The Glass Bead Game

Imagine the ivoriest of ivory towers; a place where scholars focus on the life of the mind, with fellow scholars of like mind. No distractions from the messiness of the ‘real’ world outside. Your meals, lodgings, and basic daily needs are provided. Your task is to contemplate knowledge across the liberal arts, synthesizing new connections between different disciplines, even as this activity deepens each area of knowledge. It sounds like a veritable Eden for academics.

Such an idyllic situation could come to pass, if a rich-enough country or government decided to pour resources into setting up such an institution. Faint glimmers in the present day exist in the sciences, typically set up with private money. In olden times of patronage, monasteries sprung into being as places of both isolation and learning – sometimes even training teacher-priests.

In The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse, such a place exists some three to four hundred years from now. After a time of turmoil, the nations are in relative peace, and a scholarly class has been elevated to pursue the life of the mind. Youngsters who show promise are ushered into elite schools, and through a weeding process, the crème de la crème emerges to occupy the ivoriest tower. These intellectual-powerhouses engage in what is known as the Glass Bead Game, an abstract, mind-absorbing, activity involving the great synthesis of Knowledge with a capital K.

The novel is a biography of one such individual, a talented orphan named Joseph Knecht. Plucked from obscurity, he becomes a protégé of the elites, rising to the rank of Magister Ludi, master of the Glass Bead Game. His talent is first discovered through music, but he quickly absorbs and adapts the arts, the humanities, the sciences, into his own elite and rarefied education once given the opportunity. But weaved into his life, impinging upon it, is the outside world. He finds such glimpses annoying at first, but they begin a change in him as he gradually synthesizes what he has been taught with what he is being shielded from.

Teaching and mentorship feature prominently. In exchange for supporting its monastic existence, the ivory tower supplies teachers – purveyors of knowledge – to both elite and prosaic schools all over. Joseph finds joy in teaching, where previously he considered it a burden and a distraction to his own research. He begins to desire making a greater impact out there in the ‘real’ world. The delicacy of close-mentoring relationships is explored with Joseph as both mentee and mentor, juxtaposing the challenge when different talented individuals with very different temperaments and motives come together.

The novel explores, in a somewhat abstract way, the relationship between ‘pure’ disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches. Some ivory tower scholars focus almost exclusively on deepening their own disciplines; others are cross-disciplinary synthesizers; and there are tensions between these groups. What does it mean to be creative? What does it mean to create new knowledge? Is a synthesis of known things new knowledge? Can a vocabulary be created that spans, or even transcends, the classical disciplines? The creation of this connective-vocabulary is assumed to have taken place in some symbolic-thematic form, although the descriptions are necessarily vague in the novel. It’s hard to imagine something you can’t quite imagine; like the finite attempting to grasp the infinite.

No institution is bereft of its own internal politics. The ivory tower has its own version as those of us in academia know full well. Hesse closely explores the relationship between politics and history; not a rarefied history of events connecting abstractions but one that is ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. The elite scholars shudder at the latter, seeing it as something impure and to be avoided. But Joseph learns much from a sabbatical-like sojourn to a monastery for several years. The Roman Catholic church is still alive and well in Hesse’s future world, and having survived the travails of many centuries, it has lessons of encouragement and warning to the seemingly humanistic-atheistic bent of the latest ivory tower and its Glass Bead Game players.

There is a playfulness to the narrative in The Glass Bead Game. The ‘biographers’ of the protagonist couch their story in all seriousness, pontificating as you might expect an ivory tower secluded scholar to do. I had the strange feeling of jibing with their pronouncements in a weaving sort of way – sideways rather than head-on. The preface to the novel reminds the reader of its tongue-in-cheek nature, and I think that’s a good way to read it. The prose sounds heavy but you should read it ‘light’ and not read it over-seriously.

This is my first Hesse novel. More than eighty years after its publication, I found it an uncanny read given the present-day assault on higher education especially questioning of the value of a liberal arts education. In the novel, history looks back at an age of wars and futility, and is glad that we got past that era – which sounds eerily like our era today. Somehow civilization came around to the idea of glorifying elite education and deeming it worthy of support in The Glass Bead Game, but it doesn’t look like we’re headed in that direction – at least one that is government-supported; a private technocratic oligarchy seems a likelier bet in our world to support such endeavors. And we see an accelerated widening divide between rich-elites and the not-so-haves, with no peaceful solution, no Eden, in sight.

Sodium Trichloride

Chemical bonding is at the heart of an introductory course in chemistry. Often, this topic is divided into three categories: ionic, covalent, and metallic bonding. Ionic bonding is often covered first as the introductory segue into chemical bonds; I’ve eschewed this approach for a more generalized introduction to “attractive forces between particles”. However, I do quickly get to ionic bonding, as there are many concepts to be illustrated!

We begin with the interaction between two separated ions, Na(+) and Cl(-). The attractive impetus between the ions is calculated using Coulomb’s Law. At some point, the ions can’t get any closer due to the Pauli Exclusion Principle. We can calculate the “strength” of the bond at the optimal distance between the two ions. We conclude that the ionic bond is stable because this stabilizing “bond energy” exceeds the cost of electron transfer from a sodium to a chlorine atom (primarily due to the first ionization energy of sodium).

But NaCl experienced macroscopically is a solid. Now we may introduce the structures of cubic solids and packing considerations. The larger chloride ions are positioned according to a face-centered cube while the “holes” are where the smaller sodium ions reside. We then consider the favorable formation of NaCl from its elements, sodium metal (solid) and molecular chlorine gas. Energies are calculated. We set up what is known as a Born-Haber cycle, and we can extract a quantity known as the lattice energy. The lattice energy is not equal to the simple bond energy we calculated from two ions; in G-Chem the N-body interactions are hand-waved, while in Inorganic, we can estimate the Madelung constant.

Now that we’re working with standard energies under standard conditions, we can start to ask interesting questions. In G-Chem, I show students a table of (calculated) lattice energies, and we reason our way through how to qualitatively extrapolate these values to ionic compounds not captured in the simple table. At this point I attempt to convince the students that Na(2+) and Cl(2-) should be a better representation for sodium chloride because the lattice energy stabilization should be much greater. After probing the variables, students eventually make an appropriate counterargument. We then discuss the analogous MgS followed by other interesting and more complex cases.

My students at this point can make an argument as to why Na₂Cl or NaCl₂ should not be stable (at least under standard conditions). I try to impress on them that the argument needs to be made based on energy and packing considerations and not on the “happy atoms” story they may have imbibed in secondary school. But I didn't push it further. What about sodium trichloride, NaCl₃?

We know that NaCl₃ and Na₃Cl exist at high pressures, along with a range of other stoichiometries from an interesting study in Science (2013, vol. 342, pp. 1502-1505), studied computationally and then synthesized. There’s even a cool picture of the cubic unit cell of NaCl₃ in a New Atlas article highlighting the study. We computational chemists are not just designers, we’re also artists! (We have to rely on our experimental colleagues for the actual craft of making these compounds.) A more recent article (Chem. Phys. Lett., 2017, vol. 672, pp. 97-98) calculates the lattice energies of these unusual compounds. I could set up a Born-Haber cycle problem for my students, who can dutifully calculate.

I find that the strongest students – usually the ones who had good chemistry preparation in secondary school – upon encountering a problem-to-solve quickly jump to calculating instead of spending a bit more time thinking. Why might NaCl₃ exist? Are there ways to think about it chemically? Could there be an Na(+)Cl(-) lattice with four equivalents of molecular Cl₂ somehow stuffed into the face-centered-cubic unit cell? How might the unit cell change? If we’ve covered drawing more complex Lewis structures by this juncture, could we consider the trichloride anion and have an ionic lattice with Na(+) and Cl₃(-)? (Drawing the Lewis structure of I₃(-) is a standard example my students tackle in G-Chem.)

As interesting as I’m finding this example to ponder, it’s utility to further concepts in G-Chem is limited. I might use it as an extra credit exercise or something to occupy the advanced students. However, it could work well for Inorganic, which I haven’t taught in a while so I’m not sure how I would choose to rejigger the syllabus to include this sort of investigation. Since I use my blog as a memory-offload, I’ve recorded my quick thoughts here – and maybe I’ll return to this example (hopefully) in the near future.

The Occult

Prior to the thirteenth century, most folks thought that “there was only one way to do magic and that was to enlist the help of demons.” That’s according to Philip Ball, in his book Invisible. I’ve enjoyed Ball’s writing over the years, so I was happy to spot Invisible at the local library.

Chapter 2, the focus of today’s blog post, is on Occult Forces. Yes, they do exist in nature, since occult forces are literally “influences that are invisible or hidden”. If we measure nature by what we humans can see, then the foundations of chemistry certainly fall under the occult. Atoms are too small to be seen by the naked eye tuned to the frequencies of visible light. We can “see” atoms mediated by technology, if you believe the output on a computer screen hooked up to a scanning tunneling microscope. Molecules are smears of electron density from neighboring atoms. We don’t see chemical bonds – certainly not sticks connecting balls – although arguably the localized electron density is the bond. With very careful manipulation you can “see” a chemical reaction as atoms are nudged toward each other, but only on the computer screen.

During the Renaissance, non-demon-mediated magic began to dominate. It was called natural magic. Ball describes it thus: “… nature itself was infused with invisible, occult forces that caused marvelous effects. These forces rationalized a whole suite of ‘philosophical arts’ that today seem to exemplify the credulousness of that age: alchemy, astrology, divination. But the aims of natural magic were primarily practical, even mundane: it was a system by means of which useful matters could be accomplished, whether making metals and medicines through alchemy, or constructing ingenious machines, or hiding things from sight.”

Magnetism was well-known since ancient times. It certainly seemed magical. The harnessing of electricity was magical to nineteenth century onlookers wowed by the scientific demonstrations of the day – occult, but no longer devilishly so. Gravity’s “action at a distance” certainly seemed occultic, as introduced by Isaac Newton. Einstein’s explanation of bendy space-time still sounds strange to modern ears. As a non-physicist, I still have to work hard when I think about field theories. When I teach chemistry, I mainly resort to simple classical pictures, even though I’m an applied quantum mechanic.

I agree with Ball that I’ve become comfortable with the occult. So have my students, before they set foot in my class, however much I try to remind my students of the strangeness of scientific theories and models. Ball writes: “Today we accept invisible emanations and forces without demur: they bind atoms and molecules, hold shut the refridgerator door and enable us to talk to one another from mountain-tops. And like natural magicians we can control and manipulate them, and work wonders.” Perhaps, that’s part of the attraction of science – it’s like magic!

The surprising thing about the advance of science is that overall it doesn’t seem to have wiped out occultic thinking. Anthropologists and sociologists have shed some light. Ball writes: “For magic is not so much a technical skill as a mode of thinking… a genuine cultural phenomenon rather than a consequence of individuals’ ignorance and credulity… we engage in [it] every day: if I follow this routine, I will be protected from illness.” Given the manic behaviors observed during the present COVID outbreak, magical thinking is alive and well.

From ascribing the unknown to demons, magic through scientific technology has evolved to entertain and instruct. Whether it be a cool chemistry demo, or a magician’s disappearing act, the audience knows there’s an “explanation” behind what they see but they’re there to be wowed away from the mundane. Ghosts, apparitions, and demons, made a comeback on the theater stage, in staged photographs, and later in movies, featuring the technical wizardry of the day. Today’s blockbusters are about the fantastic, the superheroes, the larger-than-life, to distract us from what we deem mundane. Industrial Light & Magic is indeed an apt name for a techno-wizardry company.

Or perhaps techno-wizardry is in the eye of the beholder. I no longer know who first came up with the following lines, but they seem apt to quote in this situation. Here’s my version. “Anything invented before you were born seems natural. Anything invented during your youth is exciting technical wizardry. Anything invented once you hit middle age is the work of demons.”

Questioning Mind-Set Theory

Earlier this month, the following article was published in Psychological Science.

If you follow education news or punditry, you’ve likely come across mind-set theory, first associated with Carol Dweck, and now taking on a life of its own. Is it yet another fad? Or does it have legs?

First, a quick intro to mind-set theory. I will quote the definitions used in the article. “People who hold growth mind-sets (i.e., incremental theorists) believe that attributes are malleable, whereas those who hold fixed mind-sets (i.e., entity theorists) believe that attributes are unchangeable.” They quote a Dweck paper exhorting the importance of funding more research on mind-set theory as it impacts the education of all our children: “…students with growth mindsets seek to learn and develop their abilities, and thus pursue challenges, value effort, and are resilient to setbacks; in contrast, students with fixed mindsets avoid challenges (which could reveal ‘permanent’ deficiencies), dislike effort (which they think signals low ability), and give up more easily when facing setbacks”.

Wow! The student with the growth mind-set sounds like the ideal student all of us would like to have in class. If only we had classes full of growth mind-set students! We don’t want any of those lazy students who don’t want to be challenged and give up easily, thank you very much. What do I see in my classes? Bits of both. No truly ideal students. No truly lazy ones. That’s not surprising. A lot of things can affect my own motivation to learn and persevere, including how much sleep I had the previous night, whether I’ve had caffeine, whether I’ve just had a nice uplifting conversation or a trying painful one, whether I’ve recently heard good news or bad news, and maybe how many clouds are in the sky.

But to sell ideas, or in this case to test them, you need to encapsulate them into pithy statements. It’s easier if they are idealized statements that sound like polar extremes. Thus, the authors formulate six statements to test. (They draw examples from Dweck and co-workers to support their formulated statements.)

·      People with growth mind-sets hold Learning goals

·      People with fixed mind-sets hold Performance goals

·      People with growth mind-sets persist to overcome challenge

·      People with fixed mind-sets believe that talent alone – without effort – creates success

·      People with growth mind-sets are more resilient following failure

·      People with fixed mind-sets hold performance-avoiding goals

You’ve seen the article’s abstract, so the results are not surprising. The authors find scant correlation for any of these statements. I’m not surprised. Let’s look at the methodology: N = 438 undergraduates answering a bunch of Likert-scale questionnaires (Qs). To measure mind-set, students took Dweck’s eight-question Implicit Theories of Intelligence Q. Then there’s a sixteen-question Goal Orientation Q, a Response to Challenge Q, and one to measure “belief in talent versus effort” which simply asks the students to agree-disagree with three statements: “talent alone – without effort – creates success”, its opposite, and a “both are needed” version. I bet almost all my students would identify with the “both are needed” version over the others. (My reading of their data suggests I’m right.)

The challenge of designing questionnaires to support or debunk mind-set theory is fraught with complications. That’s why there will be no clear winner in this debate, at least for a while. Believers in mind-set theory will continue to champion it; critics will continue to criticize it. There’s no good way to measure implicitly any of these constructs – they’re complex and multifaceted even if rendered in seemingly simple statements. I can’t look into your brain to know how you think about these things. Constructs are just, well, constructs. You can come up with different ones; the authors cite three others (self-efficacy, need for achievement, openness to experience) that they think show better correlation with the “data” than mind-set theory.

There are two tests that I found interesting in the paper. To measure cognitive ability, the study took composite averages of student performance on the Cattell Culture Fair Test 4 and a Letter Set test. These are pattern recognition tests, similar to what you might see on an IQ test. Then, they had the students take challenging items in Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices Challenge Test (also pattern recognition), told them their scores, and then gave them some less-challenging items and seeing how they did after the initial feedback. I thought this was a clever design. Interestingly, the students with more of a growth mind-set, did worse on the second set of Raven’s Test, although the effect size was still small.

What did I learn from all this? I’d like my students to exhibit the qualities associated with the growth mind-set as quoted above, but I’m certainly not going to classify them as moving from fixed mind-set to growth mind-set; I don’t think these labels are helpful. (I still hear students making unhelpful claims about “learning styles”.) Although I will continue to remind students that they have the capacity to learn new things, encourage them to do so, and remind them that their professors are there to help them. Students have a jumble of motivations when they come to college; my small piece of the pie is to help them appreciate (and perhaps even enjoy) learning chemistry.

Periodic Table of Language

What is the elemental basis of language? Are there words which all (known) languages share? How might one go about answering such questions?

It turns out that a team of linguists has been working on creating a meta-language made up of primes – the elemental words of any language. It’s called “natural semantic metalanguage” or NSM. Forty years down the road, the most up-to-date list consists of 65 primes, less than the number of chemical elements in our periodic table. Using only the 65 primes, one can define any other word in any language and tease out the (often subtle) differences between closely related words in different languages. It is cumbersome to do so, but it is elemental. And it works.

I learned about the NSM project in David Shariatmadari’s Don’t Believe a Word, a book I alluded to in my last blog post. There are many fun tidbits about words and languages, but not just at a superficial level; the author dives into linguistic details, yet keeps his prose breezy and light. I’m not a linguist, yet I found his book readable, engaging and delightful.

Are some languages better than others? Well, what do you mean by better? It’s been claimed that Sanskrit is the most efficient language and that NASA has endorsed it – the endorsement isn’t quite true, but there has been some analysis comparing artificial intelligence programming and Sanskrit. Or if you’re looking for an efficient script, perhaps you should consider Korean. It’s certainly well-designed and compact. Turns out there’s a study comparing information density in seven widely spoken languages covering the three main varieties (isolating, fusional, agglutinative). Mandarin turns out to be the most informational dense, and Spanish the least. But… There’s always a But.

The point of language is to communicate. Although some languages might seem more ‘complex’ or dense than others, they seem just as effective in communicating – at least if you’re a native speaker, using the language day-in and day-out. Many of us don’t have that skill set or practice. In the last five years, I’ve been learning Spanish and Mandarin as sort of “third” languages. I’m terrible at both, and they are indeed very different languages, but my communicative capacity in both is surprisingly similar; I can communicate fine with kindergarteners, and have very limited ability conversing with adults.

But there are differences. When listening to Spanish, I have trouble catching the key words. For Mandarin, I’m still translating the first three words in my head and miss the next three – due to its high information density. Spanish, on the other hand, being of lower density is spoken more quickly by native speakers. My reading comprehension of Spanish is much better than my listening. For Mandarin, I have trouble telling some of the characters apart, or when they are used in different contexts (with alternate meanings).

Shariatmadari explains why.

All languages do the job we need them to do: allow us to communicate effectively. There is… a fairly consistent ‘rate of information transmission’. If this dipped too far, the language would fail to perform the tasks required of it – using it would be like fumbling in a second language. If the rate went up too high, it would exceed our psychological and cognitive capacities (it would be impossible for our tongues and brains to keep up with). In other words, languages cluster around a communicate sweet spot.

Sci-fi could have a field day exploring how a cognitively superior alien race* might structure and speak its own language, possibly exceeding our ability to comprehend. Since I study the origin of life, this made me think of the different informational systems of biochemistry. We think of the four-letter alphabet DNA (or RNA) as the “informational” molecule. Nucleic acids sequences are translated into proteins which have a twenty-letter alphabet. Sugars have their own alphabet too, with more variation between distantly related organisms. And helping the crosstalk between these systems is a larger (yet still small) group of metabolites and co-factors that facilitate “speech” or signaling. Chemicals rather than words are communicated. There’s a physicality to it. Like our sense of smell, communicated by molecules wafting through the air, in contrast to soundwaves formed by spoken words.

Do the different biochemical languages have different information density? Or complexity? Or communicative efficiency? It’s hard to quantify these in different systems. What scale do we choose to measure these different systems against each other? Test-tube chemistry might be called “simple”- reactants collide and react – it’s raw and direct. Biochemistry, on the other hand, is heavily-mediated chemistry. One system talks to another system mediated by translators. This made me think of Shariatmadari’s description of the seeming “continuum” between German and Dutch as one examines the language of the bordering communities, seemingly in-between. He provides another dramatic example:

Inhabitants of Slovenia, which borders Italy, might find it hard to understand their fellow Slavs in Bulgaria, which borders Turkey. But they’re only a couple of steps away from each other. Get a Serb and a Macedonian to stand in between them, and you’ve assembled the perfect linguistic relay team. These areas of overlap, of links in an unbroken chain, are called ‘dialect continuums’, delicate structures, which… have been eroded by both globalization and nationalism.

Chemistry has elements. Does it have a language? At its base, is it akin to a pidgin, where over time as biochemistry evolved, it turned into a creole? Were LUCA and its cousins the seemingly pre-Babel-babble? Perhaps I should be collaborating with a linguist to consider these questions!

*While Arrival (the movie) is not mentioned in Shariatmadari’s book, he does discuss the debunking of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least in broad terms.

Uncleftish Beholding

In 1989, the science-fiction author Poul Anderson wrote a short essay titled “Uncleftish Beholding”. It’s an example of what English might have looked like (applied to science) if it did not use any loanwords derived from French, Greek, and Latin.

If you’ve never heard of it, I strongly recommend skimming it here before you continue reading this blog post.

Okay, you’ve read through the essay? (Or at least skimmed it?)

You can likely guess from the opening paragraph that it has to do with elements and the building blocks of matter. “Uncleftish Beholding”, which sounds like Olde English, directly translates to “Atomic Theory”. In Greek, the atom is defined as that which cannot be divided. To be cleft is to be broken apart – thus, Un-cleft-ish corresponds to a-tom-ic. Behold! Think about it!

I discuss definition of an atom on the first day of any introductory college chemistry course I’ve taught. Given most of my students have had a decent high school science education, the phrase “Atomic Theory” holds no surprises. They know we’ll be discussing small bits of stuff in a framework that sorta hangs together. Every single one of my students comes to class having already believed matter is composed of atoms. (I ask.) Or at least no one seems brave enough to deny it on Day One when they’re still trying to figure out who their strange professor is. I try to impress upon my students how surprising it is that they all see the picture below and immediately think of water; their education system has successfully indoctrinated them!

If you ask the person-on-the-street what is Atomic Theory, a range of responses might be elicited. For example, the word “atomic” refers to nuclear weapns – the atom bomb – certainly to some generations. And what is a “theory”? A non-scientist might think a theory is a fanciful opinion when you don’t know if something is a fact. But if the two words are coupled together (“atomic theory”), I’m guessing the typical guess will equate “theory” to knowledge. Thus, Atomic Theory relates to the knowledge we have about nuclear weapons, and then by extension, nuclear energy and related stuff. So, while my students sitting in chemistry class, are primed to interpret Atomic Theory correctly in their context, the person-on-the-street might think differently.

Returning to Uncleftish Beholding, we read of “firststuffs” (elements) existing as “motes” (tiny bits) called “unclefts” (atoms). Unclefts can link together to form “bulkbits” (molecules) by forming “bindings” (chemical bonds). Thus, water consists of two “waterstuff” (hydro-gen) unclefts and one “sourstuff” (oxy-gen, or acid-producer) unclefts. The element carbon is “coalstuff”; nitrogen is “chokestuff”. What a pain it is to wade through this stuffy jargon-laden language!

I learned about Uncleftish Beholding through Don’t Believe a Word, a new book by the journalist David Shariatmadari. The author does a wonderful job bringing to the fore issues in linguistics to people-on-the-street like me. I only took one non-science free elective in college, Intro to Linguistics. It was a fascinating class that focused on sound production and syntax, popular topics in the field at the time. Anyway, I recommend Shariatmadari’s book to anyone interested in the play of language – it’s very engaging!

Uncleftish Beholding reminded me of an exercise three years ago where a visiting professor introduced the “Montillation of Traxoline”. I won’t reveal what it means if you’ve never heard of it, but it reminds us teachers how much jargon we use and that we need to give our students time to assimilate our scientific terminology. It will help them as they progress through class, but we need to introduce it thoughtfully and systematically – and not too much at one time.

While my students have heard of elements, atoms, protons, and neutrons, some of them may not have heard of (or may not remember) Isotopes. In Uncleft Beholding, these are “samesteads”. This isn’t too challenging for students to digest, and most of them figure it out pretty quickly after a few sample questions. On the other hand, when we start discussing different types of Isomers, there are many glazed looks – especially since these all have jargony names – constitutional isomers, stereoisomers, diastereomers, enantiomers, epimers, anomers, etc. I recently sat in on a biochemistry survey course (where O-Chem is not a pre-requisite) and the students struggled a bit to figure out these bits.

I learned science in a different language. Scientific terms were cumbersome. Some were brand new terms. Others were derived from familiar words with shades of Uncleft Beholding. I couldn’t figure out the difference between matter and mass; the two words looked even more similar than their English equivalents – until I re-learned the terms in English. I’m not sure I would have persisted in science if I did not leave my home country and learn science in English. I had no clue what was going on in my two years of secondary school chemistry.

Reflecting on how I think about chemistry today, it’s a combination of words, pictures, and abstract ideas. I effortlessly glide across the three points of Johnstone’s Triangle – the macroscopic, microscopic, and symbolic. I recognize immediately that carbon is central in CO₂, nitrogen in both N₂O and NO₂, and that two of these molecules are linear and one is bent; two have a net dipole but one (which is linear) does not. Sometimes we write chemical formulae alphabetically, sometimes we do not. Sometimes we split up a formula (CH₃COOH instead of C₂H₄O) and sometimes we do not. I’ve a pretty good idea what happens when you mix different molecules – if they will react and how. But all this knowledge has been built up over years of experience. It’s obvious to me. But not to students taking their first chemistry class where stuff might resemble Uncleftish Beholding.

Ah, the power of language! It can illuminate or obscure. We should be thoughtful in its handling and how we communicate.

Hacker Tools

Yesterday I attended a cybersecurity talk aimed generally at university faculty and staff. It was mostly attended by staff related to I.T. and digital services (library, educational resources, etc) and there were hardly any faculty – that’s too bad, but perhaps not surprising since faculty members tend to think they’re too busy for such events even when they are well-advertised and scheduled at a convenient time.

I was familiar with most of the material since it centered around phishing attacks, their strategies, and how to avoid being a victim. For many years now I’ve served on university committees related to informational technology. And these phishing attacks are getting more numerous and sophisticated. Maybe most faculty members correctly deduced the content and thought that they already knew the needed information. Why waste time attending a seminar delivered by an I.T. professional?

Although the speaker was not the most dynamic, she cleverly kept the audience involved with Poll Everywhere questions and small prizes. But to me the eye-opener was her demonstration of the tools that hackers use. I had never seen such live-demos before and I was floored by how easy it was to use free hacking tools. I had imagined someone needing detailed sysadmin information plowing their way through jungles of back-door code. But no! Within seconds, anyone could set up a variety of nefarious schemes by just choosing from menu options. Clone a login page? Set up a fake pdf attachment? Insert a power script? Use a keylogger? I saw it being done in a matter of seconds. For me, that was an attention grabber.

I always imagined that seeing such easy-to-use ‘software’ in a movie or TV drama was fake – like when CSI would show chemical analyzer software that spits out the exact compound identity when a heterogeneous sample was loaded on to the (spectrometer) ‘machine’. Easy-to-use scamming software isn’t fake. It can be deployed quickly and effectively. I shudder to think at what the proprietary versions can do – according to the seminar speaker, there were many more options and the free version was somewhat limited.

Demos are popular in chemistry because they catch the students’ attention. That being said, many of them are more of the ‘that’s cool’ variety rather than significantly demonstrating the power and strangeness of chemistry. Part of this is the disconnect between the nanoscope world of atoms and molecules that we cannot observe directly and the macroscopic world which blurs or statistically lumps together what can be observed by our naked eyes. Computer simulations can somewhat bridge this gap, and can eye-poppingly demonstrate the intricacy of chemistry at the molecular level, but it doesn’t seem ‘real’. And it’s not. The simulation is often a simplified approximation; modeling the full system would be intractable. Chemistry hackers do amazing work, but it can be challenging to demonstrate this power to a broader audience. We need better hacker tools.