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A requiem for amateur chemistry

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Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#121

Post by MarkusWandel »

Aunche wrote: post #105
wrp wrote: post #65

Another aspect of this issue is the apparent difference in intellectual preparedness of kids today. I think this is partly due to educational environment and partly a result of selection bias (in that accounts of the past focus on the "smart" kids). When I was a teenager, rummaging around the attic at grandma's house I stumbled upon my dad's old scientific stuff. I was shocked at the sophistication of what a high sch…

> By my time in the 1970s, home electronics projects aimed at teenagers had devolved to "Stick this here, and that there, and connect the battery, and gee whiz isn't that neat!" I'm much younger than you, but that wasn't my experience at all. My dad got me this kit [1] when I was in fifth grade, and it was great. I got completely lost when it talked about transistors, but the projects were still fun (considering my v…

Is that the one with the good manual? Most of these spring clip electronics sets come with pretty crappy manuals, very light on theory and with uninspired circuits (i.e. in "130 in 1" there are maybe 10 good circuits and endless variations of those).

Whereas an Elenco brand kit I found at the thrift store came with a fantastic manual, that taught electronics right from the basics, using the kit's components to illustrate as it went.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#122

Post by watwut »

wrp wrote: post #106
watwut wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not like average teenager understood those in 1950 however. And it is not even the case that kids today were less educated either. You have today individual kids doing leetcode on pretty high level. You have then doing a lot of stuff, but it is different stuff. Meanwhile radio and circuits are not cool anymore nor new anymore. Comparably less people is even interested.

> ...it is not even the case that kids today were less educated either. This claim could be supported or contradicted by evidence. Do you have any? My experience is not K-12 education, but at the college level, standardized measures such as the GRE show declining levels of ability over the decades. A given score today doesn't mean the same as 40 years ago, because the test has needed to be recalibrated for a lower av…

High school drop out rates were 27.2% in 1960. This is one third of students not even finishing high school. Meanwhile college enrolment rates were miniscule compared to today. Yet also, getting into top university requires way more effort then it used to in 1950-1960.

> standardized measures such as the GRE show declining levels of ability over the decades. A given score today doesn't mean the same as 40 years ago, because the test has needed to be recalibrated for a lower average performance.

Are they incomparable or they show regress?

The data dont show consistend decline in years where it did not changes, but there are massive drops in scores when the test was recalibrated. It also shows multiple whole new topics being tested against 1960:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_327.10.a...

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#123

Post by kleiba »

WalterBright wrote: post #51
zokier wrote: post #5

To 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

Mechanical engineering (I'm an ME) turned out to be very very hard to do as a hobby. Even with a complete machine shop, it takes a loooong time to make something simple, such as a steam engine. My engine finally worked, but the hours expended on it were extensive. With software I can build amazing programs in short amounts of time.

And yet I get way more satisfaction out of building some small wood contraption than I get out of building anything in software, big or small.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#124

Post by ptsneves »

I have been going through Brilliant's Chemistry courses[1] and was happy to find that in the article the author mentions the way to make a mirror. When i first got to know it in the Brilliant course I was amazed it required sugar!

I fantasize of going back in time and bootstrapping my arrival with useful future knowledge like this. I can't imagine the fortune I would make selling mirrors in the time of the Romans :D

Anyway, I really would like the author to provide a kit for the experiments mentioned.

[1] https://brilliant.org/courses/chemical-reaction/

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#125

Post by ptsneves »

green_on_black wrote: post #28
zokier wrote: post #5

To 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

I think (low confidence) this is due to basic chem being not-composable. And of course, possibly dangerous in a hard to detect way.

My thoughts exactly. When our little program crashes, even in C or assembly, your operating system cleans it up for you. Just redo-it better next time. Compare that with chemistry.

Maybe what is needed for chemistry is an "operating system" that safely handles and cleans up the experiment ran. Maybe this is what actually should be sold for basic chemistry. Like the kitchen robots but for nasty materials.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#126

Post by vjk800 »

hgsgm wrote: post #58
mncharity wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> chemistry suffers from being actually quite difficult field I wonder how much of that is inherent, and how much is artifact of highly suboptimal education? Chemistry education research has been unusually scathing, characterizing chem ed content using adjectives like "incoherent". My favorite high-school state standard insisted students be taught both that atoms are conserved in chemical reactions, and that atoms ar…

Chemistry is fundamentally microscopic in a way that machinery is not, and chaotic in a way that electricity is not. (A big part of electronics is wrapping microscopics in friendly abstractions like "batteries" and "resistors".) Molecules are small and diverse (it takes alkynes to make a world!) and the world is big.

Certainly chemistry also has abstractions that make it easier to handle. For instance, acids and bases are such; if you know something is an acid, you can trust it to behave in certain ways in certain situations regardless of the microscopic structure of the molecules.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#127

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

photochemsyn wrote: post #53

The youtube channel Cody's Lab certainly deserves a mention here. For example, the extraction of iodine from seaweed is an excellent 10-min watch. It's mostly on the inorganic side, just search the channel for a random element and something interesting will pop up - try potassium, iron, silver, bromine, gallium, etc. https://www.youtube.com/user/theCodyReeder/featured (Should note however, that demonstrating robust s…

Ctrl-F for "waste" only turned up your comment. Waste management of all the experiments the article describes had me wincing as an industrial chemist. I'd say it's not so much the safety of home chemistry that keeps me away from introducing it to my kids as much as the sheer complexity of disposing of all these myriad chemicals and reactions. My guess is that's the main culprit in removing most interesting chemicals from home chemistry kits, and no one in this thread really appreciates that.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#129

Post by nibbleshifter »

green_on_black wrote: post #28
zokier wrote: post #5

To 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

I think (low confidence) this is due to basic chem being not-composable. And of course, possibly dangerous in a hard to detect way.

You would also be wrong.

Chemistry is very composable, if you are doing these experiments you are likely learning the theory and can quickly work out that variants exist, and enumerate those variants to find new things to test, expanding knowledge.

As for hazards: most of the hazards are very easy to detect or mitigate. Work at a small scale, wear PPE, etc.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#130

Post by ansible »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #121
Aunche wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By my time in the 1970s, home electronics projects aimed at teenagers had devolved to "Stick this here, and that there, and connect the battery, and gee whiz isn't that neat!" I'm much younger than you, but that wasn't my experience at all. My dad got me this kit [1] when I was in fifth grade, and it was great. I got completely lost when it talked about transistors, but the projects were still fun (considering my v…

Is that the one with the good manual? Most of these spring clip electronics sets come with pretty crappy manuals, very light on theory and with uninspired circuits (i.e. in "130 in 1" there are maybe 10 good circuits and endless variations of those). Whereas an Elenco brand kit I found at the thrift store came with a fantastic manual, that taught electronics right from the basics, using the kit's components to illust…

Yeah, I faced that issue as well. I had three kits, IIRC:

1. Radio Shack crystal radio. That was relatively simple, but I don't think the manual explained how it worked too well. 2. Radio Shack 10-in-1 Jr Electronic Lab Kit. I don't recall how good the manual was, but I didn't really learn much from that. 3. Some unknown brand 150-in-1 kit. IIRC that basically just had circuit diagrams, and didn't really explain anything.

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