Interdisciplinary Class Ideas

This past weekend I read Andy Weir’s The Martian. I had seen the movie back when it was released in cinemas and enjoyed it immensely. Friends who had read the book encouraged me to do so. I’m pleased to say I enjoyed the book and the wry humor of the protagonist (not as prominent in the movie). I also found that visual images of the movie would flash in my mind as I was reading certain passages. It’s not often that I read something after I’ve watched it, so it was an interesting experience. Reading the book made me wonder if I could teach an interdisciplinary course such as “Life on Mars”. What would it cover? What other interdisciplinary courses would I enjoy putting together? And how would my chemical expertise flavor these courses?

 

Life on Mars. I envision two halves to a course aimed at the introductory level. We would look at the future of how to make Mars habitable. We would also look at the past, as exemplified by the present search for biosignatures of past life on Mars. I keep up with the news for signs of Martian life, not just in the popular media, but I also get digest alerts on relevant astrobiology articles. There’s plenty of chemical analysis involved in determining signs of life, and I can bring my knowledge in chemical origins of life research to illuminate class discussions. I’m not as well-versed in humans surviving and thriving on Mars beyond sci-fi portrayals, but I think there’s much we can discuss about the technologies needed to live on Mars. New composite materials will be in demand, and we’ll need advanced chemical methods for catalysis, separation, sensors, energy storage/transduction, and more. I haven’t even touched on a wide range of biochemical advances. Besides The Martian, I think students would get a hoot from reading Packing for Mars by Mary Roach.

 

Catalysis. My graduate work was in heterogeneous catalysis related to fuel cells. I then picked up projects on homogeneous transition-metal catalysis. My interests in the origin of life have led me to read and think hard about biocatalysis and organocatalysis (metal-free). And in my present research I’m wrestling with autocatalytic systems. Chemistry is at the heart of catalysis and there are many examples to choose from. The challenge with this course, unlike Life on Mars, is that I’m finding it hard envisioning how to do this well at an introductory level if the students haven’t had college-level general chemistry and at least a little organic chemistry. Opportunities to teach upper division special topics courses at a liberal arts college don’t come often (because we have to spend most of our time teaching core courses and we have to run lean) and the more prerequisites you have, the fewer students you attract. I need to get over my overly-narrow vision and spend a bit more time thinking of how this can be done at an introductory level and how to attract non-science majors.

 

Genetic Codes. I think students would find this intriguing. Okay, I find it intriguing and sometimes I project it on to what students may or may not think. We could discuss what information is, the advantages/disadvantages of analog and digital information, how information is transmitted, what constitutes a code, why we have genes, and how the present genetic code may have evolved to its present-day use in extant life. We could even discuss the development and use of genetic algorithms. There will be a good mix of biology, chemistry, information science, and computational thinking. I’ve been teaching myself cheminformatics and read almost all the key literature about how the present genetic code may have evolved from simpler, messier systems. (In case you were wondering, there are still many unanswered questions and controversy about the evolutionary process, which keeps the topic fresh and interesting.)

 

Next semester, I get to teach a special topics course that I’ve titled “Metals in Biochemistry” to keep it vague and to attract biochemistry majors, many of whom may not have taken inorganic chemistry (but would garner value from learning a little more). I haven’t started working on the syllabus yet, but it will be aimed at upper division students who have either taken or are co-enrolled in first-semester biochemistry (i.e., they’ve had all of G-Chem and O-Chem). I’m sure origin of life and catalysis questions will feature in this course since I’m hoping to aim at the fundamental chemistry and get students to think about general principles amidst the seemingly idiosyncratic behavior of different metals. It sounds like a bio-inorganic course (which I’ve never taken) but I will be aiming more at fundamentals and theory than a descriptive survey. In my mind I’m doing something interdisciplinary, although it might not look that way from someone looking in from the outside.

 

To keep myself motivated, I am borrowing the DVD of The Martian so I can watch it again. Reading the book reminded me how much I had forgotten about the movie, and this time I can watch it with an eye for what scenes I might want to use for a class. Easier to use movie clips than asking students to read the book!

Our Amazing Planet

I just finished watching BBC’s Planet Earth followed by Planet Earth II. Wow! The videography is amazing and I kept muttering to my spouse, “no CGI”. In 2022, it’s refreshing to see such amazing visuals that do not resort to CGI. The behavior of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms is both diverse and strange. There are themes that standout, foremost being ecology and evolution. Organisms have evolved over time to settle into an ecological niche, but as the environment changes, life becomes threatened. I also didn’t realize how many creatures make annual mass migrations in search of food and shelter.

 

If I were a kid watching Planet Earth, I’d absolutely want to be a biologist. Living organisms are diverse, interesting, and there are endless things to explore. But since I took up my livelihood as a chemist over two decades ago, I guess I missed that opportunity. I’m making up for it by studying the chemical origins of life – and I know I’m biased by thinking that chemical systems are both beautiful and dynamic in their own way. Planet Earth also made me think about why we chemists don’t have something equivalent to draw in an audience. Physics has the astronomy and the wonders of the universe, and a strong counterpart in science-fiction. They also have some nice visuals. What do we have in chemistry? Nada, except for some demonstrations that do wow younger kids but college students are much less impressed by.

 

Popular books on physics and biology are aplenty. I’ve read many of them and blogged about some of them. Chemistry? Not so much. I’ve read most of what’s available. My  favorite thus far is Periodic Tales, and I wrote multiple blog posts about it. What is it about chemistry that causes people to shun it? The esoteric-ness? The fact that we’re constantly thinking about invisible things? Or that Johnstone’s Triangle makes it difficult to grasp conceptually? Or maybe we’re doing a poor job teaching it. If I earned a dollar every time someone told me they were “bad at chemistry”, I’d be rich.

 

I’d think that materials chemistry would be a selling point. We can make all these cool, interesting, and useful new materials using chemistry. And yet we haven’t come close to capturing the public imagination. What are we known for? Poisons and Pollutants. And what about the nanosized world of chemistry? They feature nanobots used for evil in sci-fi or superhero-supervillain movies. Biochemistry is mostly thought of as the wonders of biology rather than chemistry. As to chemistry being a basis for magic, it tends (in fiction-fantasy) to be based on the four (or five) elements theory of Aristotle and others. Chemistry just doesn’t seem to capture the public imagination.

 

What am I going to do about this? I don’t know. Every semester I hope to instill in my students the wonder of seeing the world with chemistry-tinted glasses. I do succeed with a student or two, every now and then. But for the most part, students still find it a chore, if not mildly interesting – though nowhere close to what really interests them. Today I told my students about exploding cows in one class, and the weirdness of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in another class. Strange things do catch their attention, but I’m not sure they hold that attention sufficiently. Perhaps it’s all I can do. Perhaps I can do more. In the meantime I hope there’s a chemist out there helping to make the equivalent of Planet Earth.

Century-Old Advice

I’ve been recently reading translations of some century-old books. One of these is Santiago Ramon y Cajal’s Advice for a Young Investigator first published in 1897. I read the Swanson & Swanson translation based on the 4^th edition of Cajal’s book from 1916. I’m not a young investigator anymore, but I’d like to think I’m young at heart and continue to be excited at the prospect of learning new things as I pursue my research projects. What advice does Cajal have?

 

In Chapter 2 (“Beginner’s Traps”), Cajal makes a number of points. First, he says that “excessive admiration for the work of great minds is one of the most unfortunate preoccupations of intellectual youth”. He thinks many of the young scientists of his day (at least in Spain) defer too much to authority. It’s good to be respectful of great achievers of the past, but it can deter the young investigator from original and creative discovery. Second, Cajal deplores the mindset that thinks the most important problems are already solved. Young investigators scratching the surface of a field quickly find as they dig into the literature that many of their initial ideas (typically low-hanging fruit) have already been picked and picked apart. Third, Cajal says that “some people claim a lack of ability for science to justify failure and discouragement”.

 

I don’t think I’m subjected to these three plagues, maybe because I am no longer young. I do have admiration for the great scientific achievements, but having read a fair bit of history (as a hobby), I’ve learned that many of these beautiful and stunning ideas came bit by bit along with false trails, confusion, and serendipity. Since I work on the origin-of-life, a wide-open problem, there are so many more questions than answers. And while I’ve gotten good at picking low-hanging fruit, it’s admittedly made me a bit lazy to tackle very difficult problems. Or maybe I’m good at avoiding failure. On the other hand, when I think of my undergraduate student researchers, they certainly defer a lot to authority. It’s hard for me to get them to argue with me. They’re also novices when it comes to combing the scientific literature (i.e., they don’t know what they don’t know). And as a mentor, I always start them on low-hanging fruit projects – which I think is a way to introduce them to research and encourage them in the process. Even so, many things they try will not work, as they soon discover!

 

In Chapter 4 (“What Newcomers to Biological Research Should Know”), Cajal begins with the importance of breadth in one’s education. He says “the biologist does not limit his studies to anatomy and physiology, but also grasps the fundamentals of psychology, physics and chemistry.” Why is this important? Biology, chemistry, and physics are tightly interwoven and “bringing together ideas that were previously unlinked” is a fruitful enterprise for new discoveries. Cajal also claims that “the study of philosophy offers good preparation and excellent mental gymnastics for the laboratory worker”. As an advocate for the liberal arts and someone who has personally enjoyed interdisciplinary connections, I wholeheartedly agree with Cajal in this regard. But breadth alone as a dilettante is not enough. Cajal says “it is too easy to run aground on the shoal of encyclopedic learning, where minds incapable of orderliness – who are restless, undisciplined, and unable to concentrate attention on a single idea for any length of time – tend to stop.” Hence, one also needs to specialize and delve deep into a chosen area of research. In today’s faddish lingo, our educational institutions claim to nurture “T-shaped learners”, broad and deep. How we actually do this and whether we are successful at it is open to question.

 

Cajal’s book is a quick read. It’s pithy and quotable. He’s very direct and goes straight for the jugular. Warning – it also has misogynistic parts, as one might expect from the milieu and culture of his own time and place, Spain in the late nineteenth century. I read a chapter a day, taking just 15-20 minutes for each session. In contrast, a much slower read is The Intellectual Life by A. D. Sertillanges, first published in 1873. I’m reading the fifth printing of the English translation by Mary Ryan. It’s not a long book. The first few chapters are hard to get through. And I’m only halfway through, reading one chapter each week (which takes me an hour or so). I don’t know how to explain it, but it feels like a work that needs to be slowly consumed to reap its benefits.

 

In Chapter 5 (“The Field of Work”), Sertillanges begins with what he calls “Comparative Study”. Essentially, it’s an exhortation for interdisciplinary learning and also to be both broad and deep. T-shaped learning again. Sertillanges discusses it in the context of wisdom. “It is not wise, it is not fruitful, even if one has a very clearly limited special subject, to shut oneself up in it forthwith. That is putting on blinkers. No branch of knowledge is self-sufficing; no discipline looked at by itself alone gives light enough for its own paths. In isolation it grows narrow, shrinks, wilts, goes astray at the first opportunity.” I’ve felt this experience in some of my earlier research projects: after a while, they seemed to grow narrow and I sensed the whiff of death. Time to move on.

 

Proverb-like, Sertillanges asks the following rhetorical questions: “Can one study a piece of clockwork without thinking of the adjoining piece? Can one study a bodily organ without considering the body? Neither is it possible to advance in physics or in chemistry without mathematics, in astronomy without mechanics and geology, in ethics without psychology, in psychology without the natural sciences, in anything without history. Everything is linked together, light falls from one subject on another, and an intelligent treatise on any of the sciences alludes more or less to all the others.” Amen, I say, to this. And I’m also reminded that if I’m going to advance in my studies as a physical chemistry, I need to learn more mathematics, one among many areas in which I am deficient.

 

To bring the point home, Sertillanges continues: “Therefore, if you want to have a mind that is open, clear, really strong, mistrust your specialty in the beginning. Lay your foundations according to the height that you aim to reach; broaden the opening of the excavation according to the depth it has to reach. But still you must understand that knowledge is neither a tower nor a well, but a human habitation. A specialist, if he is not a man, is a mere quill-driver; his egregious ignorance makes him like a lost wanderer among men; he is unadapated, abnormal, a fool.”

 

That last sentence is jarring, especially in this day and age, where specialization is key to advancing one’s career in the sciences. The incentives are all in that direction. One might even argue that evolution demands this. If you want a larger slice of the pie (energy being the main commodity for thriving, or minimally staying alive), you have to specialize, but if you do so too much and the environment changes, you are maladapted and you die. The depths we have plumbed in the sciences, to push those further, would you as a single individual ever have the time to broaden your foundation commensurate to the depth (or height) to which you seek to attain? If anything, my experience has been the opposite. I specialized first, and that was what helped me gain early success as a young investigator. Later, I broadened my interests. Are our incentives all screwed up? That being said, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more skeptical or mistrustful of my own specialization – perhaps because I see its limitations and problems more clearly amidst a broader vista.

 

Sertillanges will go on to exhort theology as queen, in particular, he thinks the theophilosophical writings of Thomas Aquinas are the bee’s knees. And some of the early parts of his book share the same misogynisms as Cajal’s book, again a product of the time and milieu of nineteenth century Europe. I don’t agree with much of this. That being said, there are some great nuggets in his book. I read some of his phrases and paragraphs and I wish I had his capacity for language and clear thought. Perhaps there is something to his method. I close today’s post with my favorite selection from Chapter 6 (“The Spirit of Work”) that discusses the limits of reductionism.

 

“A problem cannot be self-contained; by its very nature it exceeds its own limits; for the intelligibility that it presupposes is borrowed from sources higher than itself. What we have said of comparative study guides us here. Every object of our investigation belongs to a whole in which it acts and is acted upon, in which it is subject to conditions and imposes its own; one cannot study it apart. What we call specializing or analysis may indeed be a method, it must not be a spirit. Shall the worker be the dupe of his own device? I isolate a bit of mechanism so as to see it better; but while I hold it in my hand and examine it with my eyes, my thought must keep it in its place, see it as part of a whole – otherwise I am falsifying the truth both as regards the whole mechanism which I have made incomplete, and as regards the part which has become incomprehensible.”

Skipping Work?

In a previous blog post, I pondered whether we need to discuss Orbitals at the general chemistry level. Today, I will ponder whether we need to discuss Work. Where does Work show up in G-Chem? Usually when we begin thermochemistry.

 

Here’s what I typically do in my course. I introduce the thermodynamic universe with its three parts (chemical system, thermal surrounding, mechanical surroundings). I’ve been stressing the role of models in conceptualizing scientific knowledge, and this simplistic universe is a model. The universe is isolated: nothing goes in or out. The chemical system is closed: it can exchange energy (but not matter) with the surroundings. Planet Earth is mostly a closed system. We receive energy in the form of photons from the sun, and dissipate it as heat to the coldness of space. By and large, not much mass enters or leaves the system. Yes, there is the occasional meteorite that enters or helium that floats away. And we do launch rockets and we do have falling debris. This is contrasted with living organisms on our planet that are open systems, exchanging energy and matter with their surroundings.

 

The three-part model of the universe allows us to keep track of the energy. Typically, we cannot measure what’s going on in the chemical system directly. Tiny atoms and molecules might be doing chemistry – making and breaking chemical bonds. This results in a change in energy (and energy is a key consideration in any chemical reaction). But how do we quantify that change? We can measure energy changes in both the thermal and mechanical surroundings. To do so, we represent them as models. The simple model for the thermal surroundings is an insulated water bath, essentially a calorimeter. The simple model for the mechanical surroundings is a piston-and-shaft system, like a syringe.

 

The calorimeter determines “heat energy” by measuring the change in temperature of the water in the bath when a chemical reaction takes place. The quantity heat (usually given by the symbol q) can be calculated by knowing the amount of water in the bath, the heat capacity of water, and its change in temperature. Conceptually an increase in any of these three things will mean an increase in heat. Hence, we can use the formula q = mcΔT. But we’re doing this for the calorimeter. If the calorimeter gains energy, the chemical system is losing energy, and vice versa. Thus, q of the system is equal and opposite to q of the calorimeter.

 

The piston-and-shaft system determines “PV work” by measuring the distance moved by the piston due to a chemical reaction. Given the surface area of the piston and the distance moved, we can calculate the change in volume of the system as it expands or contracts. The piston will keep moving until the pressure in the system is equal to the pressure outside (usually atmospheric pressure for most chemical reactions). Whenever there is a change in volume, energy is exchanged between the chemical system and the mechanical surroundings. Using the standard definition of work as force multiplied by distance, we can derive the formula w = –PΔV. The magnitude of P is the constant external pressure, and the volume change is for the chemical system. The negative sign is because an expanding system will transfer energy from the system to the mechanical surroundings, while a contracting system does the opposite.

 

This leads to the first law of thermodynamics, encapsulated by the equation ΔE = q + w, where ΔE is the change in internal energy of the system. Importantly, the internal energy is a state function which essentially means that it doesn’t matter how you carry out the chemical reaction. If you use the same reactants and it leads to the same products, ΔE will be the same regardless of what actual experimental method you use to make the chemical reaction happen. This makes sense, chemically speaking. Once you’ve broken the old bonds and made the new bonds, it doesn’t matter how you did it. The old bonds had some quantity of energy; the new bonds have some other quantity; and the difference between the two quantities is the change in internal energy of the chemical system. The full picture gets built up into the one below over the course of two class periods.

 

Magnitude-wise in a chemical reaction, ΔE is much larger than w, i.e., ΔE and q are close to the same value. This is because the change in energy due to bonds breaking and forming is much larger than the change in energy due to any volume changes. If one mole of gas is released in a chemical reaction, that’s roughly 2.5 kJ of energy. But typical covalent chemical bonds are hundreds of kJ per mole. So unless the chemical bonds you break are almost exactly the same as the chemical bonds you make, you’d expect ΔE of a chemical reaction is typically in the tens to hundreds of kJ per mole, dwarfing w. We do a sample calculation in class to illustrate this.

 

Currently in G-Chem, I briefly discuss the difference between bomb calorimetry and coffee-cup calorimetry. The latter is carried out at constant pressure and very easy to use practically-speaking. In particular, the q determined by coffee-cup calorimetry includes both the internal energy change and the change in volume. Instead of trying to separate the two (by using constant volume bomb calorimetry), chemists lump the two quantities together and give it a new name: Enthalpy. Most G-Chem textbooks refer to enthalpy as heat-energy, and use “enthalpy” and “heat” interchangeably, for example the “standard enthalpy of formation” (an important and useful quantity that scientists have tabulated) of a substance is often referred to as the “heat of formation” for short. This sleight of hand is actually confusing to students because technically while enthalpy H is a state function, heat q is not. We might tell the students that for all intents and purposes, ΔH = q, and this is true regardless of the type of calorimetry employed, but they don’t know get why this is so even though they can push symbols around and do algebra. I go into much more detail when I teach this in upper division P-Chem, but at the G-Chem level, going into the minute details will just confuse students, and there isn’t enough time in our already tight semester.

 

We could avoid all this by jettisoning Work. Let’s get rid of the mechanical surroundings, or actually we are subsuming the PV-work into the chemical system. The energy of the system including the volume it occupies, let’s just call that the enthalpy, H. We won’t bother about any equations that involve w. We no longer have to use E to specifically mean the internal energy of the system and can just use it as a generic shorthand for “energy”. (In P-Chem we use U for internal energy to avoid using the symbol E.) We can then directly talk about ΔH = q and state functions for a single generic calorimeter without splitting the difference between constant pressure versus constant volume processes. At the G-Chem level, the students don’t have to worry about the piston-and-shaft model and doing PV calculations (that trip them up units-wise or sign-convention-wise).

 

Even better, when we get to Free Energy, we don’t have to try and distinguish useful work you can extract from the system from the PV-work inherent to the system. Thus whenever you refer to “work”, it is in this more generic sense that matches how students think about the word, rather than the very specific PV-work encapsulated by w = –PΔV. By this point in the semester, we’re pretty much doing everything in terms of system thermodynamic properties anyway, and we aren’t talking about q and w very much. While I’ve typically used the diagrams below to show what is happening when we introduce enthalpy and free energy to the thermodynamic universe, I could simplify this model by starting with a two-part universe and then introducing “useful work” as the third constituent when we cover free energy.

 

Jettisoning PV-work in G-Chem means I will have more work to do (pun intended) in P-Chem. But I do this all carefully and slowly in P-Chem anyway. And most of our G-Chem students aren’t going to be chemistry or biochemistry majors which means they won’t be taking P-Chem. The percentage of students taking G-Chem II (where we cover thermodynamics) who go on to take P-Chem II (thermodynamics in gory detail) is 12% from the average over the last five years. How much time will skipping PV-work in G-Chem save me in class? Barely one lecture’s worth if I combine everywhere I make reference to it throughout the semester. But I think the reduction in cognitive load for the students might be worth it. Every time I teach G-Chem II, students get tripped up over what w is, how to calculate it with the right units, how to distinguish it from useful work and the concept of free energy, and they get muddled about what enthalpy is. Enthalpy is not heat. Furthermore, we can skip trying to distinguish Enthalpy from Internal Energy.

 

One drawback if we skipped PV-work is that students will get confused as they read their G-Chem textbook. There is a cognitive load cost as we help students navigate the things we care that they know from their textbook versus the things deemed less crucial. But this happens for other topics as well. Our G-Chem textbooks are too bloated because they try to serve the desires of many different instructors who might differ in what they deem important and in how much detail. If you’re trying to sell textbooks, more sort-of looks better. More rigorous! Maybe I should just write my own textbook and use it. Ah, but that would be way too much work!

Tricking Nature

Last weekend, I finished reading Foundryside, the first book in the Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett. I had read a review that the “magic” system was interesting, the premise being that one tried to trick nature into behaving differently. I don’t think the word ‘magic’ is used; objects that have been tricked to defy nature’s law are referred to as scrived – which essentially means ‘written’. The premise is that the symbols of a ‘language of creation’ were discovered in ancient ruins, and when commands in that language are scrived or inscribed on an object, you could alter its behavior to transcend the natural laws of physics and chemistry. (I guess Latin is not ancient enough for the Foundryside world even though it seems to be okay for Harry Potter and friends.)

 

Metals play a key role. The inscriptions seem mostly to be done on metal which then must be crafted or fused into or as part of the object. It’s like writing computer code and then executing the program, except that it’s on metal-hardware rather than software. But the tricky part is that you have to be very precise in your code so that the object does exactly what you want it to do, not more, not less. If you’re not careful about specifying the rules precisely, unforeseen accidents will happen.

 

I was hoping for more details about exactly what this involves, but I found the level of description a little underwhelming. I think there are some clever parts, and I would personally find it intriguing to delve further into the nitty-gritty, but the writer wisely keeps the story moving. The novel is more steampunk than fantasy or sci-fi, but in any of these genres, it’s the interaction of the people in the story that drive the plot. The magic or gadgets or, in this case scrivings, are secondary to having an interesting narrative that keeps the reader engaged. Personalities and life choices in difficult situations are the meat of the story, and rightly so.

 

That being said, I will indulge my delving a little. The story implies that scriving is easier if you’re only trying to perturb the behavior in a small way. For example, if I wanted iron to behave more like copper, I could inscribe instructions for iron to behave more like copper. They’re both metals, and have many similarities, but there are some differences in physical properties. Copper is a softer metal than iron and easier to shape. Copper is also a better conductor of electricity. Since I’m trained in chemistry, my inscribed program would command the iron to behave as if it had three more d-electrons, so it would have the chemistry of copper, but I would also have to ask it to pretend it has three virtual protons to keep the element neutral overall. Would I need to add neutrons too? Maybe not. If those virtual protons only exerted their electrostatic charge effects on the electrons and not any other non-virtual protons in iron.

 

But how does nature get tricked? In the world of Foundryside, the interesting element is that everything has a personality – it’s an animistic worldview. Thus if you were to enter into dialogue with a piece of iron, the iron atoms would first just repeat a mantra such as “we are attracted to our mobile sea of electrons” (where I’ve used a simple description of metallic bonding). Let’s call that its primary directive. To trick the iron into doing something else, you have to suggest a loophole to sidestep that primary directive. You could then enter the dialogue by asking it to consider having electrons that repelled each other a little more, but still allow them to remain as a mobile sea. This would allow the iron atoms to move further away from each other but still stay connected through the mobile electron cloud. You could thus increase the volume of iron without changing its mass, making it less dense until eventually you get it to float on water. Nature though is much more complicated. Change one thing and you almost always change another thing. Resizing matter, for example, is trickier than it looks.

 

In Foundryside, the behavioral perturbations mostly have to do with kinematics and defying gravity, i.e., things associated more with physics than chemistry. Expert scrivers, the equivalent of magicians, find that scriving is much easier with inanimate objects and that living things are much harder to deal with. I expect that’s where chemistry sneaks a little into the picture. Metals are pure substances made up only one element. (Alloys have more than one element.) Sand, simply put, is just silicon dioxide. But the living leaf of a tree has many different kinds of molecules that interact with each other in complicated ways – essentially biochemistry!

 

I therefore claim that to be a master scrivener you must learn organic chemistry and be able to imagine things happening at the molecular level. I’d say the same for wizards and witches who want to manipulate matter in the most exquisite ways. Foundryside takes a different tact by introducing a God-language, more ancient than the initial creative-language found. It would be cool if that God-language is chemistry, and if the super-ancient  more powerful symbols are representations of chemistry! I suspect not. In any case, I’m still debating whether to read the second book in the trilogy. Foundryside had an engaging narrative and interesting characters but it didn’t wow me. But it might be intriguing enough for me to see where the story leads and discover more about how mind can be infused into matter, an interesting philosophical question at the very least.

All Aboard

The First of September, in the world of Harry Potter, is when young wizards and witches would board the Hogwarts Express, eager to start the new year of school. Friends who haven’t seen each other over the summer holidays are excited to meet again. Parents are giving last minute advice and reminders to their children. The sounds of magical creatures and pets add to the cacophony. Then at eleven o’ clock I imagine the whistle blowing and the train starts to move. All aboard!

 

In my world, it’s the first week of a new semester and a new school year, although today is not the first day of classes. The campus is buzzing with activity and there are students everywhere. Some wander the halls of the science building trying to find their classrooms or their professor’s office. It’s a bit of a maze and the room numbers are neither consecutive nor is the logic intuitive. At least we don’t have moving staircases. We also no longer have a mask mandate for classrooms this year. I’m still getting used to seeing student faces in full. I’ve said hello to students I had last year in my classes when I see them in the building, and they seem glad that I remember their names. I’ve yet to learn all the student names in my classes this semester, but I hope to have reached that milestone by the end of Week Four.

 

I have a lighter schedule this semester: one section of General Chemistry I and one section of General Chemistry II. Offering the latter in the fall semester is to help students get caught up more quickly so they don’t have to wait until next spring. We’ve been offering G-Chem I both semesters for at least fifteen years. While the bulk of these are in the fall semester, we typically have a few in the spring because there are just so many students who need to take it. However, those who took G-Chem I in the spring had to wait until the following spring to take G-Chem II, unless they take it during the summer (and pay extra). This fall, we’re offering just one section of the G-Chem II lecture (and two lab sections) as a trial run. My lecture is relatively full, so students are indeed taking the opportunity. Because I’d previously only taught G-Chem II in the spring, I’ve had to make some minor rearrangements to the schedule to accommodate different breaks and holidays. We’ll see how things go.

 

I’m always felt a little nervous leading up to the first day of class, even though I’m a seasoned teacher, and these are classes I’ve taught regularly for twenty years. It’s a good sort of nervous energy, I think. Seasoned Hogwarts veteran professors don’t seem to betray any anxiety. We do read about Hagrid’s jitters – very understandable – when he first gets the opportunity to teach Care of Magical Creatures. He feels out of place as a newly appointed academic, even though it’s clear he knows the subject material very well. I’m sure the students are more nervous. What’s this professor going to be like? Am I going to enjoy this class? Will it be a chore? Will it be a total bore?

 

The first day went well, at least in my opinion. Everyone showed up to class who was on my roster. There was some amount of student participation in class discussion, more in my G-Chem II class (with mostly returning students, but also some new transfer students), while the G-Chem I students (many of them first-years) were a lot more reticent to venture their opinions about “what is matter?” and “why does it matter?” and “why do you believe in atoms even if you’ve never seen one?” After day one, my nervousness goes away. For me, it’s only limited to the first class when I meet the students for the first time each semester. Hopefully the students also shed their nervousness, and it’s all aboard as we dive into the material. And we dive in very quickly. On day two, we’re knee-deep in calculations (units and measurement in G-Chem I, and the First Law of Thermodynamics in G-Chem II).

 

The lighter teaching load this semester means more time and energy for other things. (Although we’ll see how busy my office hours get – they’re usually less busy when I’m not teaching P-Chem.) I’ve been struggling to shape a paper that I’d like to submit to a journal by mid-October. At least I’ve told the journal editor that it’s on the way. This week I also told my research student who contributed to those research results last academic year, so now that I’ve said it, I need to follow through. We’ve collected lots of results and there are some conclusions we can draw from it, but there isn’t the clear impactful discovery narrative I would like to have. I feel it’s important to have a good story to tell, and that weaving narrative thread hasn’t coalesced in my own mind yet. Thinking about it is deflating for now.

 

That being said, I am noticing that the buzz of activity this first week of classes is starting to energize me. At the same time, I also feel more tired at the end of the work day because I expend much more energy when I’m teaching. More standing. More walking. More talking. And on the first day of class, I tried to be super-enthusiastic about chemistry to set the tone. (Or perhaps I’m scaring the students.) We’re on a journey together to learn about the interesting world of the tiny unseen things that help us explain the visible world that we interact with. What could be more exciting than chemistry! All aboard.