Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A requiem for amateur chemistry

lcamtuf.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 156 posts

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#21

Post by dylan604 »

melony wrote: post #2

Not 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…

In today's world, you also do not get a knock on the door from some LEO/TLA member because you purchased a certain combination of iPads, electronic devices, but buy a combo of chemistry ingredients and you'll enjoy a nice little chat.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#22

Post by walterbell »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #12

> It is equally difficult to source ideas for the curriculum. Many classic amateur chemistry books are out of print, and there is little incentive to publish more. So then! My place of work, the Science History Institute, has a number of old amateur chemistry experiment books digitized online and freely accessible. My job includes developing and managing the web site/app we use to manage our digitized content and pre…

Excellent work, thanks for preserving amateur/DIY/hacker science history!

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#23

Post by mncharity »

an_aparallel wrote: post #7

We 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…

Some years back there was work on VR lab sims. I fuzzily recall niches of "virtual high-school lab", "intro to lab best practices", and "protocol training in life sciences"? No idea if any of it reached market.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#24

Post by walterbell »

dylan604 wrote: post #21
melony wrote: post #2

Not 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…

In today's world, you also do not get a knock on the door from some LEO/TLA member because you purchased a certain combination of iPads, electronic devices, but buy a combo of chemistry ingredients and you'll enjoy a nice little chat.

One justification used to promote cashless digital payments.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#25

Post by ekianjo »

Victerius wrote: post #20
ekianjo wrote: post #17

Very true. Also the general knowledge of chemistry in the general population is absolutely abysmal. So much of our modern world relies on chemistry yet barely anyone knows shit about it.

Is there a primer I could read to refresh my knowledge of basic chemistry? I prefer the written format. A 50-100 pages document would be ideal. I don't mind chemical equations and math.

You can probably start with college level books since they dont really teach much chemistry in high school anyway.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#27

Post by the__alchemist »

This is more of a spear at the title than the content, which is orthogonal: I'm spending a good chunk of my spare time working on chemistry. I'm building a molecular model of proteins in an aqueous environment on the computer. The computing and knowledge resources available make this approachable - probably more so than anytime in history.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#28

Post by green_on_black »

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.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#29

Post by the__alchemist »

an_aparallel wrote: post #7

We 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…

Maybe not the answer you expect, but a sufficiently ab-initio simulation is not something our current knowledge of chemistry permits! You could approach your problem with various degrees of approximation. Personally, I'm optimistic that we may make great progress in this area in the coming years, decades, and centuries. It's traditionally described as a lack of computing power, but I'm guessing there's a fair chunk of knowledge yet undiscovered that could help.

Re: A requiem for amateur chemistry

#30

Post by JKCalhoun »

I too grew up finding those cool chemistry books in the library. For that reason I have collected some of my favorites. Kenneth Swezey's books were particularly good. Fortunately a few of them are on archive.org. I wish they still polished books like this — rather than "grossology" books or whatever.

Swezey on archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/chemistrymagic00swez

https://archive.org/details/sciencemagic0000swez

https://archive.org/details/afterdinnerscien00swez

Post reply on HN