A requiem for amateur chemistry
lcamtuf.substack.com
A requiem for amateur chemistry
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Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry
#2Not a fair take. If you have the pre-requisite knowledge, it is easier than ever. Just order the ingredients online (even the semi-regulated ones can be easily obtained from overseas) at prices that are impossibly low compared to the RadioShack days where everything is overpriced with value being mostly captured by thermofisher middlemen and retailers.
I think the lack of science kits is because CS, iPads and coding have replaced messy kitchen science for children growing up now. Swift Playgrounds only needs a tablet and it is just as educational without needing any cleanup or supervision.
Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry
#3[deleted]
Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry
#4https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-t...
I have the talk by Theodore Gray that I hosted, where he does some experiments with fire. This was a fun one to get approval from Facilities for.
Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry
#5To me chemistry suffers from being actually quite difficult field. Even by doing these sorts of experiments it is difficult to build up good intuition and actually start using chemistry to achieve some specific goals; contrast to e.g. electronics or programming where after some very basics you can start building your own things
Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry
#6Not a fair take. If you have the pre-requisite knowledge, it is easier than ever. Just order the ingredients online (even the semi-regulated ones can be easily obtained from overseas) at prices that are impossibly low compared to the RadioShack days where everything is overpriced with value being mostly captured by thermofisher middlemen and retailers. I think the lack of science kits is because CS, iPads and coding…
> If you have the pre-requisite knowledge
Isn't this a pretty big barrier though?
In the times the article discussed, plenty of parents bought chemistry kits for science-inclined kids without any real idea of what they were; assured by the packaging and availability that they were appropriate. For the most part they were correct.
That's hard to imagine these days.
Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry
#7We have unreal engine, we have really good programmers, we have countless frameworks.... how far off are we from a bio-chemical sandbox simulation?
We have soft body dynamics simulations like Beam Ng drive, anything like this for chemistry? i've searched on Steam a few times and nothing sticks out.
Im imagining a literal photoreal highschool chem lab set up. I would love something like this, without all the risk of toxicity, danger, poison, and so on.
Or is something like this effectively censored to prevent the wrong people learning the wrong things?
Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry
#8https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-t... I have the talk by Theodore Gray that I hosted, where he does some experiments with fire. This was a fun one to get approval from Facilities for.
> This was a fun one to get approval from Facilities for
That’s one paper trail I would love seeing
Theo is like 10 different kinds of genius. From the outside anyway, that man has lived an enviable life.
Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry
#9We have unreal engine, we have really good programmers, we have countless frameworks.... how far off are we from a bio-chemical sandbox simulation? We have soft body dynamics simulations like Beam Ng drive, anything like this for chemistry? i've searched on Steam a few times and nothing sticks out. Im imagining a literal photoreal highschool chem lab set up. I would love something like this, without all the risk of t…
A simulator like this would require a lot of simplifications: a table of template chemical reactions and thermochemical mixing rules which are bound to be wrong in edge cases. It doesn't take many reagents before you hit a combinatorial wall where the combination has never been tried in practice, and while it could be estimated with quantum mechanics in theory, that gets expensive.
Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry
#10We have unreal engine, we have really good programmers, we have countless frameworks.... how far off are we from a bio-chemical sandbox simulation? We have soft body dynamics simulations like Beam Ng drive, anything like this for chemistry? i've searched on Steam a few times and nothing sticks out. Im imagining a literal photoreal highschool chem lab set up. I would love something like this, without all the risk of t…
Actual chemistry simulations are still computationally unfeasible. In the "ten thousand atoms is a lot" territory.
So you could certainly make a game with hardcoded reaction paths for it, but capturing the actual scope and breadth of real chemistry just isn't really going to happen.
On the other hand you do raise a really good point about something which bugged me a lot when I was learning lab chemistry: getting the mechanical sensibility for what processes you need to do is hard and frankly IMO it's not taught particularly well. There would, I think, be a lot of value in a decent fidelity VR simulation of some of these processes just so you could get a sense of what the mechanical arrangement of things you need to do will actually be.
i.e. testing out a particular glassware and fluid path apparatus would have a lot of utility in making experimental work more structured and developing the intuition for what things should look like.