The Feeling of Knowing

To err is human. To admit to erring… well, that’s difficult. Like most people, I don’t like the feeling of realizing that I’m wrong. I always think I’m right (I can’t help it!), but I don’t think I’m always right. Past experience confirms that I do err; it’s consistent but I can’t predict when it will happen. And I feel I’m right… right up to the moment that I’m proven wrong.

 

The subject of Wrong-ology is taken up by Kathryn Schulz in her book, Being Wrong. Our minds are funny things and the way we learn and remember things is much more complex and mysterious than we imagine. We think, as Plato suggested, that memory works like a wax tablet: “Everything you experience, from your own thoughts and sensory impressions to interactions with others, creates an imprint in that wax… an unchanging mental replica of the events of the past, captured at the moment they occurred.” This may contribute to that feeling of knowing, even when in gross error.

 

As a professor, I’m well practiced at professing. Students think you’re more knowledgeable and know what you’re talking about when you present the material confidently. That’s not hard to do because I feel that I know the material. Even when I don’t know it as well as I should, I still present it confidently. Fake it till you make it. Did I do so when I first started teaching? Was I more diffident back then? Honestly, I don’t remember. I’ve learned not to trust my memory even if I feel I can visualize it in my mind’s eye. My spouse provides me a very useful signal when I might be professing with confidence about something I know little about; she says: “You say that so confidently”. That gets me to chuckle, stop, check, and think.

 

Schulz discusses medical cases of brain issues where patients confidently describe or explain something with no correspondence to actual reality. And they seemingly believe it. This is known as confabulation. Here’s how Schulz describes it: “Imagine, by way of analogy, that each of us possesses an inner writer and an inner fact-checker. As soon as the writer begins devising a story, the fact-checker gets busy comparing it with the input from our senses, checking it against our memory, examining it for internal consistencies, thinking through our database of facts about the world, and, once we utter it, gauging other people’s reactions to assess its credibility… When the fact-checker falls asleep on the job, however, our theories about the world can become wholly unmoored from reality. All of us have experienced this, because the one time our fact-checkers reliably fall asleep is when we do, too. Think about dreams again for a moment, and about how weird even just the averagely weird ones can be… Now, two bizarre things are going on here. The first is that your brain is generating representations of the world that are only lightly tethered to the real, or even to the possible. The second is that you are completely untroubled by this fact.”

 

Being surprised is a good wake-up call to discovering error. You’d think that by now I would have gotten used to being surprised every time I err. But I am surprised every single time. Consistently, yet unpredictable in when it will happen. I’m heartened when Schulz writes that saying “I don’t know” is a good sign of brain function because in some forms of dementia, the fact-checker falls asleep and confabulation ensues. It also turns out that being confabulatory is part of how the human brain works. It’s an engine, possibly the engine, of creativity and imagination. I can think about and imagine things that are not real. I can make mental models of things that are abstract or invisible (which I must do frequently in thinking about chemistry). Our minds have adapted to come up with quick instinctive solutions, not always thought through, that do serve us well on many an occasion. The feeling of knowing allows us to act quickly when needed.

 

When grading exams, I still get surprised by the occasional confabulatory explanations of students. A student who has no idea what’s going on is yet able to come up with a fantastical story involving throwing together chemistry concepts completely untethered to reality. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s interesting for me to read these “answers” and try to imagine how a student came up with them. I wonder if that student had the confident feeling of knowing. But actually didn’t. Not knowing what you don’t know isn’t a great situation to be in.

 

Reading Being Wrong has made me a little quicker to say “I was wrong” in my classes when I make a mistake on the board and it is pointed out by a student. I apologize to the class, then thank the student for paying attention and being brave enough to tell me so that I don’t mislead the class any further. While it doesn’t happen often, I feel that as I age it has ticked up in frequency. I’m not as sharp as I used to be, perhaps. Or maybe I am less well prepared because I’m overconfident in the feeling of knowing, having taught the subject matter multiple times over a couple of decades. But if I actually learn something from my errors, that’s a good thing!

Rare Earth: P and N

The idea that Planet Earth is rare and special for being able to host life has a very readable book-length argument, Rare Earth by Brownlee and Ward. Technically it argues why complex life is rare, while simpler life may be more achievable over a broader range of conditions. Given that we only have a sample size of one for life-harboring planets, who knows if life proliferates beyond our star? You can plug a range of numbers into the Drake equation to convince yourself either way.

 

The idea that Earth sits in a Goldilocks habitable zone most often refers to whether water exists as a liquid on the surface of a planet. This assumes that H₂O is crucial to life as a liquid, and that other liquids (ammonia, hydrocarbons, formamide) may not have the same versatility. It’s hard to say otherwise with a sample size of one.  We also assume that carbon-based molecules are crucial for life, which is reasonable from a chemical point of view (diversity, bond energies, or as a carrier). That takes care of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. What about nitrogen and phosphorus?

 

The idea that our rare Earth may be rarer than we previously thought comes from a paper published last month in Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-026-02775-z). It examines core formation of rocky planets and estimates the availability of nitrogen and phosphorus under different conditions. Things that are important are the relative redox state of the mantle. Our planet apparently sits in a zone that optimizes decent amounts of N and P (although much less abundant than C, H, O). It’s a tricky balance. If the redox situation is too reducing, availability of P plummets; too oxidizing and N might be lost to outer space by significant degassing. Simulated origin-of-life chemistry in the lab has always worked better under reducing conditions. Thus, the authors conclude: “there is a plausible case to make that only moderately oxidizing planets have both sufficient mantle P and sufficient reducing power to sustain prebiotic chemistry and then life”.

 

Why do we need N? Amino acids. Catalysts. Chemical versatility. We would not have fine-tuning of the thermodynamics and kinetics of (bio)chemical reactions without nitrogen. Why do we need P? I’m not sure. Arguments can be made for its crucial role in nucleic acids (Westheimer’s famous paper). But it’s possible some other backbone might work. Bioenergetic currency relies on phosphates today, but it’s possible that sulfur could have played the early role of energy transduction. Sulfate bacteria are also fierce competitors. I’d be very curious what is known about sulfur availability during planetary formation. We know that outgassing of volcanoes on the early Earth is a source. And I’m also clearly biased because I have a current research grant to study the role of sulfur in origins-of-life chemistry.

 

Final tidbit of the paper that I enjoyed: the authors use oxygen fugacity as their redox measure. When I teach P-Chem, I try to pepper in examples of why the math-and-models are useful. Fugacity is one of those bewildering topics to students, because the math looks like a merry-go-round and having a hypothetical reference state seems strange. Now I can point to another example why learning about fugacity is useful and interesting. The paper makes reference to Mars and other exoplanets in the search for life in the universe.

Second Week: Spring 2026 Edition

I forgot to write last Fall’s First Week edition (so here’s the one from 2024), probably because I was super-busy teaching two sections of G-Chem 1 and one section of Biochem 1. I’m not teaching any Honors section this academic year so last semester I had around 100 students across my three courses. We’re also using a new textbook and online homework system for G-Chem, and it was just my second time teaching Biochem. All in all, more prep work than usual. This semester, I’m teaching one section of G-Chem 2 and one section of P-Chem 2 with around 60 students across both courses. I’m now used to the G-Chem online homework system, and I like the new textbook. This, the semester feels lighter from a workload standpoint. Hurrah!

 

But I was still very busy last week because of the possibility of a government shutdown here in the U.S. (which turned out to be mercifully short, thankfully). I decided to write up my annual report for my current federal research grant and submit it about a month earlier than usual, in case the government shut down. There was some confusion about whether an administrative request that I sent via webform went through because the website was apparently having problems, but eventually some back-and-forth emails confirmed that they received my request and my report. And hence today’s post is happening at the end of Week 2 rather than Week 1 of the semester.

 

After the long winter break, I’ve been enjoying interacting with students in the classroom, in my office, or in the hallways or atrium of my building. I’ve been making an extra effort not to be overly quick or efficient in my interactions, and hopefully students feel I’m not rushing them when they have questions. We’ll see how that shakes out the rest of the semester. I feel I have more energy even though my first class starts at 8am (instead of 9am last semester), maybe because of the lighter load and maybe because I just feel freer. The first week of class I was still struggling with timing in my G-Chem class because I had rearranged the material to match the new textbook. This week I feel I did a much better job without rushing in the last 5-10 minutes of class. I’m not making many changes to the first eight weeks of my P-Chem class so that has been going smoothly timing-wise. (I will be making some changes to the latter half.)

 

I also feel I have time for research this semester! Last semester, I felt that I hardly made any progress on my own projects. I still helped my research students make progress in their projects, but didn’t have much time for my own. This semester, however, I’ve been getting in 5-10 hours of research or writing (working on a paper) per week, which has been very nice! One of my summer 2025 research students who continued working with me last semester is also a very capable writer so I invited her to write the first draft of the research paper featuring her work. The carrot is she gets to be first author! I have revised much of the text, but kept the overall flow intact. She also made all the Figures and Tables. (For many other papers, I make the Figures since I feel they look nicer and more consistent in size/shape, but this student is exceptional and detail-oriented.)

 

I’m not taking on any new service activities because over winter break, I found out that my sabbatical application for AY26-27 was approved! This means fewer committee meetings and more time this semester, probably contributing to my feeling freer! I’ve also decided to try presenting my work digitally rather than in-person at the upcoming American Chemical Society national conference, so I don’t need to block off travel time. More time freed up! I am reading a little more to try to fine-tune a plan for my upcoming sabbatical. There are so many interesting things to explore. Okay, that’s the end of Week 2, Spring 2026 edition. It may be my last such post as I’ve been reducing my blogging activities.