Teaching, Research and Scholarship Part 1

My recent post highlighting Derek Bok’s Higher Education in America focused on the undergraduate curriculum and teaching. Today’s post will be the first in a series that examines the links between teaching and research, and the role that scholarship plays in tertiary education. My motivation to delve into some of the literature was motivated by Bok’s survey of the current state of affairs (in his chapter 15, “Publish or Perish”). The chapter opens by describing the growing mound of research publications, the vast majority being “unloved and unread” and the difficulty of keeping up. A professor is quoted describing all this activity as “busywork on a vast, almost incomprehensible scale”.

Bok then pivots to the question of whether the growing emphasis on this sort of research productivity “is a diversion of faculty time from teaching”. He then outlines the stereotypical response from both camps. Those that claim research positively correlates with teaching argue that research-active faculty are likely to “exhibit to their students the special enthusiasm and excitement that come from active engagement in the quest for discovery at the frontiers of knowledge.” Furthermore it “offers the best possible evidence of a young faculty member’s quality of mind and thus helps an institution make sounder appointments and promotion decisions”. The naysayers argue that the specialized arcana of academia is unlikely to lead to better teaching of a broader undergraduate curriculum, that students receive less attention, and that teaching is “sacrificed” for work with dubious beneficial value. With an election cycle coming around in the U.S., every month brings a new round of political pandering with clarion calls to “reform" higher education.

In examining the evidence, Bok cites Feldman’s 1987 comprehensive meta-analysis that finds little correlation between research productivity and teaching effectiveness. I’ve read the larger oft-cited follow-up study by Hattie and Marsh in 1996 that comes to similar conclusions. I’ll write more extensively on this in a subsequent post, but here’s a quick summary of the findings. Time spent on research does lead to research productivity gains, but there is no correlation that time spent on teaching led to more effective teaching. There was overall close to zero correlation between teaching and research “ability” (even with different measures). Interestingly, the social sciences showed a very slight although barely significant statistical positive correlation while the humanities and natural sciences showed none. There is a slight positive correlation in four-year liberal arts colleges but not in other types of institutions. There is however a slight negative correlation in the more recent studies compared to the older studies – perhaps indicating a tipping point where the publish-or-perish research ratrace is indeed negatively impacting teaching. Certainly the requirements for research in tenure and promotion has risen significantly over the last forty years.

Interestingly, surveys from 1972-1992 indicate that while time spent on research increased, there was not much change to time spent on teaching. The number of hours worked per week went up, and the summer months were increasingly occupied with research (faculty members are on a 9-month contract in the U.S.). The 1992-2012 surveys indicate that time spent on teaching did decrease although this was primarily due to lower teaching loads. Bok speculates that the effect of increased research demands in the summer has likely led to a reduction in the revision of old courses and improving pedagogy – thereby leading possibly to a decrease in the quality of education received by students. The reduced hours spent by students on academic work over the last forty years has exacerbated matters. In addition “work-life stress has also intensified over the past twenty years, most noticeably from research and publishing demands, but also because of additional time devoted to committee work and coping with institutional procedures and red tape.” Having experience as a “middle-manager” (no power but all of the responsibility), I can attest that the bureaucracy and red tape has gotten far worse over the last several years. I suspect at least part of it is indeed due to the “rise of the administration”.

There is another potentially pernicious effect of publish-or-perish on the undergraduate curriculum and course offerings. Given that all faculty members today now go through extensive research-focused Ph.D. programs, “most faculty members prefer to teach the kinds of specialized courses and seminars that are closely aligned with their scholarly interests. Not surprisingly, teaching what professors know best does not always coincide with what undergraduates need to learn.” Since I am one of those professors who “enjoys giving introductory courses to freshmen and sophomores”, I’m thankful to be in a department where I am not in the minority. (We value both teaching and research!) But perhaps that’s because we have no graduate program so all our focus is on undergraduate education. On the other hand many (although not all) of my colleagues in R1 institutions more often than not fit Bok’s description. These intro-level classes are burgeoning and often “relegated” to lecturers and part-time adjunct faculty.

Bok concludes: “The result is a curriculum designed to suit the interests and intellectual strengths of a faculty organized and trained in accordance with established fields of specialized inquiry… [The curricular requirements] are hard to change in any fundamental way, especially in research-oriented colleges and universities where faculties are most powerful and the emphasis on the advancement of specialized knowledge most pronounced.” Given the increased work stress and hours, “faculty members who feel such pressure will presumably tend to be less enthusiastic about suggestions that they master a new technology for classroom use, attend [workshops] on innovations in pedagogy, or reorganize their courses and instructional methods to introduce more active learning.”

Given Bok’s summary of affairs, it sounds as if the increased publish-or-perish state of affairs could be negatively impacting undergraduate education. Although the Hattie and Marsh study showed close to zero correlation, that work was twenty years ago, and mostly used empirical measures such as student ratings on teaching evaluations and a variety of survey (self and peer rating) information that may or may not be a good proxy for teaching quality. As a scientist who engages in research and who loves teaching, I’d like to think there is a clear positive link between the two, but this has not been demonstrated empirically. However, there may be other ways to frame the question. In subsequent posts, I’m planning on investigating Boyer’s (1990) broadening of research categories in the way scholarship is defined, the details of the Hattie & Marsh study, work being done in different countries on this topic (studies suggest there is much context-dependence), and explore potential high-impact practices (that have an empirical basis) possibly re-envisioning what many have called the research-teaching nexus.

Revisiting Dune

I was a teenager the first time I read Frank Herbert’s epic space opera, Dune. While the genre became popular with the Star Wars, I can see how Dune may have set the stage for what has become a multi-billion-dollar franchise. A youth starts out in a sandy planet, realizes and is trained to use special innate powers, and brings a galactic empire to its knees. However where George Lucas’ epic feels campy when I re-watch it, this was certainly not the case when I re-read Dune.

What led me to read Herbert’s novel again? I blame it on DVD documentaries, and easy access to them from the local library system. When I watched Tim’s Vermeer last month, it included a preview of Jodorowsky’s Dune. Not having followed the Dune-iverse, I had not paid attention to the twists and travails in the quest to re-make the Dune movie in recent years. I did watch the David Lynch movie years ago. I hardly remember anything about it (perhaps it was forgettable) and probably was not impressed. It likely paled compared to the Star Wars trilogy. I knew nothing about Jodorowsky’s attempt the previous decade – billed as the “greatest movie never made”. This is the tagline of the DVD documentary.

In preparation to watch Jodorowsky’s Dune, I read Herbert’s original novel (also borrowed from the local library) over Thanksgiving break. The best way to read epic fiction is to block off many hours and immerse oneself in its universe. I was surprised at how much I did not remember about the story, and the new things that caught my attention! While I had a vague memory of the overall storyline and the main factions involved (House Atreides, House Harkonnen, The Fremen, and the Bene Gesserit) and several of the principal characters, I had forgotten the depth of political intrigue surrounding Arrakis. I could not recall why the spice mélange was important, although I did remember the sandworms. I had forgotten the role of the Guild, and I had no memory of Liet-Kynes and his ecological dream. This time around, I found these aspects to be some of the most interesting parts of the book. It makes me wonder if my scientific training has caused me to read everything with a different lens.

There is so much science in the novel. All parts in the book involving Kynes (which I probably read over quickly as a teenager) took new significance. With NASA probes on Mars today, and having watched the Martian recently, it really got my thinking juices going on the prospect of terraforming. How could you change a desert into an oasis? Herbert’s novel reminded me of Miyazaki’s Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind (the manga, not the movie) and its ecological dream amidst war, politics and intrigue. I also took notice whenever chemistry was mentioned, for example in the molecular conversion of poison in the cleansing of the water of life. I call it Mental Molecular Manipulation, and advocate young wizards to learn chemistry to increase their magic prowess.

I had forgotten the crucial role of spice and how it expanded the mind in time and space. Now that I’m a quantum mechanic, I was picking up on all the references to the wave nature of matter, the space-time continuum, reversibility of physical laws, and speculations of the multiverse-consciousness complex. I don’t think I understood the role of the Guild, nor the depth of political and economic importance of Arrakis, until this reading. I probably read the book too quickly the first time, when I was a more impatient reader. Now I savor my fiction! Back then, I never quite understood why the Guild was one of the six factions in the Avalon Hill boardgame. (I might even consider revisiting the boardgame now.) The blending of politics, economics, and space-time navigation is intriguing indeed!

This brings me to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s vision of Dune. I had never heard of Jodorowsky before nor had I seen any of his earlier movies. This documentary showed clips from some of his older work – I must admit that I do not understand it, nor have I any desire to see it. The impression I got comes from my limited understanding of surrealism in motion pictures and not being able to sit through Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (I gave up after half an hour). The documentary mostly consists of the key players working on that first movie adaptation of Dune: Jodorowsky, Seydoux, and several very talented artists recruited by the maestro himself. After Dune failed to launch, the artistic talent would go on to leave their mark starting with Ridley Scott’s Alien.

The culmination of Jodorowsky’s work comes in the form of a storyboard tome (cover shown above). We get to see not just some of the wild and psychedelic concept art, but some amazing storyboarding and layout techniques. Jodorowsky was ahead of his time, and towards the end of the DVD, you can see his ideas influencing the crop of sci-fi movies in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Star Wars included. The way Jodorowsky recruited his actors is also very interesting with characters such as David Carradine, Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger and Orson Welles. His magnetic personality and vision convinced young and capable artists to leave home and country for Paris where they would produce an amazing tome. Technical talent was not sufficient for Jodorowsky, and he searched for the “spiritual” elements of his crew, motivating many of them to do some of their best work for his prophetic vision. A prophet, a messiah, was central to the story – and therefore all aspects would have to be infused with the spiritual.

No movie studio would pick it up, however, and the project came to an end. The probable reason: the eccentricity, perhaps visionary madness, of Jodorowsky the artist. There seems to be some hint of madness in all the great artists, at least that’s the impression I get when reading about them. The scientist in me perhaps doesn’t understand it, but I still got caught up in Jodorowsky’s vision that Dune could be the motion picture that would achieve a cult status far beyond its descendants like Blade Runner or The Matrix. The creativity excited me, even though I’m sure I do not comprehend it. Just listening to Jodorowsky made me want to excel at whatever I did. It reminded me of a great teacher, one that unleashes the potential in students, acolytes and protégés. It motivated to not just be good at what I do, but great at it. And as I revisited Dune, I felt perhaps a small tinge of mania – perhaps a brief vision of what could be. It’s almost as if I had tasted the spice-filled Water of Life to see into the great beyond. Now that’s what great literature should be like!

Infographic Project: How It Went

Back in August, before the semester started, I blogged about the possibility of assigning an Infographic Project for my Chemistry & Society class. I’m pleased to say that I decided to try this, and today’s post is my reflection on how things went. (When I get back my teaching evaluations we’ll see if the students had any additional comments.)

On the first day of class, I spent five minutes in class introducing the Infographic Project and told students not to worry about it just yet. (There was a brief overview in my syllabus.) Just before the midpoint of the semester, students were given the details of the assignment including a rubric. In the previous class meeting we had discussed the properties of water and aqueous solutions. In the first half of the subsequent class meeting, we discussed chapter 8 from Bottled and Sold (by Peter Gleick), “Selling Bottled Water: The Modern Medicine Show” that discusses the case of Penta Water in great detail. Besides reading the chapter beforehand, I also had the students watch this video from AcquaPhi. I didn’t tell them anything about it beforehand. Our class discussion was very lively, with great participation from all the students. There were several of those great aha moments! (A few students thought I wouldn't assign them a pseudoscientific video and thought that it was "real", but strange.)

Based on the great discussion we had, I proposed that the theme of the infographic be about any product that had something to do with water. (We had a great discussion about float therapy early in the semester tied to a unit on the scientific method and calculating density.) Students liked the idea! Over the second half of the semester I would periodically show an infographic in class that was relevant to what we would discuss that day. As we went through acid-base chemistry, redox chemistry, and moved into organic chemistry (and natural products), I would hint at other possible topics. I would also take 2-3 minutes in class to answer a student question about the parameters of the project.

The infographics were due this past Sunday. Students were allowed to work in groups of up to three people. Interestingly, not many students formed trios, and they were mostly solo efforts or pairs. (If students worked with someone else, they had to each send me a separate e-mail about their contribution to the project with the submission.) The Thursday leading up to the deadline, I decided that we would not meet as a class but students could come by my office to show me drafts of their infographics. This turned out to be a good decision. Around 40% of the class showed me initial drafts. In some cases I saw multiple drafts before the final product. Hence, the average quality of the final submissions was good across the board. I’m also very pleased that students who e-mailed me drafts all of last week did so no later than Friday afternoon. No one sent me a draft over the weekend asking me for feedback. (I’ve trained my students well!) So I was able to come in on Monday morning and see all the submissions. Many of the students did not wait until the last minute. I had final submissions starting as early as Thursday afternoon.

I decided that peer review of the infographics would involve each student rating three other submissions. It took me a while to devise a scheme so that students would not review an infographic that was closely related to their own project. Hence I was pleased that the students chose a wide range of topics. (I think my giving many examples throughout the semester helped!) Topics included water in physical therapy, vitamin water, alkaline water, a variety of bottled waters, several different energy drinks, water-filtering systems (e.g. Brita), large-scale water treatment processes, and a range of cosmetics (lotions, creams, water masks).

As part of peer review, students rated on a numerical scale the clarity, depth and usefulness of the content, and the aesthetics of the presentation: fonts, colors, relevance and quality of graphics, layout. Then they had to list two further questions they would ask the creator of the infographic, and reflect on how they would have made their own infographic better now that they had looked closely at three others. While some of the students posed superficial questions (partly correlated with how fast they completed the assignment), the majority posed thoughtful questions – and I was very glad to see that they were starting to incorporate scientific inquiry in their thinking!

One of the things I had worried about was whether students would try to plagiarize other infographics on the web. I did some searches on the topics students chose, but saw nothing egregious. It did make me think that perhaps a future assignment might be for students find some infographics on the Internet and critically evaluate them for content and presentation.

Overall, I’m happy with my experiment and I might do something like this again in a future class. I did make a slide show of all the submitted infographics and I showed them in class (with 20-second highlights for each slide by me) before the students did their detailed ratings of the three they were assigned. This was to give them a sense of the range. I also uploaded the slide show to my course website and asked students to e-mail me (by next Tuesday) the infographic they would rate the best overall and the infographic they personally found the most interesting. I have responses from half the class so far and there are some winners emerging. I told the students that the top ones will be used as examples in my next class.

Now that you’ve just read a wall of text, it seems appropriate to end this post with an Infographic. Sorry, I won't be showing you any from my class since the semester isn't over yet. (Finals week is next week, and I'm still grading the infographic assignment.) This month I’m enjoying the Compound Interest Advent series. Here is yesterday’s (Day 10) – informative and highly amusing!

Benchmarking Teaching

My department had its external academic program review this past year. (It went very well – the joys of being in a superb department!) Reports and letters have been written and circulated. The final step of the process is to submit our Five Year Plan to the administration. As part of the report, we discussed benchmarks for research and scholarship in our department faculty meeting last week. We have actually been collecting benchmarking data annually for a number of years since we received a generous external award/grant to “bring our department to the next level” (according to the funders) which was generously matched by our institution. (The good thing about getting a prestigious award that requires an institutional match, is that no administration would want to turn it down.)

After looking over our annualized data for the past five years, we started to discuss what our benchmarks should be for 2020. All these were research or scholarship related, and could be assessed quantitatively. (This data was submitted annually to the funding body as part of our annual review during the grant period.) Examples include number of peer-reviewed publications per year, number of faculty presentations at national conferences per year, number of grant proposals submitted, dollar amounts of external funding received, number of undergraduates presenting their research at conferences, and number of undergraduates involved in research during the year. Our benchmarks are aggregate numbers across the department, recognizing that output varies from year-to-year and from individual-to-individual. Sometimes we arrive at the benchmark by adding up target numbers individuals have set for themselves. Other times we propose different aggregate values and debate their relative merits. We may not always agree, but being in a cohesive and highly functional department means that we are often able to reach some sort of consensus both amicably and efficiently.

We did not discuss teaching benchmarks as a department, nor have we ever in recent memory. I did not think about this, but a couple of days after the meeting, one of my colleagues e-mailed the group asking us to consider how we will discuss our teaching goals in the Five Year Plan – given we had discussed the research and scholarship benchmarks in great detail. Individuals have target goals perhaps, but our department does not have benchmarks. We do have a (possibly vague) statement about our aim to be known for our excellent teaching, and we certainly have the reputation in the college for having great teachers and providing an excellent learning environment for students (who flock to our classes and our major). Have we improved over the past five to ten years? I don’t know. How do we measure it? Can it even be measured in a way that is both fair and useful? (I can think of many ways to measure this poorly.) I’ve been pondering this question the last couple of days. Here are some thoughts, with no strong conclusion as of yet.

Let’s start with examples of some poor benchmarks. “We, as a department, would like to see the average numerical score on questions X and Y in the student teaching evaluations rise by N points over the next five years.” I hope our administration will never suggest any department do such a thing. (They never have yet, but who’s to know in the fad of “accountability”.) “We would like to see an increase in the overall final grades of students in our classes by X indicating that they are learning more and thus we are teaching more effectively.” I can see many pitfalls with this approach, and if anything we are trying to fight grade inflation. Interestingly, our students take the standardized American Chemical Society major field test before they graduate – but students vary from year to year so we don’t see an increase necessarily in how well they do. Some of our students also “blow off the test” since it has no effect on their GPA. On average our students do better than “comparative institutions” but those lists also change annually. Some individuals do exceedingly well, and others do rather poorly.

Here are some examples that don’t sound so bad, but might still be dubious. “We would like our faculty to attend an average of X workshops run by the teaching center and give Y presentations at conferences on teaching/pedagogy.” It turns out that we can track X and Y (and we keep track of Y at the department level) and we know about X when individual annual review comes around. However, we have never set these as benchmarks. We do bring in “non-research” grant funding (by that I mean not directly related to our research projects in lab) that’s related to education or student scholarships, but while we track the numbers, we do not set a benchmark. “We will substantially improve X courses on an N-year cycle.” I’m being vague about what this entails since I’m sure it varies greatly. My colleagues and I constantly update and improve our classes. I personally try to overhaul each class I regularly teach every 3-4 years – this means that I’m usually overhauling one class each year. But that’s a personal goal – and I wouldn’t foist it on any of my colleagues.

How about this one that I suspect an administration might actually try and do in the future (although I would never suggest it): “In the rubrics of our assessment plan, we would like to increase the number of students in the Developing category by X, the Accomplished category by Y, and the Mastery category by Z.” If you’re an academic in the U.S. and have not yet been inundated by the assessment wave sweeping the nation, count yourself lucky for the moment.  Or: “We would like to increase our average scores by X on the Peer Teaching Observation Inventory (PTOI).” Use of a PTOI (an acronym I just made up) with a numerical score is not widely used, but there are pilot suggestions. Here’s a version I discussed in a previous post. I have since read the actual papers and looked carefully at the tool. What troubles me is that certain pedagogical techniques are privileged over others, and this is a dangerous road. I can see an administration tempted by the claim of some PTOI being research-based and therefore appropriate. I don’t doubt that some of the guidelines suggested by education and cognitive research are useful (and I have learned much as an instructor), but I would be strongly against mandating/privileging particular teaching techniques or using certain types of teaching technology.

Maybe benchmarking as a department is unnecessary. As individuals we have our personal goals in how to improve as teachers and how we would like to restructure our courses to maximize students learning at a deep (rather than superficial) level. My colleagues frequently talk about our classes, our students, our teaching ideas, new things we are trying, things that are working, things that are not working, etc. Most of our personal goals are qualitative rather than quantitative. Perhaps a narrative that discusses what we are currently doing, and lists some individual goals (perhaps not associated with names) would be suitable to include in the Five Year Plan. In a sense, teaching goals are like service goals. Many individuals in our department have substantial service responsibilities and involvement both within the institution and to the profession at-large. I do think that it behooves us to represent both service and teaching (especially teaching since we are college professors!) in a Five Year Plan that may not include things that are “countable”. A dictum I’ve often repeated is “Not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be counted counts.” We should do our part in reminding the administration that when 2020 comes around, success isn’t just measured by the benchmarking data laid out by our research and scholarship.

What is a Theory?

The scientist must set in order. Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. – J. Henri Poincare.

As my institution is undergoing a massive core curriculum revision, and I’m serving on the curriculum committee, I’ve been thinking a lot about what students should get out of a core scientific inquiry course. If you asked a random person what should be in that course, probably the “scientific method” will be suggested as something all students should know. Depending on whom you ask, what this “method” entails may differ. Another suggestion might be that students should learn the main scientific theories of our modern era. Although a post-modernist might suggest that such theories represent a consensus view of a particular community and may not have the absolute grounding assumed by the common person. (I've been thinking about scientific theory as mentioned in my most recent post.)

This is where Roald Hoffmann (Nobel-prize winning chemist and someone who has dabbled in the humanities) starts in his essay “Why Buy That Theory?” in the magazine American Scientist. Most examples in the philosophy of science, written by philosophers, make use of examples mainly in physics (and occasionally biology). Very few discuss chemistry, so I find it refreshing to read the views of chemists who have thought carefully about the philosophy of their own discipline. My Ph.D. (doctor of philosophy degree) is in chemistry – I should therefore think a little more carefully about the philosophy of chemistry.

Hoffmann writes: “The theory of theories goes like this: A theory will be accepted by a scientific community if it explains better (or more of) what is known, fits at its fringes with what is known in other parts of our universe, and makes verifiable, preferably risky, predictions. Sometimes it goes like that… But much that goes into the acceptance of theories has little to do with rationalization and prediction. Instead, I will claim, what matters is a heady mix of factors in which psychological attitudes figure prominently.”

He argues that simplicity carries a strong aesthetic appeal. Theories that are “beautifully simple and simply beautiful” capture our imagination – they just feel right, and we humans are apt to quick acceptance when we encounter such simplicity. Furthermore, theories that can be communicated well via a story-telling narrative tend to stick and capture our imagination. Theories also need to be “portable” – the wider its applicability across a range of phenomena, the better. Finally, Hoffmann writes that the “best theories are productive, in that they stimulate experiment”. He tells us his theory about theory in an easy-to-grasp story-telling narrative.

I am in the midst of reading the much denser Chemical Discovery and the Logicians’ Program by Jerome Berson, an emeritus professor of organic chemistry who has turned into a philosopher of chemistry. The quote from Poincare at the beginning of this blog post is the opening quote in the book’s second chapter: “Theories Built up From Observations. The Inductivist Ideal.” Before launching into the different philosophical approaches, Berson asks three questions about Theory. What is it? Why do we need it? Where does it come from?

I liked how Berson delved into the etymology of the word “theory”. Apparently its Greek antecedents, theoria and theorein, mean a “spectacle or speculation” and “to look at” and that these derive from theos meaning “god”. Since one of my chemistry classes is part of a live-and-learn community with the theme “Faith and Reason”, this made me think about how a religiously faithful scientist might characterize the activity of a scientist as “thinking God’s thoughts after Him” (which I think can be attributed to Saint Augustine). As an aside, my faculty colleagues in this community jokingly ask each other whether we have been faithful and reasonable in our endeavors, whatever they may be!

One of the things I try to get across to my students is that the colloquial use of the word “theory” is different from its use in science. “That’s just a theory!” implies something of possibly fanciful imagination. Theories in science are however much more substantial. Berson would say that “several levels of our knowledge of natural phenomena may [roughly] be identified with a set of raw observations, then a law, which expresses and codifies related observations into identifiable groups, and finally a theory that groups together or classifies related laws, explains why they are related and predicts new phenomena.” He goes on to say that “some theories are widely accepted and guide the thinking and action of most of the scientific community, some are accepted as probable, although acceptance may not be universal, some are speculative, and some, although currently accepted, are destined to be shown wrong.”

But why bother having a theory in the first place? Mach and Duhem thought that one purpose is to achieve an “economy of thought”. Poincare is quoted again. “Thanks to generalization, each fact observed enables us to foresee a great many others.” In this sense, Berson summarizes that “the creation and testing of theories lie at the core of science and define its program. In this sense, the experimentalist treasures theory as the source of inspiration for new investigations.” Berson then goes on to describe key figures in the school of inductivism, Popper’s hardline falsification approach, the more pragmatic approach (in my opinion) of Lakatos and colleagues, and the “anything goes” of Feyerabend. The philosophically inclined will find Berson’s book interesting particularly if they are organic chemists. (If you’re not a chemist, the examples can be dense.) Berson provides plenty of examples in the field of organic chemistry, not something you see in most discussions in philosophy of science, where if any chemistry is represented it is typically physical chemistry.

I want to return back to Hoffman for a moment. In a 2007 article of the journal Synthese, he has a paper titled “What might philosophy of science look like if chemists built it?” The main point is to investigate what makes chemistry different and unique, when compared to the other sciences. In particular, Hoffmann argues against simplistic reductionism, an idea he says is “alive and well within science”. He divides understanding into vertical and horizontal components. While the vertical is classical reductionism, “horizontal understanding is expressed in the concepts, definitions, and symbolic structures at the same level of complexity as the object to be understood. Horizontal explanations, like dictionary definitions, but richer, are quasi-circular. And none the worse for it.”

Hoffmann lists some productive concepts in chemistry that are not easily reducible to physics: “aromaticity, the acid-base concept, the idea of a functional group, a substituent effect, and that of a chromophore. And let us not forget the chemical bond.” This made me think of the rather ubiquitous use of electronegativity for all sorts of chemical explanations in a first year college chemistry class. I try to impress on my students the quasi-empirical nature of using the Pauling values although I’m not sure they really understand this. When I teach inorganic chemistry, we look more carefully at the Mulliken values, the Allred values and discuss how the Periodic Table might even be arranged differently! That’s another example of a model that is not easily reducible: While the Periodic Table systematizes some aspects of chemistry, to me it is a reminder of the uniqueness and seemingly idiosyncratic nature of each element, pulled together in a “theory” represented by a two-dimensional model. It is interesting and very useful, but is it “true”? And that’s why it behooves me to think a little more carefully about the philosophy of chemistry.

(I recommend Hoffmann’s articles. They are relatively easy to read and follow along even if you are not a chemist. But you will particularly enjoy them if you are a chemist!)

To Sublime is Sublime

Last week we discussed precipitation reactions in my General Chemistry class. I tried to impress upon the students how surprising it would seem to someone observing such a chemical reaction for the first time. Mix two clear and colorless solutions together, i.e., two substances that look just like liquid water, and out pops a solid! Most of the solids are white in standard demos (and perhaps the jaded student does not find this all that interesting) but lead iodide (PbI₂) is yellow. I wonder if an early alchemist observing a similar reaction might have wondered if this was a route to making gold. I’m not sure my students were all that impressed (having seen this reactions in lab the week before). They might even have found writing out the chemical equations tedious. At the very least I might have amused them with my opening Power Point slide shown below as they were filing into class. Lame, but it still elicits chuckles.

Let’s stop to think about this for a moment. We often see solids dissolve in water (salt and sugar for example) but in everyday experience we rarely encounter solids appearing where you only had liquids to begin with. It’s almost magical. If you had a chemistry set as a kid, you might have had the magical experience of making your own precipitate or growing crystals. Think about the child-like wonder in seeing something surprising that might not have conformed to your everyday experience! (In the age of the iPad with fancy addictive games, it’s unclear to me if today’s kids will find it fascinating.) I’m pretty sure the alchemists did – especially since they did not know the underlying chemistry. I wonder if part of why the students are jaded is because the explanation seems so mundane and straightforward. (Maybe I need to spice it up!) Knowledge should be exciting, not boring!

What questions did students have on this unit? The first one, predictably, was “Do we have to memorize the solubility rules?” This was the final thing we talked about in class where my emphasis was not on memorizing but in trying to draw general principles from the rules – really a list of observational facts. That’s how you put together a theory! (Or perhaps a working hypothesis that can be tested!) But more on that in a later post since I’ve been thinking about philosophy of science and the makings of a scientific theory. In any case, I hope the students understood the idea of how to formulate such a theory based on what they had learned earlier in the semester. We had discussed lattice energies of ionic compounds, packing in solid crystalline structures, and dynamic equilibrium. I waved my hands and drew pictures on the board as I drew students into the discussion. I was at least interesting enough that they were paying attention instead of watching the clock (because we ran over by 2 minutes and they didn’t notice). I suppose I could have an assessment question to check if they really did “get it”.

A related phenomena that I think the alchemists would find particularly interesting is sublimation. Some solid substances will turn directly into gases (skipping the liquid state) upon heating. Dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) is an example familiar to most people. We also covered this in class but I neglected to make the connection to alchemy and teleportation! (More on the latter in a moment.) Iodine works well in a demo because of the lovely purple hue as it sublimes. I did not do the demo this year in my lecture class (noxious fumes) but I have done so when I teach lab (with the apparatus in a fume hood). If you put a watch glass over beaker so you can see the crystals reforming on the base of the watch glass. (Putting a small piece of ice on the watch glass hastens the deposition.) Other substances exhibiting this behavior include arsenic, camphor and ammonium chloride (sal ammoniac). Arsenic and sal ammoniac would have been familiar ingredients to the medieval alchemist, and camphor was available to Europe as a spice through the Arab traders.

Why might sublimation and deposition be of particular significance to the alchemist or magician? I think the process is akin to teleportation! A solid substance disappears into vapors, only to be reformed somewhere else. In the TV series Once Upon A Time, when the evil queen teleports she is engulfed by a swirling purple smoke that resembles the color of iodine vapor! (I wonder if that’s where they got the idea.) Furthermore, sublimation could also be used as a tool for purification, much like distillation – a process core to alchemist’s work. Since alchemy was often infused with the religious symbol of Christianity, one might see the analogy a soul rising upward (or heavenward). If my students lived in the medieval world and witnessed such alchemy, they might think it sublime!

Operation Mongoose

Spoiler Alert: Just finished watching Season 4 of Once Upon A Time. If you don’t want to know what transpires, stop reading now!

Given my interest in how magical worlds intersect with non-magical worlds (a la Harry Potter), I’ve been slowly working my way through Once Upon A Time. The series features plenty of creative story-telling and mash-ups – how characters from two different fairy tales interact with each other. It also prompts me to think about the boundaries of magical systems (I’ll need to post further on this topic some time).

The chief problem with a TV series, as opposed to a stand-alone movie or well-defined miniseries, is how to keep the viewers coming back. Once Happily Ever After is reached, there is no more story to hold the attention of viewers. This seems a tad ironic given that one central theme running through Season 4 is “finding one’s happy ending”. Obstacles have to be surmounted, but to keep the story going, new and more powerful obstacles have to be devised. In the case of Once Upon A Time, this means more powerful characters wielding more powerful magic.

Frozen makes its entry primarily focusing on Elsa as she finds herself in Storybrooke at the beginning of Season 4. I think it’s fairly obvious that she is not an evil sorceress, so the powerful antagonist introduced in this case is the Snow Queen. This is the main theme of the first half of Season 4. I felt that the story and character of the Snow Queen was very well developed – and the way it draws together the web of intersecting lives was done in a clever way. The patience and perseverance of the Snow Queen, hidden in plain sight, was much more compelling in my opinion than the way Zelena, the wicked witch from Oz and Regina’s sister, was featured in the previous season. The intersection of the Frozen world (Arendelle) with the current characters is creative story-telling in some instances, and in other cases feels forced or contrived.

The second half of the season is where things start to fall apart story-wise. While the intrigue of finding the Author kept me watching, when he is finally revealed and plays his magical hand (or uses his pen), I was unimpressed. Two new witches are introduced (Ursula and Cruella) each with their own back-story episodes, and Maleficent gets resurrected. Not to mention Zelena shows up. August returns. Lily comes back. The plot feels way too contrived as the prior entanglement stories are stretched to the point of weak credibility. There is something particularly compelling about fiction that rings true. It’s magical in a way I don’t know how to explain, and maybe that’s the point! Great stories or great literature share this in common. In contrast, many other fictional stories feel contrived and dragged out. The longer they get, the more difficult it is to “get the story right”. I think this is a growing problem with the Once Upon A Time series - the piling on of backstory entanglements weakens the pleasure of the overall story. In the first season, there were fewer entanglements and backstories mainly focused on character development rather than entanglement of different characters from different worlds.

Three magic-related things I pondered while watching Season 4:

(1) Magic-wielding folks seem to have good ways of resurrecting or reincarnating themselves. However for non-magical folks, dead is dead. This makes the world outside Storybrooke interesting because without the ability to wield magic, sorceresses (and most of the magic-users in Once Upon A Time are women) cannot easily protect themselves or reassemble themselves.

(2) The pen is mightier than the sword, at least in the case of the Author – but that can only impact those “authored” in the enchanted or magical worlds. Henry, for example, is unaffected when Heroes & Villains gets written. Oddly, the Author himself seems not to have come from a magical world. It’s entirely possible he might given the way Once Upon A Time springs new back stories on characters. The concept or the idea of an Author (or multiple authors) writing things into reality and who can impose a will on the outcome is interesting, but I felt it was used in a rather one-dimensional way. Maybe later seasons will fix this.

(3) Things get interesting when the world outside Storybrooke intersects with the enchanted world. The use of magical objects is still permitted outside of Storybrooke, i.e., one could enchant an object for a specific task but not be able to channel that magic in any other way. Thus, the necklace Zelena wears allows her to take the form of another (sort of like Polyjuice Potion). Also, magical scrolls (we never see what’s written in them) allow one to recognize and re-enter Storybrooke. This reminds me of 12 Grimmauld Place. Perhaps the writers got this idea from the Harry Potter books.

I will probably watch Season 5 when the DVD is released, although my interest started to wane two seasons ago. I don’t see how the storyline can get better with the new Emma the Dark One trajectory. However, I have gotten more interested in the nature of story-telling that involves magic and also magical story-telling, so this will have to do – until something else more engaging comes along. I’m looking forward to Fantastic Beasts, but my expectations are not all that high. Prequels can be done well or they could be done poorly even if the movie special effects have improved. So can sequels.