Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

LINK: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php

As usual Jorge Cham has nailed the essence of the significance of the research done in most University Laboratories. In reality, if you actually do work that gets published, the paper will get read by a small group of people (no more than a 100 would be my guess). Most of them will go "Meh" and forget the work unless they are thinking of writing a review or a paper where you might review one of their manuscripts.
The university system is actually designed to train scientists not to really turn the scientific world upside down. We forget that when we continually ask professors "So when are you going to make Flubber anyway?". Still when you are hip deep in research and trying to convince yourself that the work is in someway relevant ... well it can all get a little delusional. It is good that we now have a test to get our heads back from the clouds.

A Creeping, Fitful Progress

So, I spend two hours every Monday morning and Thursday evening on the road between the M-R-D Metropolitan area and Cathedral City. I happen to like the trip but it cuts into my day and driving with tourists on the road drives me nuts.









I also happen to love Cathedral City where I grew up and went to University. The place just can't have a bad picture taken of it even with a cellphone camera in bad light. On the other hand the city has no reason to exist other than that it is a provincial capital and has a university. It means that it is a largely white collar city where no one really works for a living.











Now, the reason why I am doing this is to get some publishable research done. That means that I have to get something done that a) no one has thought of before b) if they did think of it they failed and c) succeed. Which requires creative thinking, discipline, keen observation and old-fashioned luck.

This summer my focus has been on the physical chemistry problem of what happens when a well known industrial reducing agent [which everyone uses in huge excess because it is a) typically impure b) short lived in solution and c) has the solubility of beach sand (are you still with me on this sentence, we had a digression there that was almost humanities style writing in length, I am going to have to fix that before I try to write a scientific paper ... Subject -Verb - Object, keep it simple and stay away from weird tenses ... anyhoo back to our regularly scheduled sentence)] becomes a soluble species. In my hands, it has pulled a Luther on me. When Luther was in the tight grip of the Catholic Church they were able to minimize his eccentricities. However, when he was "free" of the confines of the church he went mad (so to speak) and started chewing the furniture (check out R. C. Sproul and "The Madness of Luther"). That is what happened to my compound when I was able to get it to dissolve ... it started chewing one whatever was around (solvent, container and spectrometers).

The problem is that I need pure compounds to characterize and with this material I am already starting at 85% purity on the best commercial samples. So my only hope is the formation of crystals that I can separate from the impurities and chewed on bits of furniture.

I thought I had the problem licked when massive well formed crystals formed from one of my oils. For a week I gloried in my crystals, there they were so close, just on the other side of the glass, so close. But I needed to isolate them and that meant work-up. Then things did not go so well, the crystals survived filtration and back distillation of the solvent but the real test is when you evacuate the reaction chamber to remove the solvent so you can handle the sample in the drybox. In less than a minute, while I watched, the massive crystals lost all structural integrity and became something that looked like Playdough if Campbell Soups made a tomato soup play dough.

What I have done once I can do again. But this time the path will be much longer and technically difficult to avoid the decomposition of the solvated crystals. I still do not know why some German or Russian did not do this chemistry 50 years ago and so in my spare time I am scouring the old literature for secondary research stories to make sure that I am not re-inventing the wheel. But that is research.

It is good to be back at the bench. The glassblowing is coming back to me and I like the people I am working with. I feel blessed and I will feel even more blessed when in two weeks the science courses will be taught at ABU without my name listed as professor. Then I will know what a sabbatical feels like.

Research and Ghosts

So ... it's been a long time. Research at the bench is what it always has been. Sometimes it is a visceral delight as the reagents cook up into something new. Sometimes it is a grind to get through routine housekeeping necessary to keep a lab working. Sometimes bench research erodes the soul with countless small stumbling blocks that can stop a research program in its tracks. I have known them all in the last month or so.

The car has worked well. The driving has been fine since the trip from home to here is in my opinion a great little drive. The weather has been "tourist weather" (hot and sunny). So I leave the unplanned garish squat of a community by an unloved river and drive to an urbane and quiet small city with a wide beautiful river. Why did I ever leave here?

Ghosts.

The research has gone pretty much as I expected. Slow and at times frustrating. I was fortunate to stumble into a discovery that will allow me to look at some interesting and relevant chemical aspects of battery chemistry. I am currently up to my eyeballs in various forms of oils that refuse to form solids. It's the colour changes that jazz up my day. I have discovered a chemical reaction between two compound that have been known for decades and one of which is an industrial reagent. Not only that the reaction features the combination of two white crystalline solids with a secret solvent and I get the brightest most interesting colours and colour changes. If I can determine what the chemical species are that are responsible for the colour changes I may just get into the inorganic textbooks after all. It looks like I will be spending the balance of my sabbatical doing ESR and Raman and hopefully X-ray crystallography. Why did I ever leave here?

Ghosts.

We had a water main break in the the basement of our Chemistry building two days ago. The water filled a room so that the water was about a meter deep and the doors into the room could not be opened (genius designer had then all swing INTO the room). Not only that the only access to a shut-off valve was behind a wall in the room filled with water. Needless to say the lower floor (which includes the chemical storeroom) was inundated and they had to turn off the electricity to the whole building. We suddenly discovered that the fumehoods have an important role in making it possible to breathe the air and we all bolted for the nearest exit like a bad Mexican burrito.

That meant that yesterday I ended up in the Engineering Library doing some long delayed literature work. After a long day of somewhat fruitful reading I headed out of the library and wandered around looking for a bathroom.

Ghosts.

In a random corner of a random corridor I ran into this picture ...

And this picture had this small detail ...

Kevin was a friend, a good friend. We went to school together, we worked together and we enjoyed each others company. He was bright and devoted to sports. We were both raised in a community where feelings were mostly repressed but I knew him as a sensitive and curious brother. We sort of drifted apart in University I went into science and he went into engineering but it was a measure of his ability that in a program where the "four year degree" took everyone five years to complete ... he finished in four. I remember meeting him in the hallway of the Chemistry building ... we walked by each other and simultaneously turned and realized who the other person was. For fifteen minutes it was like old times ... but time had moved on and Kevin was anxious for work so he had decided to go into the Armed Forces. We talked about wives and babies and then the tide took us apart.

About a year later we heard that Kevin and some other students were down in a hole in British Columbia learning how to wire explosives. One of those can't ever happen accidents happened and some people died including Kevin. I went to his funeral where a doddering old pastor who didn't know him said some stuff that had no meaning to a young wife and daughter. We all cried at the outright wrongness of his early death. And then our lives moved on.

So here I am in this random corner of a random building crying again. That is why I left this place ... there are too many ghosts that can bubble up from my past and rob the precious moment of the present from me while I remember old wounds, words or loves. I have gotta go home and kiss my family and live in the precious gift of the present.

As long as I live, I will carry the memory of that last conversation with me. It is precious to me and, in reality, symbolized all the friends left behind while I was off chasing electrons. Rest in peace brother ... you are not forgotten.

A link to an appropriate piece of music for my mood.