Naming Rights

(Thanks to the July issue of WIRED magazine for the tip-off)
(Check updates, below, for folks who've reminded me of more chemist-named facilities)

Andre Young and Jimmy Iovino:
Music Entrepreneurs / Academy Founders
(Wonder which guy gets to set the new dress code?)
Credit: Sam Jones | USC

Could you receive a doctorate from Dr. Dre?
Not yet, but maybe soon...

I somehow missed the announcement a few months ago:
Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovino, two highly successful music entrepreneurs, donated a chunk of change to USC. The result? The USC Iovino Young Academy for Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation.
(Tagline: The Degree Is In Disruption.)

The program creates an L.A-based  incubator, with courses like "Marketing Radical Innovations," and "Managing New Enterprises." The students spend their fourth year working, quite literally, in a space dubbed "The Garage," filled with tools, gadgets, computers, and other budding entrepreneurs.

How much did this new Academy set Jimmy and Dre back? A cool $70 million. Not too shabby, for two guys who never went to college.

This got me thinking: Do chemists ever buy naming rights?

Most of us would be content to be known for a specific reaction or process - 'named reaction' books get reprinted almost annually. Sometimes well-known professors sponsor or are honored with named professorships, such as the Cram or Vedejs Chairs. One famous Nobelist even garnered his own Institute. Rarer still, chemists whose research translates into industry can name buildings (Silverman Hall), institutes (Warner-Babcock), or create charitable organizations (the Kenan Trust).

But, sponsoring entire academic programs? The only chemist* I can recall doing that is Jack Welch, with two programs: a "Management Institute" at Strayer, and the business school at Sacred Heart.

Too much money? Admittedly, most chemists only make a fraction of $70 mil over the course of a career. But, the top dogs at large chemical companies might come closer. So, how about it, guys? Who wants to see the Liveris Institute? The Svanberg Charitable Trust?

Better still? The Witty Professorship (that one just writes itself!)

*OK, OK, he's Chem-E. Close enough for this discussion.

1. Updates (7/7/13) - On the twitterz, James Banal points out that Ahmed Zewail (1999 Chem Nobel) has a Research Park ("city") named for him.
2. Learned that Jack Welch also named a business school at SHU. Text edited to reflect same.
3. On Twitter, Matt Hartings points to the Beckman Institute (Illinois and CA!), and Moore Centre (Cambridge) / Moore Labs (CalTech)
4. In the Comments, CE points out the (ironic) exclusion of one Alfred Nobel, he of the eponymous Prize, and Max Planck, he of the eponymous Institute.
5. Anon points to the Sanger Institute, the Curie Institute, and the Lawrence Livermore Nat'l Lab.

Plenty of Room at the Bottom

Have you seen this cool new NASA "astronomy picture of the day?" It allows you to move up and down through the dimensions of the known universe - level by level, scale by scale.

Sadly, not included in the graphic.
Source: Namco / PlayStation

Building on an earlier version released in 2010, the Huang twins (Mike & Cary) have really outdone themselves this time. Now fully equipped with smooth transitions, helpful fact boxes, and awestruck ambient music, the graphic allows viewers to move through 62 orders of magnitude  (a "1" followed by 62 zeroes, or 100 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion!) to explore phenomena ranging from the immense observable universe, down through galaxies, asteroids, animals, cells, atoms, and particles, to the infinitesimally tiny Planck constant. The experience feels somewhat like playing the popular "stuff-collecting" game Katamari Damacy. 


Browsing the site, I zoomed into the realm where we chemists usually find ourselves, somewhere between 1 micrometer (10^-6 m, one micron, where the larger viruses hang out) down to around a femtometer (10^-15 m, about the size of a single proton). Honestly, that's a huge zone to play around in, roughly nine orders of magnitude. Put in human terms, the larger viruses are to protons what Jupiter and Saturn are to us! 


Encouraged by the classic Feynman lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," in which the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist lays down the foundation for nanotech, I pushed further down the size scale, past various flavors of quarks, down to the neutrino, still our smallest detectable particle at (about) 1 yoctometer (10^-24 m).

Hey, who turned off the universe?
"Nothing down here but us strings..."
Source: htwins.net

Then...nothing! For the next ten orders of magnitude, down to quantum foams and strings, there was just empty space. So, what's down there? The subconscious? The Higgs boson? Tesseracts?


Honestly, I don't know enough quantum physics to tell you. If any of my readers are better versed in the subject, please write in. To parrot Feynman, 10¹⁰ seems like entirely too much room to have nothing in it.


Update (5/5/12, 11:00AM) - A reader alerted me to an old xkcd comic that covers much of the same ground...