounds rather familiar.

But the story gets more interesting. Over a long period of time, punch cards were the main devices for the input of digital information – until eventually superseded by the keyboard. (As a computational chemist, I say thank goodness!) Before reading Johnson’s book I had never thought to connect the computer keyboard with the musical keyboard. There’s a good reason why the piano, and other related keyboard instruments, are so widely played. With the simultaneous use of ten figures, the music produced by a single individual is amazing in scope. Not only that, the striking of the keys could be used to “capture the notes played in some kind of permanent medium”. This is easier said than done with an actual key-striking piano – by which I mean the keys striking the backboard when you open up a piano. Inking the keys and rolling a paper through the piano has its problems. (It would be eventually realized electronically through the MIDI keyboard.)

However there’s another device that captures information by inking keys that strike a moving sheet of paper – the typewriter. Johnson writes that the “first functioning machine that a modern observer would identify as a typewriter was patented in 1855 by an Italian named Giuseppe Ravizza… calling his creation the cembalo scrivano, the writing harpsichord.” Except for the fact that you should not play ‘chords’ on the typewriter, it functioned similarly to the piano. The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to minimize inadvertent ‘chords’ by a very quick typist. But with the modern computer keyboard, this is no longer a problem.

Johnson’s chapter on music contains much more than I’ve discussed here. He connects the pianola to Wi-Fi, the Oramics machine with modern software tools, and peer-to-peer networks to teenagers sharing music. Do read his book if any of this interests you! I will close by quoting the last bit of this chapter. “Too often we hear the old bromide that innovation invariably follows the lead of the warriors… Yes, the Department of Defense helped build the Internet. But the pinned cylinders of the music boxes gave us software. When it comes to generating new tools for sharing and processing information, the instruments of destruction have nothing on the instruments of song.”

Back-of-the-Envelope Game Design

A couple of nights ago, I was having trouble falling asleep. Shortly after lying down in bed, my mind was filled with thoughts of atoms combining in different proportions. I attribute this to reading The Last Sorcerers. I had just finished sections on Dalton’s Atomic Theory and the crucial contributions of Avogadro, Berzelius and Cannizzaro. (Perhaps they should be the ABC of Atomic Theory along with D for Dalton. There’s also Gay-Lussac…) Interestingly, Avogadro’s significant contributions went unrecognized for almost 50 years until Cannizzaro’s appearance at the 1860 Karlshruhe conference. Interestingly, Cannizzaro only made it to the conference because he had no revolutions or insurrections to participate in, having just missed Garibaldi’s liberation of Sicily.

But I digress. In fact, my swirling mind moved from atoms and molecules to thinking about board- and card-game mechanisms. I was recently introduced to a new game with a card set collection aspect layered on an area control board game. I’d also been revisiting several older games in my collection that had not been played in five to ten years. I had to re-learn the rules. Once you’ve played many different types of games, there’s little that is new “under the sun” (to quote the Teacher of Ecclesiastes). Newer games often repackage old underlying mechanisms of older games – with their own twists and themes, of course! The history of education is replete with similar examples, but that’s another story.

What started out as a semi-conscious falling asleep stage turned into an increasingly awake stage. This was annoying because I try to start my day relatively early and I don’t want to be short on sleep. My mind was working at an excited pace (I couldn’t help myself) and I had envisioned basic sets of game cards representing atoms. These could be combined to form molecules using valency rules. As players played sets of cards in front of them in the form of molecules, they could score points based on simple goal cards, e.g., CO₂ for greenhouse gas, H₂S for rotten gas, etc. But more complex goal cards involving chemical reactions would allow for the stealing and remixing of card sets. A player with O₂ and H₂ could stead another H₂ from another player and recombine them into two H₂O satisfying the Rocket Fuel goal.

Since I’m preparing for an Origin-of-Life conference in mid-July, thoughts about prebiotic chemistry invaded my consciousness. I started thinking about Urey-Miller chemistry, carbonic chemistry, increased atmospheric oxidation, and how the game could be divided into different eras. Things were starting to get complicated. And I was supposed to be trying to sleep. After 15 minutes, I hit upon a solution. I got out of bed. There were some envelopes (spam mail) on the table. I grabbed a pen and in a couple of minutes jotted down the ideas swirling through my head. You can see it below.

While it doesn’t have everything that crossed through my mind, it has the gist of the idea with some examples. More importantly, after my selective data dump, I read another chapter of The Last Sorcerers and felt drowsy enough to go to sleep.

Where do I go from here? If I want to further this project, it will take a lot of refining to make something that’s both enjoyably playable but yet retains its core chemical concepts. It’s hard to do both well – a testament to the failure of many “educational” games; they’re just not as interesting to play. There are already so many other interesting things I’d like to do this summer, and it’s almost half gone! Once the semester starts again, I’m probably going to get busy. I don’t think I have the discipline of famed game designer Reiner Knizia, who has a doctorate in mathematics, and designed games in the evenings outside of his day job in the financial industry. He eventually quit his day job to design games full-time. I don’t have Knizia’s talent, and I happen to love my day job as a chemistry professor. However I do feel a tickling itch of creativity bubbling up that might combine my love of games, chemistry and education.

Coincidentally, this weekend I started reading Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson. Here are some quotes from the Introduction. “Because play is often about breaking rules and experimenting with new conventions, it turns out to be the seedbed for many innovations that ultimately develop into much sturdier and significant forms. The institutions that so dominate traditional history – political bodies, corporations, religions – can tell you quite a bit about the current state of the social order. But if you are trying to figure out what’s coming next, you are better off exploring the margins of play: the hobbies and curiosity pieces and subcultures of human beings devising new ways to have fun… a space of wonder and delight where the normal rules have been suspended, where people are free to explore the spontaneous, unpredictable, and immensely creative work of play. You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun.”

Realistically, I don’t think my designing a game is going to change the world or solve the riddle of the origin-of-life. However I am likely to enjoy the work of creating something that could be both fun and educational. And even if it doesn’t see the light of day beyond family and friends, it will be a fun project. My spouse, trained as a chemist, thought the initial idea had promise – and she’d at least humor me with a few games of my yet unnamed and unrealized creation. But if this game actually gets designed and goes further than I anticipate, well, you saw it here first – on a picture of the back of an envelope!

The Last Sorcerers

The Last Sorcerers. The title font on the cover page is similar to my edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. It sounds like the title of a fantasy novel, but it’s actually about the history of chemistry. The cover art might have given it away – it juxtaposes an eighteenth century Alchemists painting by Pietro Longhi and a page showing Dalton’s atoms. (I use the latter in my class.) It’s also the last book by author Richard Morris, who writes books at the intersection of science and society. (Graphic from Amazon.)

The book consists of ten short chapters covering “the path from alchemy to the periodic table”. The writing is clear, crisp, and light. It doesn’t bog down in too many details – as history of science books are wont to do. Morris explains the key alchemical and scientific questions in very clear prose. While the book is pitched to a very general audience, scientists will also find enough that is engaging. What distinguishes it from other books on this subject is its focus on the interesting (and quirky) lives of the alchemist-scientists. I’m halfway through the book, just finishing up the entry on Joseph Priestley. Antoine Lavoisier is next, and I’m looking forward to Dalton, Mendeleev, and more. (If you want a more detailed and comprehensive history of alchemy, I suggest The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence Principe.

While I am familiar with many of the major characters in the book, I was delighted to learn a number of things new to me. Chapter 2 focuses on Paracelsus. I knew his theories and his bombastic name, Philipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. I did not know that he chose Aureolus as his own alchemical name, or that technically he had no legal right to the von Hohenheim title, his father being an illegitimate child. He also gave himself the name Paracelsus (meaning “greater than Celsus”), and in fact he thought he was greater than everyone else who came before him. Criticizing others was something he did often, although he was apparently a capable physician. He had to keep moving from town to town because he regularly angered prominent townfolk.

Chapter 3 focuses on Robert Boyle, famous for his book The Sceptical Chymist and Boyle’s Law – the latter is taught in introductory chemistry classes in the “Gases” chapter. I did not know that Boyle also wrote “religious romance” novels. Apparently his Seraphic Love was a hit during his time with nine editions and translations into other languages. Besides fiction he also wrote a number of theological treatises that led to him being “offered high positions in the Anglican Church more than once. Characteristically, he refused them…” Boyle was also an alchemist, and like other alchemists, these writings were in “a variety of ciphers and invented code words for different chemical substances or alchemical procedures. Like most other alchemists, he believed that if methods of preparing the Philosopher’s Stone became widely known, the results would be catastrophic.”

Last week, as I was reworking my General Chemistry course, I wrote up a section on atomic line spectra. Shown above is an example from an older website that I like because the accompanying information is both useful and interesting information. The hydrogen line spectrum, in particular, played a crucial role in discovering the quantum nature of electrons in atoms. Also, each element in the Periodic Table has its own unique “fingerprint” spectrum, and this led to the discovery of new elements. I had included the discovery of helium in my lecture notes, but I had forgotten Robert Bunsen’s discovery of cesium (“sky blue” from the Latin caesius) and rubidium (“dark red” from the Latin rubideus) from the spectral lines. Yes, he’s the eponym of the Bunsen burner, and his collaboration with Gustav Kirchoff led to a plethora of new discoveries. Interestingly, Bunsen finally isolated the very reactive cesium and rubidium by commissioning “a chemical factory near Heidelberg to spend several weeks evaporating and chemically treating some 12,000 gallons of Durkheim water”. This water came from the Durkheim mineral springs that Bunsen had first analyzed. The process yielded 10 grams of rubidium and 7 grams of cesium.

I should include cesium and rubidium when I talk about spectroscopy since I’ve used this old Brainiacs YouTube video in a number of my classes. Don’t try it at home! Reading about the many experiments on gases, and how integral they were to the rebirth of atomic theory, I’m wondering if I should cover the “Gases” chapter differently. It normally shows up at the end of the semester, partly because of the textbook we’re using, but I’m wondering whether I should split it up and sprinkle the topics across the semester. (I did this with Electrochemistry for the second semester in a similar situation.)

The book also made me think about how the first Harry Potter title was changed from the British Philosopher’s Stone to the American Sorcerer’s Stone. For many years, I thought that Philosopher’s Stone was the much better choice because of alchemical history. But now I think that Sorcerer’s Stone isn’t a bad choice. The cast of characters in Morris’ book both exhibited the traits of natural philosophers and alchemical sorcerers. In that time period, magic and science were not so different from each other. I wonder what they would have thought about our clear-cut distinctions. In any case, for more on the colorful lives of the early scientists, I recommend reading The Last Sorcerers in full. I’m looking forward to reading more vignettes in the second half of the book that I can use in my classes.

First Third of Summer

A third of the summer has come and gone. Overall I’m happy with the way I spent my time. But since I blogged about summer plans, or perhaps I should call them aspirations, I thought I would compare my aspirations with reality. So here’s what I’ve done or not done in one month.

Research Goals.

I have not started writing up the paper of a close-to-complete student project yet. Two reasons. One, not all the results are in yet. The story is unlikely to change, but maybe I’m just using that as an excuse. Two, I was considering actually having the student write up a first draft to the paper. She’s very talented. In my fifteen years as a faculty member, I’ve only had two other undergraduates write up the first draft, and therefore were the first authors on their papers. This student has the caliber to do the same. However, the process will take much longer compared to if I just wrote it up. There’s still time to decide.

On the other hand, I have been making excellent progress moving another student project forward. I had a breakthrough in mid-June on a problem that had stymied me for several months, and now I can see my way forward to another paper and have been generating results in earnest. A paper is a narrative – there is a beginning and an end. However its end is a new beginning. In thinking about the story arc for this paper, I’ve been reading some of the older stories that I will cite in my contribution to the grand story. I now have a better glimpse of several sequels – or the germ of a grant proposal. It will need to percolate a little more before I determine where best to request funding for my next grant. As a bonus, I also have more results for my upcoming conference presentation later this month. Making figures for the presentation also means making figures for the paper, so I’m killing two birds with one stone.

I’ve made reasonable progress in learning the new piece of software at my disposal, although I still feel like a novice. I wrote up some new crib sheets for my students, and modified some analysis and calculation setup scripts. There is still much more to learn.

Teaching Goals.

I have made no progress on my Potions textbook. Perhaps I should set myself the goal of writing drafts of it as blog posts.

On the other hand, I am making good progress in redesigning my General Chemistry course for the upcoming semester. The theme is “Hiding in Plain Sight: Using Light to Uncover the Structure of Matter”. The idea is to emphasize the many uses of electromagnetic radiation in hinting to us what is going on in the world of electrons, atoms, molecules, and network solid structures. This leads to the conceptualization of models to visualize the atomistic world – how those models give us a hint of “reality” but have their limits. I’ve written up material for the first two weeks of class up to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and how we cannot precisely determine the location of electrons. Orbitals are next!

I have not started work on the new Research Methods course, but I’ve asked my colleagues who taught the course last year for the first time for access to their materials. My plan is to start working on this in July, i.e., I should start this coming week.

Hobby Goals.

I cooked three new dishes in June, a pasta with colatura, salmon with lemon and ginger dressing, and a stir-fry lamb dish. It was my first time cooking lamb. I did not get around to playing Bios Genesis, but I did get in a few games of an older Phil Eklund design, Origins: How We Became Human. It had been five years since I last played it, so I had to relearn the rules. Eklund games are rules-dense so it took a while and I made many mistakes in the first couple of games. I have not read The Silmarillion yet, but I did read five other books in June – several of which I’ve blogged about. One that I didn’t mention in a blog post was All These Wonders presented by The Moth. I don’t normally read short autobiography, but this compilation was excellent. I highly recommend it.

All in all, a good first third. But it’s a new month, so Onward!