How to write awesome conclusions

A friend of mine Jerome Loreau sent me an article:

R. Breslow "Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth", Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

This part of conclusions is just awesome:

"...An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D-amino acids and L-sugars, depending on the chirality of circular polarized light in that sector of the universe or whatever other process operated to favor the L-α-methyl amino acids in the meteorites that have landed on Earth. Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them."

Take care,

Misha

UPD. The article was temporarily retracted for alleged duplication (self-plagiarism)

Happy New Year!

We, physicists, will never understand the logic of chemists. But, che fare - che fare, the forthcoming year is going to be yours:

Be happy, and remember that if two cesium atoms are bound together by only 0.000000004 kJ/mol - we call it "the Cs₂ molecule". Because... this is a molecule.  :-P


Take care,

Misha

Naming kids is hard

Last year chemistry Nobel laureate Dudley Herschbach was giving a plenary talk at the Faraday Discussions conference. After the talk he got a question somehow related to angular momentum algebra and started his answer with

"You know, I love angular momentum. I even blame my parents for not naming me 'Angular momentum'!"

What puzzles me a bit is the whole 'naming kids' business. I can understand that guys far from math don't name children using indeces or primes, although 'Anna-double-prime' or 'John-three' looks and sounds great. But if people stick with the name of the mother/father while naming their dauther/son they should use something of that sort. Vladimir-prime Vladimirovich Putin, for instance.

Nice quote from the past

"Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of chemical questions must be considered profoundly irrational and contrary to the spirit of chemistry... if mathematical analysis should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry – an aberration which is happily almost impossible – it would occasion a rapid and widespread degeneration of that science."

Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 1830

History of science: Gulio Racah kicks ass

As many other branches of atomic, molecular, and chemical physics, the field of chemical stereodynamics emerged from nuclear physics. Basically all this business about how molecules rotate after a chemical reaction, or how to boost the reaction efficiency controlling the reagents – it was already there, in nuclear reactions and spectroscopy.

In 30's some people were involved in studying double gamma decays, when a nucleus goes from some excited state A to state B and then to the ground state C, emitting two gamma-quanta. Already in 1940 Dunworth proposed that there might be some correlations between the directions of emission of these two quanta. Here "correlations" mean that, for instance, if we detect the first gamma-ray from the upper side of the nucleus, the second one most likely will be emitted to the left, less likely to the bottom, and never to the right.

Dunworth was not able to check this experimentally, but induced Donald Hamilton to theoretically prove that there should be some correlations. A few years later Edward Brady and Martin Deutsch from MIT found an experimental evidence of gamma-gamma correlations in the decay of Co(60) and Sc(46) nuclei.

In the meantime theorists published lots of papers, step by step trying to improve approximations and thoroughly elaborate the problem. This lasted for more then a decade, from 1940 to 1951, when a brilliant article by Gulio Racah was published.

He starts it literally as: "Hey guys, last ten years I was interested in something else, but I just bumped into you and I see that you are really stuck. Well, the problem becomes very easy if you use the tensor operator algebra that I developed about a decade ago..."

And, of course, the problem turned out to be solvable in a very natural and straightforward manner. Now tensor operators is an important tool, not only in nuclear physics, but anywhere in physics in general. We all use it and like it.

Take care,

Misha


UPD: By the way, I never knew that Gulio Racah was a cousin of Ugo Fano...

Something you should know about vodka

On the 31-st of January 1865 the author of the periodic table of elements Dmitri Mendeleev defended the doctoral dissertation "On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol":


People often say that in this piece Mendeleev proved that the solubility is the best for 40% of alcohol and 60% of water, and thereby invented vodka as we know it. Unfortunately, that's nothing but an urban legend: Russians were drinking vodka long before Mendeleev was even born.

John Fenn and age discrimination

In European academia there is a mandatory retirement age: if a university professor becomes older than 65-68 years (depending on country), he cannot hold a position anymore. This was also the case in the US some 30 years ago, when the Age Discrimination in Employment Act still allowed for the mandatory dismissal of tenured workers.

A few days ago I was told a fascinating story of John Bennett Fenn. He was working at Yale for a quarter of a century, until he reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 1987. After a while, the law was changed to fight the age discrimination, and Fenn became officially allowed to get a job. By that time his ex-position at Yale was still vacant, and he applied for it. Believe you or not, he didn't get it.

Eventually Fenn joined Virginia Commonwealth University in 1994, where he started working on the Electrospray ionization technique, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 2002. John Fenn was 85 by that time and he still remains the oldest Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.

Yale University claimed that Fenn was working on electrospray ionization while still holding a position there. After submitting a lawsuit against Fenn, Yale was awarded over one million dollars and partial patent rights to the technique.

The Journal of Chemical Physics

I'm reading a terrific review by Dudley Herschbach. In the introduction he mentions, that one of the reasons to establish the Journal of Chemical Physics in 1933 was the impossibility to publish any pure theory in the Journal of Physical Chemistry by that time. This remained the case for another two decades or so, unless plenty of acknowledged theoretical results emerged.

Nowadays pure theory is almost never published in science magazines, such as Nature or Science. We definitely need to found another one.

Color figures for free

It turned out that since the 1st of August the Journal of Chemical Physics publishes color figures in print for free: here is the Editor's announcement.

Not sure I ever read a printed version of any journal...

Faraday Discussions

Last week I participated in Faraday Discussion 142: Cold and Ultracold Molecules, presenting a poster there. For those of you who don't know, what Faraday Discussions are I will describe it in two words.

The conference is organized by the Royal Society of Chemistry, it has a centennial history and takes place a few times a year nowadays. This time it was at Durham University, UK. Faraday Discussions are not "real conferences" with long plenary talks and short student's contributions. Actually, they are nothing but... discussions.

People submit their abstracts well ahead of time, about one year before the conference. The best abstracts are selected for oral presentations and the lucky guys are asked to submit full-length papers about their work. Then, after the peer-review process, preprints are sent to all participants, who are expected to read them carefully before coming to the place.

Talks at the discussions are limited by only 5 minutes - it should be just a "reminder" to people, who already read the preprints. This rule is quite strict: there is a special guy sitting next to traffic lights, which are green when you start a presentation. After four minutes the lights are switched to yellow, and they turn out to be red after five minutes. At this point you are interrupted at half a sentence - no other way around.

Presentations are scheduled in such a way that they are more or less about the same subject within a single session. So, a few five-minutes talks are given one after another. Then the discussion begins - the most interesting part, taking about one hour. People ask a lot questions, both technical and general ones, but "comments" are also possible. The latter are short presentations, also restricted by the traffic lights, which are relevant to the main contributions. For instance, a theorist, who came up with some explanation after having read the experimental preprint, can briefly describe his idea and show some slides with results.

All questions, answers and comments (along with the papers themselves) are then collected and published a few months later as a volume of Faraday Discussions, a journal having quite a good impact factor, about 5.0 these days.

I find this kind of format to be much more efficient, than usual conferences, where people may have no questions simply because they haven't got the idea of the work during the talk.

On my webpage you may find my poster as well as two preprints about our project (0903.0811, 0904.0567).

Chemical Physics vs Physical Chemistry

At one of the last conferences I've attended, we've got a nice informal discussion about a usual subject "what is the difference between physical chemistry and chemical physics". We concluded that there might be a following way to distinguish between those. If you measure/calculate the reaction cross section, you are definitely a chemical physicist. But, if you multiply the cross section by the velocity, and therefore measure/calculate the reaction rate, you belong to the physical chemistry community. What is your opinion on that?

Nature Chemistry

Today I found a little advertising brochure from Nature in my mailbox. It is about a new journal, Nature Chemistry, starting this year (a first issue will appear mid-March). I hope that apart from biochemical articles there will be a bit of usual chemistry in there...

Happy Mole Day!

It turned out that today (10/23 in American notation) is a Mole Day...

Links for 12.10.08

• Chemical Portal - an excellent collection of useful tools and tables
  
• The collapse of peer-review - from the economist's point of view
• What's Interesting About AMO Physics - by Chad Orzel
  
• APS now leaves copyright with authors for derivative works - "When you submit an article to an APS journal, we ask you to sign our copyright form. It transfers copyright for the article to APS, but keeps certain rights for you, the author. We have recently changed the form to add the right to make ‘‘derivative works’’ that reuse parts of the article in a new work."

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

Since I'm a physicist, I present physics the first:

PHYSICS PRIZE. Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.

But, my favorite one is a chemical one:

CHEMISTRY PRIZE. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.

here are other prizes