Qapla!

Qapla! Success! My latest column in Nature Chemistry came out last week. It opens and closes with Klingon — which may be a first for a publication in a scientific journal. 

Se'vIr lIngDI' tamlertej, tlhIngan Hol QaQ law' DIvI' Hol QaQ puS jatlh Michelle Francl. (More or less translates as "Should chemists publish in Klingon rather than English wonders Michelle Francl")

and 

TlhIngan Hol ghojlu'meH QaQ jajvam. (Today is a good day to learn Klingon.) 

Writing this piece I learned a bunch about synthetic languages beginning with Hildegard of Bingen's lingua ignota to Nobel prize winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald's literal investment in Ido (an offshoot of Esperanto). He gave half of his prize monies to promote use of the language by scientists. Also  I was introduced to Volapük, which sounds like it could be Klingon, but is actually the name of another 19th century synthetic language.

The essay isn't about Klingon per se but rather tackles the issue of auxiliary languages and science. If English is the lingua franca of science, what is the cost to scientists who do not speak it as their mother tongue? Time? Visibility? Surely, but the ultimate cost is the work that doesn't get done as a result, or gets done more slowly. It costs us all.

So, a Gedanken experiment...would it level the playing field if we all had to publish in Klingon? Could you squeeze more science into a 15 minute talk if you did it in Klingon? Chaq!

Read the whole thing here.

Lost in translation

 

I am working on a piece on reading chemistry articles in other languages. I am reading "Chemistry Through the Language Barrier," written in the late 1960s when Google translate was science fiction. The advice is practical - how can you wring what you need from a paper written in Czech or Polish or...Russian or Chinese? Well, when it comes to that last, the author's advice is best summed up as "Good luck and godspeed!", but Japanese is not out of reach he assures you.

Exercises are left for the reader, in part so you will believe his methods possible.

Yesterday I was happily ensconced on the divan in my office, a cup of tea on the side table and went to grab my yellow pad to jot notes and thoughts. Argh, it was across the room on my desk. Too lazy to get up, I grabbed the nearest blank writing surface: the next blind date book on my stack.  I happily scrawled away. Now I am trying to transcribe what I wrote into my electronic notes and finding myself at a loss translating sentences where the ink failed to write on the tape.

_____

Earlier I had been reading the foreward and mentally debating the author. Imagine my shock when I reached the end to discover my father-in-law had written that foreward.

Last times

There is, they say, a last time for everything. It is certainly true for me this (last) academic year. There are many last times.  I have graded the last quantum midterm, and today made up the last problem set for the class. Last week in intro chemistry, I taught VSEPR theory for the last time. It takes practice to be able to visualize the 3D structures of the molecules from the sketches that chemists make, and so I give them all a simple molecular model kit they can carry around. It all fits neatly into a centrifuge tube.

I bring all the pieces to class and have students assemble their own kits. This time when I went to put the extra bits and bobs away, tossing the little signs — “Take 3” — into the bag I realized with a start that I would not need these things again. I could just toss the signs and give away the 50 extra octahedral centers. Except I couldn’t. It seemed too…real. Too final.

Somehow the last things are less real when there is not actual stuff attached to them. Literally weightier, they feel metaphorically heavier, too. I repacked the bag and put it back in the cupboard. 

Maybe it is the time of year, not just my imminent retirement. The days are shorter, the sun struggles to climb high in the sky, and the readings at Mass are circling around the end times.

---

VSEPR stands for valence shell electron pair repulsion and basically says that bonds around an atom will arrange themselves to be as far apart as they can because the electrons that make up the bonds repel. So if an atom has two other atoms bonded to it, they will be in a line (CO₂ is an example), 180^o apart. There are a dozen or so patterns based on this theory.

Centrifuge tubes are great for storing small amounts of stuff and you don’t have to be a scientist to buy them. They don’t usually leak, either.

Fifty ways to leave your lab

 

"...Oh, you hop on the bus, Gus
You don't need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free
Slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan..."

As I headed across campus to the main library this morning to pick up a book I had ordered from interlibrary loan, Simon and Garfunkel's Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover started playing. (Is this an improvement over Cecilia? Not sure.) Midstream, "..you don't need to discuss much, just drop off the key, Lee..."

In the summer of 1986, I opened the door to my assigned research space, next door to my office. My department chair was with me, the task was to see what  needed to be done to make the space usable for computational chemistry research. My predecessor had been gone for more than a year, so the space had become...storage...disarrayed...ugh, a mess. 

There was an old tire on one of the lab benches, and a dead pigeon on the window sill. Two window air conditioners were wedged with plywood into the windows, wheezing as they tried to keep up with the midsummer heat. We stood in the doorway and surveyed the scene. My chair said, "I will take care of it." He cleared the lab out — tire, dead pigeon and all — with his own hands. The space got kitted out with all the modern necessities for mid-80s' computational chemistry. Phone lines and modems to dial into the VAX computer up the hill. FORTRAN manuals. A couple of Mac Plusses which doubled as terminals. Racks to store magnetic tapes.  Tables. Chalk.

Over the last 40 years I have had several labs, this last one tucked into the ground floor of the biology wing. And this is — was — the last lab. 

Last week I recycled the few hard copy manuals that remained. Gifted a nice large monitor to a young colleague who does some computational work. Recycled boxes of paper files, drafts of papers long ago published, data from projects that didn't quite bear fruit. CDs of software I will never need again were pitched in the trash. And a desk was piled with tech to be picked up by our IT folk. Including a 1986 Toshiba laptop, that was the computer I started my work on. I packed a couple of boxes to take home, but most everything else went into the trash.

I left no old tires, nor dead pigeons. I dropped off the keys, slipped out the back, and was free.

There must be 50 ways to leave your laboratory. 

____________________

I am moving to part-time teaching beginning next fall, then retiring all together at the end of next academic year. This was the first major step toward that transition.

The tale of the great tea kerfuffle

A year ago today, Steeped was published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. I was excited to see all my work come to fruition. But little did I know what the day would bring.

There had been an article in La Civilta Cattolica, and another in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few days before publication. I had gotten up at 4am a couple of mornings to check my mail for interview requests with UK publications. I did a couple, including one with The Telegraph and one with the Daily Mail. I might have mentioned that adding a tiny amount of salt to tea can ease the bitterness, particularly if you'd let your tea oversteep. 

On Wednesday, I woke to a lovely email from my editor at the RSC offering her best wishes and some suggestions for publicizing the book. It was the first day of teaching, so I figured I'd tackle some of those tasks after my classes wrapped up at 1 and before office hours at 3:30. (Confession, there are still a couple of those tasks I haven't managed yet.) And off I went to the college to catch the 9am departmental meeting. 

I went to pull the meeting agenda out of my inbox and noticed I had an email from the RSC's PR firm. The Telegraph was wondering if I had a response to the US Embassy's statement. What statement??? This statement! Turns out that Britain was up in arms over the suggestion that salt in tea could be desirable. We drafted something light and I went off to the departmental meeting. But I kept a wary eye on my inbox. An email from a reporter at the NY Times popped up. Would I have time to talk to him now? I excused myself and went back to my office. We had a lovely conversation, and I was pleased he asked me about my (non-tea related) science. I rang off.

That's when chaos ensued. My phone started ringing. There were DMs on what-was-once-known-as-Twitter, on LinkedIn. In my college email, my personal email. A text from my sister summed it up, "this isn't REAL is it?" It was crazy real. I grabbed a marker and started writing times and interview requests on my glass-topped desk - a space I usually used for working out quantum mechanics problems with my pchem students. Then I went to teach.

The next three days were wild. I did an interview with Lauren Frayer on NPR, and was too flustered to dig out the passage in the book about salt and bitterness when she asked me to read it to her. A TV crew came from the Philly station. I did interviews for media outlets in Ireland and Canada and South Africa and Turkey and Australia and Japan. And of course for the UK. For CNN and the BBC and PBS. At all hours. Like at 1:30 am my time - morning in Britain. By Zoom and phone and via fancy web set ups. And I taught my classes. 

I was the subject of a press briefing at the US State department.

Saturday morning I was sorting my laundry as one does on the weekend when the texts flew again. I was a limerick on NPR's Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me:

Before all you Britains find fault
Take a sip and your whinging will halt
While sugar is nice it’s not quite the right spice
Because your tea needs a wee pinch of…salt

It got a bit less wild the following week. I did more interviews, but got more sleep. One of my favorites was with WHYY's Cherri Gregg and Avi Wolfman-Arent for their show Studio 2. I brought tea to taste and it was fun to meet the people behind the voices that I had heard so often. I enjoyed giving a Joseph Priestly Society lecture at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, which played a role in the book. In the end the PR people estimated that the news had been seen 19 billion times. I'm with my sister, this isn't real is it?

I'm still talking tea (four events coming up in the next month including a reading at an independent book store and a virtual talk with the ACS -- you can sign up for free here) and doing the occasional interview about the chemistry of tea (December's Consumer Reports) beyond salt. I got to meet and talk tea and baking with chemist and Great British Bake Off finalist Josh Smalley in London last summer, hosted by the RSC. Most of all I enjoy taking people for a dip into their cup to better appreciate the rich molecular mash-up that is the world's most popular beverage after water. And to find ways to make their tea taste better! Even to the adding of a pinch of salt.

Deliquescent: I am melting

I am currently reading "Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair" by Christian Wiman. It is part poetry, part lyric essay, and part commonplace book. In the third entry he quotes Imre Kertész, "under certain circumstances... words lose their substance... they simply deliquesce..." Kertész is, I think, referring to grief, but I was struck by the Dali-esque image of melting words that deliquesce implies. It is originally a term from chemistry, referring to the process by which a salt absorbs water from the atmosphere and turns into a solution. Looking for all the world like it is melting away, but of course it has not. All the ions that were in the salt are still present, simply now unseen in the water, and the water that swirled around the salt unseen is now made manifest. 

Ten entries later deliquesce appears again, this time in a long ouroboric discourse on snakes. I look deliquesce up, wondering what the non-chemists make of it. Metaphorically, suggests Merriam-Webster, it means to soften, perhaps with age. Am I deliquescing as I write? (Certainly as I age.) Pulling something unseen from the air, making it manifest, while I myself vanish? Still there, tucked unseen between those water molecules...those words. 

It makes me think of efflorescence, where water flows through a salt, dissolving it, carrying it to the surface where it then turns back into a solid. But instead of the tidy crystalline packing, now it looks like flowers have erupted on the surface. Perhaps that's another metaphor for my writing, looking for what's in the depths to carry it up to the surface where it can flower. (Or lose its intended structure -- not an image I'd chose.)

All things visible and invisible. All things exchanging and interchanging.

_______

Sodium hydroxide is what I think of as the iconic ionic substance that deliquesces.

Daughters of the moon

One of the delights of graduation is standing in line, well not the standing-in-line part, but the who-I'm-standing-in-line-with part, sometimes with colleagues I haven't seen since last commencement. I am privileged to work with some pretty amazing people, and this year stood across from a colleague who is an award-winning poet (she won a Guggenheim!). We chatted about the moon, its moods and modes, how it can seem to loom so large in certain places. Her students, she tells me, are in love with the moon. My students, I confess, not so much.

We wondered what it might be like to swap classes, perhaps my students could learn to swoon over the moon as hers do, and perhaps her students might enjoy raiding my language for their own purposes. I would tell them about the daughters of the moon, that carry the history of their mothers with them in their cores, bearing it forward billions of years. A process in which decay does not mean loss and despair, but instead transformation and eventual stability.

My students are peevish about the moon because of a problem we worked about dating the rocks brought back by the Apollo missions. It's a problem that crosses two of the topics we've discussed, chemical kinetics and nuclear chemistry. I'm fond of the problem because it uses material from the very beginning of the course and from the very end and shows both how they are connected and can be used in a very practical way by another field. But making connections can be challenging, and at the end of the semester my students are tired. They are less intrigued and more resigned.

The moon, like the earth and pretty much everything on it, contains radioactive elements. Sometimes these radioactive atoms are versions of stable elements, sometimes all of the versions of an element are radioactive. (Carbon-14 is radioactive while the most common carbon atoms on earth, called carbon-12, are not. On the other hand, there are no stable versions of uranium.) Radioactive elements are like tiny clocks, transforming themselves from one element into another at a particular and fixed rate. Comparing the amounts of a radioactive element at two different times can tell you the time spanned. For example, if an artifact like a wooden carving has 50% of the carbon-14 that it had when it was made, 5500 years have elapsed since its creation. We say carbon-14 has a half-life of 5500 years.

These built-in atomic clocks can run on short timescales, a matter of days or seconds, or on incredibly long timescales. The rule of thumb is that a given radioisotope can measure out time spans up to 10 times the half-life. So carbon-14 can be used to date materials up to about 55,000 years old. Potassium-40, the main reason human beings themselves are radioactive, has a half-life of 1.3 billion years and can time processes going back to the Big Bang.    

Uranium-238 gives birth to daughters such as thorium-234, radium-226 and polonium-218. (I note that some of these daughters were discovered by a daughter and a mother, Marie Curie.) Eventually all her energy is exhausted and U-238 finally plops down onto the island of stability as lead-206. This is not a short process, it takes 45 billion years for (nearly) all of the U-238 to find its way to the stable space of lead-206. But her daughters will hold tight to her history all along the way.  And we can read it in their very identities.  

Taking tea with a grain of salt - the Boston tea party

Tomorrow is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, the day protesting American colonists dumped 42,000 kg¹ of tea into Boston Harbor. That's enough to make about 21,000,000 cups of tea. While that might sound like a lot of tea, several billion cups of tea  are drunk across the world  every day². Each year humans drink enough tea to to fill Boston Harbor end to end. That's a bit less than half a cubic kilometer (which in those terms I confess does not sound like very much - but Boston Harbor).

The tea, once dumped in the harbor, was unusable due to contamination not only by the salt water, but by the sewage that surely polluted the bay. (I was fascinated to find that a vial of the tea leaves purportedly collected from the harbor still exists.)

Salt would seem to be the last thing you want in your tea, but in the eighth century manuscript Classic of Tea, the tea master Lu Yu recommended adding a dash of salt to water before using it to brew tea. Salt, actually the sodium ions in it, suppresses our perception of bitterness. A small amount of salt, not even enough to taste, reduces the bitterness in a cup of tea. Other ions will do this too, including zinc. Beware, zinc also interferes with the perception of sweet!

---

1. If you prefer this in Imperial units, that would be 92,000 pounds.

2. At this point I'm apparently contractually required to tell you that tea is the most popular beverage in the world. Virtually everything I read about tea made sure to make this point early and often.

If you want to know more about the chemistry behind tea, my book Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea comes out from the Royal Society of Chemistry Books in January 2024. You can sign up to hear me talk about the chemistry of tea on February 15 with Chemistry World.

---

Anointed

The reading spoke of a horn full of oil in the hands of a prophet prepared to anoint a king. As I listened I tried to visualize how much oil that might be, were we talking about a few drops or a cupful? What animal gave its horn, what was used for a stopper? There is a time and a place for Ignatian composition of place. This might not have been it. 

That evening I was making dinner, and measured out a quarter cup of oil, a bit more than 50 mL. I set it down on the counter for a moment, and then knocked it over with my hand. Oil was suddenly everywhere. It flowed over the counter top, onto the drawers below. Onto the floor. It was everywhere. I couldn’t believe how such a small amount could spread so far.

At one level, I do understand why oil makes such a mess when it spills. It has a low surface tension (about 30 dynes/cm — and yes, I looked it up, see Albert Halpern, J. Phys. Chem. 1949, 53, 6, 895–897), about half that of water. A teaspoon of oil can spread out to cover about 22 thousand square feet of water. I had spilled ten times that, no wonder it was everywhere in my 200 square foot kitchen.

The messiah, the anointed one. All these years as a chemist, all the psalms I’ve prayed and I’d never really thought, “Why oil?” Oil burns, giving light. It binds, turning flour into bread. It soothes, it’s a balm. It doesn’t evaporate, rather it protects what it covers. It eases friction. Oil is costly. So was the grace that flowed from Calvary. And oil spreads out and out, reminding me that the mercy of God knows no bounds.

_____________________

Benjamin Franklin famously measured the spread of oil on water in a London pond. And in looking through the literature about surface tension of plant oils discovered that you can extract oil from carrots. And that what you get is comparable to olive oil in many of its physical properties.

Illustration is Raphael’s fresco of the anointing of David by Samuel, part of a series in the loggia of the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City. I walked through there in June of 2016, but will admit both have been agape at the frescos and not having noticed this one in particular. 

Squid, skunks and Jesuits

I'm working on an essay for Nature Chemistry about weird pandemic cooking, prompted by my experiments with ikasumi (squid ink). The Boy and I modified my dad's recipe for seeded rolls to bake charcoal black versions. They looked burned, are black through and through and taste...just fine. 
 

And shades of the Food Babe, who was all about the beaver butt that definitely isn't in your vanilla ice cream. Squid ink (which doesn't come from squids, but from their relatives the cuttlefish) is basically melanin rich snot that the cuttlefish squirts out its behind. 

It's richly ironic that the chef Jamie Oliver went on Colbert and said there's beaver butt excretions (i.e. castoreum) in vanilla ice cream (again there's not) but who has recipes for black ink pasta on his web site. Are you really going to eat something with squid snot in it?  Castoreum has always been expensive and rare -  in Roman times you had to be careful not to buy counterfeit castoreum. 

Fun fact of the day, one of the smellier components of skunk spray is an approved food flavoring in both the US and the EU. Vile at high concentrations, at low concentrations it tastes and smells of onion and garlic. 

Also - a 17th century Jesuit wrote home after an encounter with a couple of skunks that he thought he knew what Catherine of Siena's stench of sin might smell like.

Books: Alchemy and poetry

Crash has returned to his own apartment, leaving us with a call board to plan the meals and organize the day and an (almost) up to date inventory of the chest freezer.  Much as I appreciate the latter ledger, I'm wishing I'd kept a ledger of the meals we made over the course of these months.

I have been dipping in and out of Jane Hirshfield's new book of poetry, Ledger, which opens with "Let Them Not Say":

Let them not say: we did not see it. 
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

When I read "Advice to Myself" about a file with that title (and presumably advice) created a decade ago, I felt very seen.

I pulled philosopher Harry Frankfurt's little book On Bullshit off the shelf and am glad to have done so. He references Augustine! The essay attempts to carefully delineate lies and liars from bullshit and bullshit artists. 

"For the bullshitter, however all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

In this particular political moment, I highly commend On Bullshit to you. 

I've been captivated by Ainissa Ramirez's The Alchemy of Us. The opening vignette about traveling timekeepers was fascinating.

Anne Perry's Death in Focus is set in Europe during the rise of Hitler. It's a mystery, it's dark, and it's reminding me that we shouldn't close our eyes or ears. I have seen. I have heard. It's incumbent on my to speak. And to vote!

 

Reading Rahner

I was working on an essay about praying the everyday, and (misquoted) Karl Rahner, SJ. My editor caught it, but it drove me to pull Rahner's The Need and the Blessing of Prayer off the shelf to find the full context. The chapter entitled "Prayer in the Everyday" is beautiful. If I'd re-read it before writing my own piece, I'd have been tempted to write simply.

Go read Rahner's "Prayer in the Everyday". The End.

"What can be of more astonishing exaltedness than the voice of the Spirit which makes the eternities quake and fills the abysses of God" when it carries our small, timid prayers to the very throne of God. "So that the earth's weeping is heard in the innermost chambers" of that place God built for himself. There is much to weep about in the current moment, and much to appreciate about Rahner's exhortation to simply "pray in the everyday; pray the everyday." in these times where one day blurs into the next.

What else am I reading? I just finished The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman who embedded himself in the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) in the 1990s. The melding of theory and praxis made me think about chemistry training, where you need to be able to see the dance of the atoms in your head, but also have the knowledge in your hands. 

I'm reading Mexican Gothic, a novel set in the mountains of Mexico, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I spent a summer living with my grandfather and his wife in a small town in the mountains outside Oaxaca, and the novel reminds me of my sense of dislocation. It's dark and 50s-ish and it glows. There's also some chemistry sprinkled here and there:

“She was certain she’d heard about how these most civilized Victorians had been killing themselves in this way, the fungi chomping on the paste in the wall, causing unseen chemical reactions. She couldn’t remember the name of the fungus that had been the culprit—Latin names danced at the tip of her tongue, brevicaule—but she thought she had the facts right.”

Which has me reading William R. Cullen and Ronald Bentley's "The toxicity of trimethylarsine: an urban myth" (J. Environ. Monit., 2005, 7, 11-15).

But whatever you're reading, put it down for a minute and read John Lewis' last words to us. 

"Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way." 

Amen. 

Despicable me

I opened up my email this afternoon to see an email titled "Vaping and Vitamin E." The snippet read

Hi There,  I just read the article posted in regards...

I was quoted in September (and it turns out today, too) in a couple of articles in the Washington Post about the chemicals considered possible causes of lung damage from vaping. I've gotten occasional emails since, ranging from on-the-ball analytical chemistry sales staff hoping I'm in the market for some new instruments to predatory journals hoping I'll 'contribute' an article or join their editorial board. This, I guessed from the chipper start would be more of the same, my money was on analytical instruments (the predatory journal entreaties are more likely to start with "Dear esteemed professor...")

(Double-click) Oops, nope, it's a howler!

My entire reason for writing to you today is to tell you how incredibly irresponsible and cruel you are to suggest animal testing. SHAME ON YOU. Animal testing is horrific and there is no reason an innocent being should suffer for the stupidity of people. I hate that I have to walk to the same earth as people like you who can disregard other living beings for the sake of "science". Despicable. 

Please re-think your stance as it's so undeniably cruel and wrong. There is no justification no matter how you try to spin it. I don't know how you sleep at night.

Whoa. I can almost see the whole thing crumple up and turn to ash.

I'm very confused. I'd spoken about molecular structure and properties, not animal testing. I pull up the most recent article to find I'm quoted about molecular structure and properties, not animal testing. The comment about animal testing is further down and not attributed to me.

I toy with many answers to this email.

Snark. ("I sleep just fine, thank you.")
Demanding. ("I want an apology for this cruel and unwarranted attack.")
Shaming. ("How dare you send this to the wrong person? Can't you read?")
Demanding and shaming. ("I demand an apology for your carelessness!")
None. (Probably the best option).
Flat denial. (What I went with.)

I went with denial, in part because the writer was on social media and if I could keep this from becoming a social media thing, I wanted to. But it was inarguably a mistake, and if I had made it I would not want to get flames in response. So I simply said, "not me." And I did get an apology in return.

Bonus! I've never seen Despicable Me - so now it's cued up to watch while I grade tomorrow.

A short Roman archeological expedition

Termini Station at midmorning

I got an early train into Rome on Monday, headed to the physics library at Sapienza to look at a copy of the proceedings from the first conference on the periodic table, held in 1969 in Rome (and Vatican City) and Turin. I was hoping to find a photo of the conference attendees, or barring that a list of participants, but was destined to be disappointed.

Smaller than Bryn Mawr geology van, but a sign that I was
in the science zone.

Sapienza is about a 10 minute walk from Termini Station in Rome, so an easy trip. I had no trouble finding the physics buildings, I just followed the physicists. I can spot them anywhere (I think). The stacks are closed, but the student at the desk was delighted that I'd brought all the information he needed to pull it for me. I was surprised to find the book was for the most unopened, that is it had come with the folded pages uncut. The reader was supposed to cut them with the paper knife that surely lay on the little side table next to the comfortable leather wing chair. Unsupplied with a paper knife (and trying to imagine the reaction of the desk staff to my taking out such a knife and slicing into the book given that I was scolded for trying to scan with my phone a single paper from the volume), I was glad the one paper I really wanted, along with the lists of contributors and table of contents, had been opened.

I was interested to discover that this meeting on the periodic table was attended mostly by physicists, or at least the contributors to the proceedings were physicists, and eminent physicists at that: Emilio Segré, John Wheeler, spectroscopist Charlotte Moore from the National Bureau of Standards (who discovered technetium (element 43) in nature, after it had been produced artificially) and Georgy Flerov (for whom flerovium (element 114) would be named).

One of Fermi's early accelerators.

The best tidbit that I won't use in the talk is from Segré's paper, where he starts imagining that there might be worlds made of anti-matter in some remote corner of the universe, where anti-chemists would be doing anti-chemistry. But of course, that anti-chemistry would be anticlimactic, or at least uninteresting, as it would be the same as as the chemistry here. Somehow positing the existence of alien civilizations doesn't strike me an uninteresting (even if their chemistry mirrors ours)!

I arrived back to chaos at Termini. A fire had been deliberately set at a main junction north of the city and every long distance train was delayed 3 hours or outright cancelled. The place was filled with anxious travelers and long lines. Thankfully the train to Albano was running on time, and I walked the quarter mile out to the platform and an hour later was sitting at my desk in the Specola.

Elements of revenge

I seriously can’t write fiction. I suspect it's not lack of imagination, but some odd form of writer’s block. Or perhaps it is too many years devoted to sifting defensible reality from experimental and computational data. Or is it that I’m unwilling to ask a reader to be confused about the real, the possibly real and the entirely imagined? Or maybe it is because the one and only piece of published fiction I wrote, came (almost) true within the year?  Would any other fiction I wrote become real? That’s clearly a flight of fancy, but even with one data point, do I want to take the risk?

I was invited to write a commentary on the elements that scientists thought they'd discovered (but hadn't) for Nature Chemistry's issue celebrating the International Year of the Periodic Table.  The IUPAC guideline for element names says that you can't re-use names already in circulation in the literature, even if they were ultimately discarded. Which got me thinking if that could be a way for an unscrupulous scientist to crush the dreams of a competitor of having an element named for them. Despite my demonstrated inability to write good fiction, I drafted an introduction to the essay that played out this idea.

In the end, I wrote a non-fictional introduction to the essay (which you can read here if you are of the mind to do so). But if I were to write a piece of fiction about the elements, it might begin like this:
_______________________________

Prof. Exuvgen leaned back in her desk chair and wondered for the thousandth time why she’d ever signed that retirement agreement. Time was slipping through her fingers.  In a month, she’d have to hand over the key codes and walk out the door.  No access to her data and worse yet, no access to the tools she would need to analyze it, that idiot of a director had made it clear her account would be wiped — wiped — at midnight on the 30th, and anything left in her office trucked out to the dumpster.  Tang Woh Kow, they maintained, was right. There were 243 elements in the universe and no more. When Tam Besper saw the traces of zuzenium in 2069, right in this building, that was the end of the era of the element hunters. The last chance to have your name remembered in every chemistry book in the solar system, if not the galaxy. Though if the Vulcans had their way, everyone would be using the systematic names.

Running her hands through her short grey hair, she turned again to the data on the screen.  She’d spent thirty years working toward puncturing Kow's ceiling on the elements, the last ten racing Sabaxoar’s extravagantly funded group on the moon. What was it Maxine had said at that last meeting? Oh, right. Time. That she wasn't in a hurry, she had years to work on this, given lunar life expectancies. And with that Maxine shook her blonde curls and floated off.  Would the director take her more seriously if she looked less weary, grey and face it, old?

Time. It's running out, was there enough to say, now, without a doubt, that they’d turned up an atom or two of 244 Sym in that last run? Maybe, though maybe that oxide of muscovium was rearing its ugly head, this wouldn't be the first umbral element sunk by 115. Certainly there was strong evidence of a new isotope of 243.  Time, there just wasn't enough time.

She tapped the bud in her ear, and started composing the manuscript of one last paper.  “We present here evidence for the creation of the 616 isotope of 243 Zz, half-life 82 msecs, along with traces of element 244, Uuq.” She glanced up at the list of proposed names for 244 her group had kept on the whiteboard, derived from the names of birthplaces and long dead mentors and far-flung galaxies and grinned wickedly. “…for which we propose the name sabaxorium, symbol Sx, in honor of our respected and long time competitor in this hunt, Maxine Sabaxoar.”

Four months later, Maxine wakes up to a tweetstorm of congratulations for having the first trans-zuzenium element named for her. She pulls up the paper and seeing the unmistakable traces of MvO in the accompanying supplementary data dump, shrieks, "I've been robbed.”
_____________________________________
Notes:  
In the 1970s, Tang Wah Kow of New Method College in Hong Kong suggested (based on an odd theory about triads and octaves) that the upper level for an element was Z=243. Further, he proposed that when that element was ultimately discovered, it should be called zuzenium (Zz). The suggested name he said was, "...deduced from a Chinese idiom 'The name stands behind Zun Zen, who (Zun Zen) came last on the list of successful candidates in a royal examination." [In "An Octagonal Prismatic Periodic Table" J. Chem. Ed. 49, 59 (1972)]

Cross-posted from Culture of Chemistry

Five Books

Only five books? And the five best books? Last month I did an interview via email with Caspar Henderson (who wrote a marvelous bestiary for the new century: The Book of Barely Imagined Beings) on the best five books I would put on a reading list titled "Chemistry."  It's now up on the site — Five Books.  But the hardest part was not answering the great questions Caspar posed, but figuring out what five books to list. What did I want this list to do? Teach you chemistry? Maybe. Or give you a sense of what I find fascinating and beautiful and compelling about chemistry? Definitely!

I thought about various friends, curious and readers, but who don't have much background in the sciences and math.  What would I pull from my shelves for them to read?  Something that teaches you to decode a bit of the chemistry, a biography - what is the life of a scientist really like.  Something that is compelling, that drags you into a story you can't put down. Something that shows off the beauty of the world at the atomic and molecular level.

Something that teaches you to decode a bit of the chemistry:

Why does asparagus make my wee smell? And 57 other curious food and drink questions by Andy Brunning of Compound Interest. A bold graphical look at the chemistry of what we eat, with lots of quick explanations of weird (but useful) words of science like chromatography. 

What is the life of a scientist really like:

Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie by Barbara Goldsmith.  Of course there had to be Marie Curie. And this unsparing biography of her pulls the curtain away on what it can mean to plunge into research with all your being.

Compelling stories with chemistry at their heart:

The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum. Some molecules are thugs, some turn witness for the prosecution. Real crimes, real molecules.  (And her new book on the rise of food safety, The Poison Squad, which is in the stack on my desk, is just as good.) 

The beauty of the atomic and molecular world:

H2O: A biography of water by Phillip Ball Chemistry laid out for the layperson with care and delight. Clouds are not what you think!
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean. There's a dark side to the periodic table.

Read the whole essay to find out more about what is fascinating about chemistry (at least to me), what I do as a chemist, and of course, about these five books. Want more book recommendations about chemistry? Want to know what the runners up were? Leave me a note in the comments!

---

Chemistry not your thing? Go read Caspar's bestiary about the wildly improbable creatures that inhabit the very real world, from sea butterflies to yetis (or at least yeti crabs), it's a wide ranging exploration of the corners of the biological world. To quote a reviewer: "There is something lovely about a book that takes on so many disciplines and tackles them with confidence." There is indeed.

A flood of memories

The flood of 2018. Park Science Center. The lowest point in the 

chemistry wing was under 8" of water.

I have taught at least one class in this room almost every year for the last 32 years.  I gave my job interview talk in this space, albeit in a less modern incarnation.

I stood at a standard demonstration table, complete with sink and running water. I used an overhead projector much like the one on the cart in the corner, putting my used transparencies to the side as I worked through my talk (what work did I talk about?  no idea!).

Midway through my talk I heard the sound of water running into the sink.  I looked over to see that I had knocked over the cup of hot chocolate I was drinking in the hopes of defrosting after a walk across campus in a sudden snowstorm for which I was woefully unprepared. All over my stacked of completed transparencies.

I thought at that moment I might have lost any chance at the job.  I'd spent all day reassuring experimentalists that the reason I was a theorist was not "bad hands" — in other words that I wasn't clumsy in the lab. Thankfully everything was draining in the sink and that no one asked to see any of the wet, sticky sheets that had been my carefully prepared talk.

The water has receded, but not the flood of memories it unleashed.

---

Well before the flood, I wrote a piece for Nature Chemistry which features a brief tale of this classroom: "Talking to Pauling's Ghost"

Coffee or when in Rome

This isn't coffee either, hot chocolate at the local coffee house.

When in Rome...I drink coffee.  Nowhere else. Everywhere else in the world,  I drink tea.  So it's perhaps more than a little ironic that I'm quoted in a recent Washington Post article about the brewing controversy in California requiring the labeling of coffee as a carcinogen.

But coffee is iconic.  I say, "let's get coffee" to mean, let's find a time to talk that's not over a meal and not in someone's office but at a place where hot beverages are sold and consumed.  But where there will never, ever be a good cup of tea to be had.¹ So I talk about coffee.

When I talk about the molecules we eat and drink, I also talk about coffee, a complex brew of a thousand or more different molecules, that most people have some experience with. It is my push back point for molecular madness of all sorts.

Yes, some of the names for chemicals are harsh and discomfiting. What is acrylamide anyway, I imagine acrylic nails or crunkled tubes of paint in high school art class. It certainly doesn't sound like anything I want in my morning pick-me up.  Nor does oxidane, an industrial solvent used extensively in the preparation of coffee. But that last is just water, while the former is perhaps a carcinogen.  The names aren't important in assessing the risk a molecule poses.  Molecular structure and the resultant reactivity are.

Nor does source matter, natural or not. In this case acrylamide is an all natural carcinogen.  Acrylamide is found at much higher concentrations in other foods (see this list at the FDA).  It doesn't matter if it is "clean," organic or non-GMO. If it has sugars (this means fruit) or starches(vegetables) in it and you cook it at high temperatures, it has acrylamide in it, and often far more than coffee. Tobacco smoke has acrylamide in it — if you need another reason not to smoke.

This rush to judgement on coffee makes me wonder about a strain of chemophobia that I see circulating from time to time, one with an extra dash of Puritanism.  Pleasures are bad for the soul, and so by extension must be for the body.  I wonder if coffee and sweets and even artificial sweeteners come in for more than their share of judgement for this reason. 

I'll still drink coffee in Rome, though not in California. 

---

1.  This is true in the US, and in Italy.  But in Ireland I can get better cup of tea at a gas station convenience store than I can at very good restaurants in the US.

The Princess Bride, Chemistry and Rome

The 3rd century amphitheater is in use,
concerts start next week.  Note the exit.

I'm working on an essay about what it means to be an experimental science, wrangling with the philosophy of science literature, Including this delightfully brisk paper by William Goodwin, "Experiments and Theory in the Preparative Sciences" ($), which might be summed up as "Experiment.  You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."  (My apologies to Inigo Montoya.)

Two other words I learned this week do not mean what I think they mean.  Agone and vomitorium.  The church built on the site of St. Agnes' martyrdom is Sant'Agnese in Agone.  You might think (but I couldn't possibly comment) that agone refers to Agnes' agony.  Nope. Its root is the Greek agora, amphitheater, as this are used to house a sporting arena.

And on a walk up the Colle dei Cappuccini (the hill where the Franciscans have a church), there is a 3rd century amphitheater, with two vomitoria — large exits that let the audience pour out at the end of a performance.  Not what you thought!

Science fiction and chemistry

Topi Barr's Antithiotimoline is in this vintage Analog

Seven years ago, Andy Mitchinson, an editor at Nature, wrote at The Sceptical Chymist (Episodes II and III) about the dearth of science fiction that involved the particular science of chemistry in a substantive way.  Why isn't there more of it?

He pointed to a list put together by Connie Willis, an award winning SF author, and an article by Philip Ball in Chemistry World.

I'm working on a column for Nature Chemistry about the ways in which chemistry and science fiction play off each other.  Is science fiction more than escapist entertainment?  Should chemists care that there's not more chemistry inflected fiction out there?  Should we deliberately expose students to science fiction? Should we encourage them to write it?

To go alone with the piece, I'm trying to create a periodic table of chemical fiction, not limited to just science fiction.  Are there pieces on my list you particularly love?  Something I'm missing?  I'd love to hear in the comments!

For a full set of elemental science fiction short stories, I encourage you to browse Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction (thanks, Kateri!).  What really happened to the Hindenburg?

The list to date!

	Author	Work
As	Asimov, Isaac	Whiff of Death, The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline, Thiotimoline to the Stars, Pate de Fois Gras
Pb	Ball, Philip	The Sun and Moon Corrupted
Ba	Barr, Topi	“Antithiotimoline”
B	Bujold, Lois McMaster	Vorkosigan series
Ac	Christie, Agatha	"The Blue Geranium” in The Thirteen Problems
Cl	Clements, Hal	Phases in Chaos
Co	Conan Doyle, Arthur	Holmes
Md	Dewar, Michael	“Temporal Chirality:  The Burgenstock Communication”
F	Foster Wallace, David	Infinite Jest
Ag	Goodman, Allegra	Intuition
He	Heinlein, Robert	Glory Road, Have Spacesuit will Travel
Hf	Hoffman, Roald	Oxygen
Li	King, Laurie	Russell & Holmes series
U	Le Guin, Ursula	“Schrödinger’s Cat”
Sn	Lem, Stanislaw	“Uranium Earpieces” in Mortal Engines
P	Levi, Primo	The Monkey’s Wrench
Am	McCaffrey, Anne	Pern series
H	Piper, H Beam	Omnilingual
Kr	Robinson, Kim Stanley	Mars series
O	Sachs, Oliver	Uncle Tungsten
Dy	Sayer, Dorothy	The Documents in the Case
Sm	Smith, Edward Elmer “Doc”	“Tedric,” “Lord Tedric" in The Best of E. E. “Doc” Smith
Ne	Stephenson, Neal	Anathem
Br	Stoker, Bram	Dracula
Fr	Vance, Jack	“Potters of Firsk”
K	Vonnegut, Kurt	Cat’s Cradle
V	Vourvoulias, Sabrina	INK
Hg	Well, H.G.	“The Diamond Maker” in The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents
C	Willis, Connie	The Sidon in the Mirror