Whimsy

Walking through a used book store today, I happened across the "Science and Math" section (hardly by coincidence). One of the better collections I've seen in awhile, it had a few copies of Feynman's QED and Six Easy Pieces, Kaku's Physics of the Impossible, and even biographies of Niels Bohr and Jane Goodall.

I ended up with a copy of Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, for $7.14.

An inveterate "skimmer," I often leaf through the old books before I pick them up. Many times, they have handwritten notes from a class, business cards, sometimes even personal photographs or "to-do" lists. On this particular occasion, I happened across a special surprise in a book titled Elementary Chinese.

I left it in the book. Maybe someday you'll find it [wink].

Curious Collaborations

Tried telecommuting? It's tough when you're bench-bound, since you can't really catalyze by cell phone, or take HPLC by HTTP. Of course, research takes strange twists and turns all the time: witness the schism between compound "designers" and "makers" in Pfizer's geographically divided new organization. 

Long-distance scientific collaboration crops up in all sorts of interesting places. Creative minds always find a way, albeit leaning heavily on technology to help smooth things out. Here's a few interesting examples:

Physics by Ham Radio (1950) - While on sabbatical in Brazil, Richard Feynman continued his Caltech research by hooking up with a pirate ham radio operator.

"I found an amateur radio operator in Brazil, [but] because there was something slightly illegal about it, he'd give me some call letters...So I'd say 'This is WKWX. Could you please tell me the spacing between the certain levels in boron we talked about last week?"

Source:Brian Dettmer, 2008
Thanks to Chemjobber for pointing this out!

Manuscript Writing by Phone, Post, and Boat (1969) -  Writing in How the Hippies Saved Physics (p. 47), author David Kaiser describes how two authors - Abner Shimony and John Clauser - tackled paper submissions from afar. While writing their first quantum mechanics manuscript, Clauser decided to sail down the East coast, towards an eventual postdoc at Berkeley. Here's how it went:

" ...each time Clauser sailed into a port along the East Coast, he would find a telephone and check in with Shimony...then Shimony would mail copies of the edited draft to every marina in the next city on Clauser's itinerary, 'some of which I picked up,' Clauser explained, "and some of which are probably still waiting there for all I know.'"

SPARC (1992) - The Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory, first established at the University of Michigan, grew over the next 6 years to include several worldwide radio telescopes. The project now incorporates behavioral scientists, computer programmers, physicists, and astronomers, who "...sit down to their computers in the comfort of their offices and call up a screen that allows them to control and gather data from more than a dozen instruments located around--and above--the globe." Online collaborative tools developed by this consortium include Java programs, chat rooms, and a digital whiteboard.


Instant Messaging, Liveblogging, Wikis (mid-2000s) - Regular readers recall the recent uptick in live-blogging, that is, conducting a live experiment while posting data, observations, and commentary. Paul at Tot Syn famously debunked NaH oxidation, and Azmanam proved that LemiShine cleaner contains citric acid. The open science movement brings together scientists from around the globe to live-edit papers on electronic documents called wikis. My biggest surprise? Digging up an IEEE abstract on eChemIM. Apparently, it's a real-time application that allows exchange of structures and protein sequences through a simple pop-up window. Sounds like a cool new way to collaborate!


Readers, have I left out your favorite way to connect? Let me know in the comments.

Hubris vs. Humility: Chemists' Inner Struggle

Hydrazide crystals, DCM solution at left

When the Royal Society's Chemistry World blog challenged the chemistry blogosphere to suggest "What makes a good chemist?," they inadvertently reopened a debate on the cultural and professional perception of scientists.  Editor Bibiana Seijo opined that problem solving, tenacity, flexibility, passion, teamwork, and communication skills were tops. Chemjobber's take on it?

"...I really believe in humility. [snip] Humility can keep a chemist grounded in the fundamentals of their field and it can give direction by showing what's yet to be known...another trait that chemists should be really good at: truthfulness. When I speak, it's my sincere hope that I can understandably convey the truth about chemicals and chemistry."

While several commenters reiterated the call for humility, some did not. I was among them.


In fact, when I submitted my first answer (Curiosity, honesty, industriousness, exuberance, and adaptability), I had taken great pains to leave humility out. Later, blogging stalwart @azmanam mentioned that I almost had a full acrostic, so I couldn't resist the chance to finish it:

"OK, OK: "Curiosity, Honesty, Exuberance, Mastery, Industriousness, Structured, Tenacious! #chemist" 

All puzzle pandering aside, note that I've still left out humility. Not that I advocate being a puffed-up know-it-all, especially not around other, smarter scientists, but CJ's tongue-in-cheek Twitter hashtag #humblebrag springs to mind; quite literally, when one argues for his humility, he violates it at the same time.

My champion for respectful disagreement
Source: 3 Quarks Daily

Honestly, between us? I prefer the approach Richard Feynman advocates for in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: respectful disagreement. In this scene from the book, Feynman bluntly discusses physics at length with Niels and Aage Bohr, and learns the value of a little chutzpah:

"...Bohr said to his son, 'Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over there? He's the only one who's not afraid of me, and will say when I've got a crazy idea. So the next time we want to discuss ideas, we're not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes, yes, Dr. Bohr. Get that guy and we'll talk with him first.'

I was always dumb in that way. I never knew who I was talking to. I was always worried about the physics..."

Humility doesn't necessarily fund your grant, or publicize your research. It doesn't get young kids excited or engaged in learning. It also doesn't help you to advocate a new approach, or appreciate any hard-earned success. I feel like scientists, generally - and chemists, specifically - fight an ongoing, internal battle: hubris vs. humility. How can you take pride in your research and stay motivated, without alienating coworkers or sounding condescending?


My answer? Emphasize honesty and curiosity. The first trait makes sure you're constantly checking and validating results (which helps to keep you humble). The second helps smooth interactions with other scientists; you can learn a lot if you're genuinely interested and excited about another's field.

Fall leaf, or metaphor? You decide!

I've recently been reading The Wild Life of Our Bodies, by Rob Dunn, a biology professor at N.C. State. Deep in Chapter 5, Dunn discusses mid-20th Century experiments with aseptic "bubbles," which bred lines of lab animals that were essentially germ-free. One problem, of course, rears its head with DNA-embedded viruses, which can later be expressed even under these sterile conditions. Deep in the narrative, he drops in a tiny asterisk, which draws the eye down to some miniscule text near the bottom - Dunn's take on mixing curiosity with a little dash of irreverance:

"Perhaps, in reading this, you are thinking, "I know how you could get those viruses out." If so, the urge you are feeling is the backbone of scientific innovation, a stew of can do, curiosity, obsession, and a little arrogance. It is the job of conservative, daily science to suggest that the problems are bigger than you might appreciate. It is your job on behalf of radical, innovative science to go write your own fifty-year plan."

 Sounds good to me!

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...

Friday Book Club

Books, chairs, and lamps = happiness

I live in a sleepy town of about 28,000 people. Quiet, picture-postcard-like scenery. A few coffee shops and pizza joints. Schoolchildren, soccer moms, and tall pine trees. The type of town where a visit to the local library might normally turn up mysteries, nonfiction, and children's books, but not a lot of science content.


So, imagine my surprise at finding a veritable treasure trove in our "New Books" section last week. As I strolled by, I couldn't help scooping up everything I laid my eyes on.


Carl Zimmer's A Planet of Viruses was there. As was Much Ado About (Practically) Nothing, a book about the history of noble gases, by David Fisher. A few rows down, I encountered How I Killed Pluto (And Why it Had it Coming) by Mike Brown, and one row to my right was Rob Dunn's The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners that Shape Who We Are Today. Toss in the obligatory Feynman biographies, and a book or two about popular physics, and I was in science reading heaven.


Looks like a long weekend of coffee and reading (and maybe a game) for me.  Enjoy, everyone!