In my mind STEM topics exist on a scale that has math at one end, then there's a slight pause/discontinuity (as in point 2 in the underpants gnome business plan) before it continues with physics, chemistry, biology and onwards to god knows what. As you move along this axis stuff feels more and more complex, messy and hard to nail down definitively. More practical. More prone to get tripped up by silly mistakes and things you never imagined you had to think about.
The new compounds they discovered in the old samples kind of illustrates how much hard work is required to get good answers. You can't just suck on your pipe, scratch your quill on some parchment and exert yourself mentally, you have to scrape gunk out of test-tubes and be really careful and thorough in a highly practical sense. The world is imprecise and gnarly and you kind of have to hope for the best.
I really admire people who are capable of wringing results out of goo and specks of dust using gadgets that require calibration that has to be able to distinguish actual good signal from residues of the danish you had for breakfast.
(Example not entirely random since one of our engineers eating a danish for lunch in his office made the electrochemical sensors he was working on go absolutely apeshit. Kind of good to know before you evacuate a whole industrial site and send in the people in yellow hazmat suits)
I try to keep this in mind when reviewing predictions, speculation, and fiction about artificial intelligences that get super intelligent. There’s more to knowledge than just calculating faster. Hypotheses need to be tested by experimentation; theories must be supported by evidence. (This is not my original idea, I read it in an essay from an AI researcher.)
This is also why there is more to science than statistical analysis. Stats help us understand evidence we have collected. But at some point a new idea needs a new test in order to know if it is useful or correct.
I've been lucky enough to work with a few highly skilled organic chemists, and I know enough chemistry to know that I could never, ever join them as such. It's such a niche, specialised, and important and yet under-recognised set of skills.
A few examples. The order in which you add nominally unimportant reagents to a reaction can significantly matter – the enthalpy of mixing is non-zero, and so if you dissolve A and then B in solvent C before letting it reflux for five hours (say), it will be a different initial condition to adding B, then A. Many (most?) chemists weigh vials before adding a mass of x g/mg of a compound, in the process of adding that, and then again when they have removed "x" grams. Lids are pared with volumetric flasks. Tiny variations matter. Room humidity, temperature, and the history of the use of the equipment involved may change the answers. I had one graduate student (who came top in her year in chemistry) make an isotopically labelled molecule for me, with a ~70% yield and a ~100% labelling purity. A few years later, a biochemist following the "recipe" she developed (and beautifully illustrated!) was unable to get above 10% yield and about 80% purity. I never really was able to work out why. Any "debugging" conversation starts with "tell me exactly -- what did you do?". Things occasionally don't go "as well" when certain contaminants are (not) present. The debugger for reality sucks.
And still, despite all the fiddly nature of the work, it's downright dangerous. Organic chemists, as a species, live less long. They get blown up and gassed. I've been in a building when a "small scale" reaction has exploded and you feel the vibrations of it – nobody was seriously injured because the fume hood's shock sensors detected the azide derivatives decomposing rapidly and, within microseconds, dumped a load of cold CO2 down the front of the hood, stopping combustion and redirecting/reducing the blast. Another acquaintance of mine managed to have the building evacuated after ordering a 10 ml bottle of a compound he distilled from a hops extract and identified via GC-MSMS and MS^n spectrometry as part of a project trying to understand beer foam (and make better non-alcoholic beers; this is in about 2000 or 1999, before "good" alcoholfrei bier was available) – he naïvely opened the lid to see what it smelt like outside of the fume hood, and immediately uncontrollably vomited. So did his neighbours. Then the rest of the room. Then the floor. They closed it over a weekend, opened all the doors and windows, put in industrial fans, and it still stank for months.
Chemists do important, undervalued work. They make drugs, materials, batteries. They do everything from quantum mechanics to what I still consider to be not far removed from alchemy. Some of them are slightly odd people, but they are usually very fun to share a drink with...
Another anecdote (because it's Friday): We hired a chemist from a big rocket company into our computer company. He designed organic flammable compounds (rocket fuel) that got made in a clean room in vats and packed into tubes by technicians. They scraped the rapidly-hardening stuff with paddles and smeared it into the tubes. If they left any, the vat was toast and had to be replaced.
So they would try really hard to get it all, scraping the sides and sometimes jamming the paddle down on recalcitrant bits to get them unstuck.
My friend was very nervous about this, and so looked for another job, which was how I met him.
Not long after he was working with us, he got a call and turned white. He explained: the fellow hired in after him was standing behind a technician when the batch went up, turning them both into crackly bits of toast. That could have been him.
Anyway, no I'm not cut out to be an organic chemist.
Thank you for sharing this story. It's easy to think the well-educated/professional/R&D/STEM-academia fields are devoid of danger - they are for the most part - but survival and safety is not a solved problem in many niches of these domains.
I walk through a high-tech, massive industrial factory most days I go into the office. I find it harder to remember to look for wires and forklifts than I did when I was in roles closer to the danger. It's clearly a "natural" risk-analysis response, but risk doesn't go to zero, nor should the individual ever completely export their risk management to confidence in systems, processes, and organizations.
The key-cards and clean rooms and smart people can lead us to forget these things.
Stories like this are what make me so frustrated with the "anti-science" rhetoric you hear in politics coming from the same people that carry a miniature computer in their pocket that's the result of (wild guess) millions of man hours of research in physics, chemistry, and many forms of engineering.
The people that do this work are ACTUALLY making the world a better place.
tertiary amines, man. That's the reason I couldn't be an organic chemist. If you don't like the smell of decaying fish, it's tough.
Also pretty much everything in OC ends up being a yucky resin at the bottom of a flask you can't remove.
When I visited my grad school for the first time, there were ambulances and firetrucks outside the building. I went to the main office and there were EMTs everywhere and firemen. Turns out, they were doing spring cleaning of a fume hook and accidentally touched a bottle of ether. The ether had formed free radicals over time, and just touching the bottle caused it to expose, popping all the windows out 20 feet away. The chemist's face was permanently scarred (although his life was safed by the safety glass). That was later my office, although I did mostly computational work.
speaking of dicey chemistry, I'm sure you have already read the book, but to anyone else who hasn't: "Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants" by John Drury Clark (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677285.Ignition_) made me realize two things: 1) I'm glad I didn't pursue a career in chemistry as I would doubtless have been drawn to things that are "interesting", 2) people who do "interesting" things in chemistry have the best stories.
We didn't have fancy fume hoods like that back in the day. Do you have a link to the device used in that fume hood? I only found this [1] but it doesn't sound like the device you're talking about.
I mean. I am not trying to underscore the work. But I feel you are making it sound magical. This is not much different than cooking, is it? Try making bread or beer by adding things out of order.
I feel so much of this mysticism is driven by over reliance on associative and distributive laws for elementary math. And it is super annoying because I know I do the same thing.
I think I was just sticking on the gp's "In my mind STEM topics exist on a scale that has math at one end..."
Especially with the first supporting evidence being that order matters on how you mix things. Only in very elementary math, it seems, is that not the case. Yet, we stick on that heavily.
That is, I wasn't trying to counter the point. I intend my point to be a further exploration on why that makes things feel more complicated. Near mystical, in that we can't always explain why an order is important. Sometimes we can, of course.
I track your point, though I might add that in advanced mathematics, things can often be reasoned in multiple directions, or sometimes proved via multiple methods. Often things are demonstrated irrespective of changing parameters, or otherwise the parameters are well understood to define the problem.
This isn't true for many orgo chemicals, based on the OP. The scale of sensitivity to initial and intermediate (!) conditions is un-intuitively high.
Makes sense. I think it is from a definition perspective, though. Statically, it is easy to define things independent of the process that governs them. Such that it is a middle college class that really covers dynamic systems for structural analysis. With most earlier classes being static analysis.
Even electrical classes started on analog circuits and power transmission later in courses. Early circuits are centered around ready dc connections. Or steady state ac ones.
I see it as a sensitivity to initial conditions. If anything, beginner cooks are more likely to overestimate this sensitivity (afraid to sub ingredients,
Your examples of bread or beer avoid this, but then consider whether brewing beer is a good, differentiating counter-example to organic chemistry. ;)
Yeah, I confess I picked baking and brewing specifically. Was also thinking cheeses making.
And agreed that for many processes, it is initial conditions. I also consider scaffolding for things like keystone arches. The final result being something that is only doable with items that are no longer there.
> In my mind STEM topics exist on a scale that has math at one end, then there's a slight pause/discontinuity (as in point 2 in the underpants gnome business plan) before it continues with physics, chemistry, biology and onwards to god knows what.
Whether or not it is a joke probably depends on how you label the axis along which you distribute these topics. :)
Observe that as you move from one side to the other (math to biology and onwards), you are essentially dragging along a good portion of the stuff as prerequisites you have to know a bit about.
By the time you reach something like immunobiology you can pretty much build a house out of the textbooks and go live in it. :)
The joke as I heard it in the 80's -- and I have no reason to think it was new then -- went something like: Physics is just applied math, chemistry is applied physics, etc...
I've always liked the view that Physics is just experimental discovery of the axioms "chosen" for our universe. Physics without experimentation just being a specific subset of math.
> In my mind STEM topics exist on a scale that has math at one end, then there's a slight pause/discontinuity (as in point 2 in the underpants gnome business plan) before it continues with physics, chemistry, biology and onwards to god knows what.
"Now one speculative [i.e., theoretical] science is said to be nobler than another, either by reason of its greater certitude, or by reason of the higher worth of its subject-matter...Of the practical sciences, that one is nobler which is ordained to a further purpose, as political science is nobler than military science; for the good of the army is directed to the good of the State."
The new compounds they discovered in the old samples kind of illustrates how much hard work is required to get good answers. You can't just suck on your pipe, scratch your quill on some parchment and exert yourself mentally, you have to scrape gunk out of test-tubes and be really careful and thorough in a highly practical sense. The world is imprecise and gnarly and you kind of have to hope for the best.
I really admire people who are capable of wringing results out of goo and specks of dust using gadgets that require calibration that has to be able to distinguish actual good signal from residues of the danish you had for breakfast.
(Example not entirely random since one of our engineers eating a danish for lunch in his office made the electrochemical sensors he was working on go absolutely apeshit. Kind of good to know before you evacuate a whole industrial site and send in the people in yellow hazmat suits)