Posts Tagged ‘chemistry’
“In our society (that is, advanced western society) we have lost even the pretence of a common culture”*…
In 1959. C.P. Snow gave a now-famous series of lectures (quickly published): The Two Cultures, lamenting the cleaving of Western culture into spheres of science and humanities, neither of which could clearly understand, thus effectively communicate with the other. Jeroen Bouterse reminds us that Snow had a predecessor…
Several years before C.P. Snow gave his famous lecture on the two cultures, the American physicist I.I. Rabi wrote about the problem of the disunity between the sciences and the humanities. “How can we hope”, he asked, “to obtain wisdom, the wisdom which is meaningful in our own time? We certainly cannot attain it as long as the two great branches of human knowledge, the sciences and the humanities, remain separate and even warring disciplines.”
Rabi had been interested in science since his teenage years, and grown up to be a Nobel-prize winning physicist. He had also been an important player in the Allied technological effort during World War II, as associate director of the ‘Rad Lab’: the radiation laboratory at MIT that developed radar technology. The success of Rad Lab, Rabi later reflected, had not been a result of a great amount of theoretical knowledge, but of the energy, vitality, and self-confidence of its participants. In general, Rabi’s views on science and technology were somewhat Baconian: science should be open to the unexpected, rather than insisting on staying in the orbit of the familiar.
In Rabi’s accounts of his time leading Rad Lab, he would also emphasize the way in which he insisted on being let in on military information. “We are not your technicians”, he quoted himself, adding: “a military man who wants the help of scientists and tells them half a story is like a man who goes to a doctor and conceals half the symptoms.” Indeed, the key to understanding Rabi’s worries about the two cultures – he would go on to embrace Snow’s term – is his view of the role science ought to play in public life. Scientists should not just be external consultants, delivering inventions or discoveries on demand or listing the options available to the non-specialist. In some stronger sense, they should be involved in directing policy decisions.
Even more than Rabi’s positive experience with the military during the war, his views were informed by his frustration with the lack of agency scientific experts were able to exercise in the immediate aftermath. Already in 1946, he complained in a lecture that scientists had been used to create the atom bomb, but they had not been consulted about its use, and the fact that many of them had been opposed to it had made no difference. “To the politician, the scientist is like a trained monkey who goes up to the coconut tree to bring down choice coconuts.”
This feeling would increase with the decision to develop a hydrogen bomb. In 1949, Rabi was one of eight experts in the General Advisory Committee (GAC) to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), in which capacity he co-signed a unanimous report arguing that the ‘Super’ should not be built. (Rabi, together with Fermi, signed a minority opinion to the effect that the US should first get the USSR to pledge that it would not seek to develop an H-bomb.)
Rather than signaling to the world that he sought to avoid an arms race, however, President Truman did the opposite: without knowing that it was even possible, he announced publicly that the US would “continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb.” Rabi would never forgive Truman…
… in the context of Rabi’s broader thinking about science in modern culture, as he came to develop and express it in the decades after the war [the] was not just that more technical expertise needed to be brought to the decision tables; the point was that scientists should make their moral views heard. In the atomic age, where science created so much power, science’s representatives should wield some of that power. From the perspective of the scientists, this was because the atom bomb had demonstrated beyond doubt that science was not a disinterested search for objective truth; it had consequences, and scientists should accept responsibility for those consequences. They should consider not just the means, but the goals…
…
It is a soft law in two cultures discourse that precisely those who most bewail the chasm between science and the humanities end up deepening it. In Rabi’s case, the reason is that he believed in the two cultures; he believed there was something special about the culture and tradition of modern natural science that was a source of wisdom and strength, and that in many ways the project of the humanities was its opposite. Understanding of nature was progressive and forward-looking, was a matter of hope and optimism, while understanding of the human world was old, had already been achieved in ancient societies, and was more a matter of transmission than of innovation. Historian of physics Michael Day notes that over time, Rabi talked less about merging the two traditions and more about putting science at the center of education…
In spite of this, I think Rabi saw correctly that picturing science and the humanities as opposing forces helped him to identify a real fault line in modern culture. The notion that science has to stay on one side of the fact-value-distinction, while the humanities are closer to the actual formation of values, was not a figment of his imagination, and it did stand in the way of his cultural ideals. While not quite the synthesis between the two sides that he sometimes claimed to aim for, the answer he gave – that neither science nor the humanities, nor committees ‘discover’ values, but that values are immanent in activities, in ways of life; that the age of science came with the scientific way of life, with its own values, and that these values were potentially culture-defining – was compelling…
… there remains something inspiring in Rabi’s vision of a common quest for knowledge and understanding, of people working together in activities that are both exciting and important, and of a society that takes those people and their projects not as resources to be exploited, but as models to be emulated.
“The atom bomb and the two cultures: I.I. Rabi on the sciences and the humanities,” from @jeroenbou in @3QD. Eminently worth reading in full.
(Image above: source)
* C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures
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As we search for synthesis, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Walter Kohn; he was born on this date in 1923. A theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist, he shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (with John Pople); Kohn was honored for his development of density functional theory, which made it possible to calculate quantum mechanical electronic structure by equations involving electronic density (rather than the much more complicated many-body wavefunction). This computational simplification led to more accurate calculations on complex systems and to many new insights, and became an essential tool for materials science, condensed-phase physics, and the chemical physics of atoms and molecules.
“No water, no life. No blue, no green.”*…
Between AD 1275 and 1300, the Anasazi, a civilization that had thrived in the canyonlands of the Four Corners area of the American Southwest for a thousand years, simply vanished, abandoning their urban centers, their irrigated lands, their sacred enclosures. Their descendants, the Hopi and Zuni, tell of a time of drought, the end of the rains. Without food in the desert, one can live for a fortnight; without water, perhaps a day. The collapse of the Anasazi occurred in a single generation.
The drought in the American Southwest has now entered its twenty-third year– and as Wade Davis explains in an excerpt from his book River Notes: Drought and the Twilight of the American West, the historic drought of the last couple of decades is threatening the Colorado River (on which 40 million Americans and 5.5 million acres of agriculture depend) and raising that specter again…
… We are today in the third decade of a drought that, despite heavy snowpacks in California and parts of the mountain west, remains unrelenting.
Over the last century, the river’s flow has averaged roughly 15 million acre-feet a year, far less than the 17.5 million acre-feet that planners anticipated when water rights were apportioned to the seven states of the basin — Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California — in 1922. In that year, the population of Arizona was roughly 350,000, that of Nevada a mere 80,000. Between 2000 and 2022, the flow of the river dropped to an average of 12 million acre-feet; over the last three years the annual flow has been but 10 million acre-feet. Even as the volume of water coming down the Colorado has dramatically declined, the seven states of the basin continue to clamor for allotments based on flawed assessments established nearly a century ago, exerting rights to consume what the river cannot provide.
As a result, during a drought of historic severity, water consumption has consistently surpassed the total natural flow of the river; altogether since 2000, water use has out-stripped supply by 33.6-million acre-feet (an acre-foot is 325,851 gallons). To meet demand, water has been diverted from the major reservoirs. Lake Mead, last full in 1983, is today down to 28 percent of capacity, 1,040 feet above sea level, the lowest it has been since the floodgates closed in the 1930s. If the reservoir drops below 950 feet, the Hoover Dam will no longer generate hydroelectric power. At 895 feet, the reservoir becomes a deadpool; water can no longer pass through the dam. The river downstream ceases to exist.
The situation at Lake Powell is equally grim. Its capacity is now down to 22 percent. In February 2023, the reservoir dropped to 3,522 feet above sea level, the lowest since the Glen Canyon Dam became operational in 1963. Should the water level drop another 32 feet, which can readily occur in a year, it will no longer be possible to generate electricity that today powers and cools the homes and businesses of 4.5 million citizens. A power outage in Phoenix, coinciding with a two-day heat wave, could result in half the population — 800,000 or more — seeking emergency care in hospitals set up to handle but 3,000 patients. An estimated 12,800 would die. At 3,370 feet, Lake Powell will reach deadpool. The Glen Canyon Dam will be but a concrete plug. Water will cease to flow, cutting off the drinking supply of well over 25 million Americans, including most of those living in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tucson, and much of the Los Angeles basin.
…ordinary American families are already experiencing shortages that would have been unthinkable in 2006. For decades, the Arizona city of Scottsdale has provided the Rio Verde Foothills, a community of two thousand homes, with access to its municipal water supply, sourced from the Colorado. On January 1, 2023, this supply was cut, a decision made by a city facing its own crisis, leaving the people of Rio Verde no option but to buy water by the truckload at prices that tripled overnight. Those who dug wells discovered that, after years of drought, the water table had fallen by hundreds of feet. Residents have turned to using paper plates and urinating outside, even while coping with monthly water bills as costly as their mortgage payments.
Cities such as Las Vegas have implemented strict conservation measures, banning ornamental grass, limiting water deliveries to golf courses, reducing the size of swimming pools, using recycled water whenever possible. Yet despite these efforts, Las Vegas still uses twice as much water as the average US consumption. Hedging its bets, the city is building a three-mile-long tunnel that will come up at the bottom of Lake Mead, a $1.4-billion drain to ensure that if the reservoir ever runs dry, Las Vegas will get the last drop.
In the end, what Las Vegas and other cities do hardly matters, for the elephant in the room remains agriculture. Fully 80 percent of the water drawn from the Colorado goes to irrigating some 5.5 million acres, most of which is used to grow alfalfa and grass to feed cattle, and not only in the United States. Alfalfa grown in Arizona is exported by the ton to fatten cattle in Asia and the Middle East…
Water, water– not a drop to drink? “The Climate Crisis Could Mean the Twilight of the American West,” from @authorwadedavis in @RollingStone. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Sylvia Earle
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As we dowse, we might spare a thought for Bjørn Helland-Hansen; he died on this date in 1957. A pioneering oceanographer, his studies of the physical structure and dynamics of the oceans and their interactions with the atmosphere were instrumental in transforming oceanography from a science that was mainly descriptive to one based on the principles of physics and chemistry.
“Strange, strange are the dynamics of oil and the ways of oilmen”*…
… and at the same time, all too predictable…
Oil executives love to talk about the energy transition. But for all the platitudes about technologies such as hydrogen and carbon capture, most are doubling down on what they know best.
Oil.
Spending on new offshore oil projects over the next two years is projected to soar to levels not seen in a decade.
In Saudi Arabia, the state-owned oil giant is embarking on a series of massive offshore expansion projects designed to boost the kingdom’s crude production. The United Kingdom and Norway are pumping more money into the North Sea in hopes of lifting out more oil. Exxon Mobil Corp., America’s oil giant, is plowing money into projects in waters off Guyana and Brazil.
The offshore revival represents a shift after a decade of focus on onshore shale plays and amounts to a vote of confidence in oil’s long-term future. The move is notable as it follows several years of mounting talk of diversifying oil companies’ business models…
The world is still likely to consume large amounts of oil for decades to come, even if energy transition efforts gain steam and global crude demand begins to decline. That means investment in new or expanded fields is needed to offset declining production from existing wells. The result is something of a race, with oil companies seeking to identify fields that can produce at low oil prices and outlast competitors in a shrinking market…
Rystad Energy, a consulting firm, reckons that offshore spending will eclipse $100 billion in 2023 and 2024. That would mark the first time offshore oil investment eclipses the $100 billion mark in consecutive years since 2012 and 2013, the firm said. Offshore spending will account for 68 percent of spending on newly sanctioned projects over the next two years, compared with 40 percent from 2015 and 2018…
At first glance, offshore projects appear ill-suited for a world moving away from oil. Offshore development is incredibly expensive and time consuming. Exxon’s Payara development off Guyana, for instance, comes with a $9 billion price tag. Hydraulically fracturing and drilling a shale well, by comparison, is relatively cheap and quick.
Yet shale production is increasingly challenged. Output from shale wells tends to fall quickly, meaning new wells have to be quickly drilled to offset production losses. After more than a decade of intense drilling, many of the most productive locations in the United States have been tapped, analysts say.
Rising interest rates also present a challenge for U.S. shale producers. Many shale companies are relatively small by industry standards and rely on debt to fuel their drilling programs.
Offshore, meanwhile, tends to be the domain of large producers, which are flush with cash after a year of record profits and better able to finance projects from their own balance sheets. Offshore platforms also rely on massive economies of scale, producing vast amounts of oil for decades at a time. Exxon’s Payara project, for example, is projected to deliver 224,000 barrels of oil a day…
More at: “Offshore oil is about to surge,” from @EENewsUpdates.
Related: Countries spent a record-breaking $1 trillion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2022– “Want to cut global emissions by 10%? Stop fossil-fuel subsidies.”
* Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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As we contemplate carbon, we might spare a thought for Harry Coover; he died on this date in 2011. A chemist and inventor (with 460 patents), he is best remembered as the creator of Super Glue.
In 1951, while working at Eastman Kodak, Coover accidentally discovered (then patented) the adhesive properties of cyanoacrylate monomers that needed neither heat nor pressure to permanently bond between a wide variety of surfaces. His creation was initially marketed as “Eastman 910,” largely for industrial purposes. In 1963, Loctite purchased the patent and business from Eastman Kodak, and began marketing (what they trademarked “Super Glue”) more broadly. While it still found industrial use (and then medical application, e.g., repairing arteries, veins, teeth, and as a spray to seal open wounds of soldiers during combat in Vietnam), its big push was into the consumer market. Memorable advertising showed a car lifted by a crane using an attachment bonded with just a few drops.
“Take risks: if you win, you will be happy; if you lose, you will be wise.”*…
… or dead. Consider…
Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari (died c. 1003–1010), a Kazakh Turkic scholar from Farab, attempted to fly using two wooden wings and a rope. He leapt from the roof of a mosque in Nishapur and fell to his death…
Andrei Zheleznyakov, a Soviet scientist, was developing chemical weapons in 1987 when a hood malfunction exposed him to traces of the nerve agent Novichok 5. He spent weeks in a coma, months unable to walk, and years suffering failing health before dying from its effects in 1992/3…
Cowper Phipps Coles (1819-1870) was a Royal Navy captain who drowned with approximately 480 others in the sinking of HMS Captain, a masted turret ship of his own design…
Thomas Midgley, Jr. (1889–1944) was an American engineer and chemist who contracted polio at age 51, leaving him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. He became accidentally entangled in the ropes and died of strangulation at the age of 55. However, he is better known for two of his other inventions: the tetraethyl lead (TEL) additive to gasoline, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) [as we’ve noted in (Roughly) Daily before]…
Just a few of the entries in Wikipedia’s “List of inventors killed by their own invention.”
* Swami Vivekananda
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As we practice prudence, we might spare a thought for F. Sherwood Rowland; he died on this date in 2012. A chemist who focused on atmospheric chemistry, he is best remembered as the man who “outed” Thomas Midgley– that’s to say, for his discovery that chlorofluorocarbons contribute to ozone depletion– for which he shared 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
“Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground”*…
The periodic table of elements, in the form introduced by Dmitri Mendeleev, is something that many of us take for granted. But as Philip Ball explains, there are a number of different visualizations making claims for our attention…
The Periodic Table was conceived as a scheme for bringing order to the elements. When there were deemed to be only four of these—the earth, air, fire, and water of the Greek philosopher Empedocles (it was just one of the elemental systems proposed in ancient times, but enjoyed the weighty advocacy of Plato and Aristotle)—things seemed simple enough. But during the Renaissance, natural philosophers were increasingly forced to accept that the metals then known—copper, iron, lead, tin, mercury, silver and gold—were not as interconvertible as the alchemists believed, but seemed to have an elemental primacy about them, too. More and more of these became recognized—zinc, bismuth, cobalt, and others—along with other new elements such as sulfur, phosphorus, carbon, and, in the late eighteenth century, gaseous elements like nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen. When the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (who named those latter two) drew up a list of known elements for his seminal textbook Traité élémentaire de chemie in 1789, he counted 33—including light and heat, which he called caloric.
The list didn’t seem to be arbitrary though. In the early nineteenth century, several scientists noted that some elements seemed to come in families, resembling one another in the kinds of reactions they engaged in and the compounds they formed. Some claimed to see triads: the halogens chlorine, bromine and iodine for example, or the reactive metals sodium, potassium (both discovered by English chemist Humphry Davy in 1807) and lithium (identified in 1817). Was there a hidden pattern to the elements?
The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, working at Saint Petersburg University, is usually credited with discovering that pattern. A Siberian by birth, with Rasputin-like dishevelled hair and an irascible manner, he published his first Periodic Table in 1869. It is “periodic” because, if you list the elements in order of their mass, certain chemical properties seem to recur periodically along the list. The table is produced by folding that linear list so that elements with shared properties sit in vertical columns (although Mendeleev’s first table had them instead in rows, effectively turning today’s table on its side)…
Still, it’s a weird kind of periodicity. At first, chemical properties seemed to recur every eight elements. But in the row that starts with potassium, there’s an interlude of ten metals—the transition metals—and so it continues thereafter, creating a periodicity of 18. And after lanthanum (element 57), chemists discovered a whole series of 14 metallic elements with almost identical properties that have to be squeezed in too—frankly, these elements, called the lanthanides after the first of their ilk, all seem a bit redundant. There’s another block like this after radioactive actinium (element 89), called the actinides. In most Periodic Tables, the lanthanide and actinide blocks are left floating freely underneath so the table doesn’t get stretched beyond the confines of the page. (Some insist that this long-form table is the only proper one.) Why this odd structure?
The answer became clear with the invention of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. The chemical properties of New Zealander Ernest Rutherford showed that atoms comprise a central, very dense nucleus with a positive electrical charge, surrounded by enough negatively charged electrons to perfectly balance that charge. Rutherford imagined the electrons orbiting the nucleus like moons, but in the quantum-mechanical description they occupy nebulous, smeared-out clouds called orbitals. Using quantum mechanics to describe the disposition of electrons shows that they are arrayed in shells. The first of these can contain just two electrons—this is the only shell possessed by hydrogen and helium, the two lone elements at the tops of the towers—while the next has eight, and then 18. The shape of the periodic table thus encodes the character of the quantum atom.
All clear? Not quite. Even now, there’s no consensus about how to draw the Periodic Table…
Read on to explore some fascinating alternative depictions: “Picture This: The Periodic Table,” by @philipcball in @PioneerWorks_.
* Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
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As we ruminate on relationships, we might spare a thought for Vladimir Vernadsky; he died on this date in 1945. A Ukrainian mineralogist and geochemist, he is considered one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology. He also co-founded and served as the first President of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (now National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine).
Vernadsky is probably best remembered for his 1926 book Biosphere, in which he popularized the concepts of the biosphere and the noosphere, arguing (after Eduard Suess) that in the Earth’s development, the noosphere (cognitive life) is the third stage in the earth’s development, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition will fundamentally transform the biosphere. In this theory, the principles of both life and cognition are essential features of the Earth’s evolution, and must have been implicit in the earth all along (a position Vernadsky held was complementary to Darwin’s theory of evolution). Indeed, within the last 200 years, humanity has been a powerful geologic force, moving more mass upon the earth than has the biosphere.
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