Prose

I. Chemistry is Freedom - A Meditation

It is mine. My freedom and my love. Yet not exclusive to me. Like you, I too have multiple freedoms. Chemistry is a universal one. It allows me, allows us, to dance with molecules. We can give matter dreams of unexplored territory beyond the confines of the Periodic Table. Chemistry allows us to give flesh and bones and blood to ideas, energy, and imagination. We are free to dream of new choreographies and reactivities between molecular partners juxtaposed into unique associations, structures, and functions. Free to command unruly atoms and ions and molecules to assemble as we wish. On scales and in magnitudes that generals, politicians, priests, artists, and influencers would be envious of.

Long before writing an experimental procedure, and before mixing reactants together, before handwritten equations become reactions, before restless electrons are transferred or shared, our imagination is free to ask what if. Will it work and how well? If it does, what can the product or the process be good for? We are free to imagine environmentally friendly atom efficient reactions. Free to conceptualize and design molecules that can change colors like Hydrangea flowers or like the oxidation states of transition metals. Free to think and reflect and create new molecular entities that can potentially heal, treat disease, bring comfort, and improve our standard of living.

 
I am chemistry and chemistry is me. I am free to inhabit both its identity and transformation as they too inhabit me. I am free to ask, decide, and define who I am and who can I become. I am born free to roam between matter and spirit, between inertia and reactivity, between noble gas aloofness and organic community, between molecule and imagination, between synthesis and reflection. Likewise, you too are chemistry and chemistry is you. We give it purpose; it gives us power.

We walk not in darkness but in the light and by its interaction with matter. Light calleth unto matter and reveals its structure and its name. In this truth, in this enlightenment, we are set free of false assumptions and invalid hypotheses. 

The motions of matter between particle and wave, at quantum and macromolecular scales, is not just poetry or theory, it is our lived reality. Chemistry is not just central, it is essential. It changes how we live and how we die. It is with us in life and death. It never ceases nor abandons us. In the ceaseless creativity of chemistry there is freedom ad infinitum.

Chemistry is not performative, it is substantive. Without chemistry we are not free to be or to become. With it we are.

II. A Meditation on Water

Water as we know it and use it in our daily lives is so only because of relationship. By itself as an isolated single molecule, water is not buoyant, does not wet, does not boil, does not form ice, does not dissolve gases, liquids, and solids, does not form dew drops, clouds, oceans, rivers, lakes, or tears of joy and/or pain. There will be no water cycle; our entire global weather system would be fundamentally different. There will be no soup. There will be no sap in trees. There will be no drinks. No juice from fruits. No liquid crystalline soap solutions.
 
A single isolated water molecule cannot quench your thirst, form snow, mirror objects, transport red blood cells, or support life. It cannot be used to shower, to clean, to extinguish fire, to sail on, or to soothe your body and soul. Indeed, without water 70% of YOU would be missing!!!

It is ONLY when water molecules are connected to each other, interacting with each other, in intimate relations to each other, that water is who/what we know and experience it to be. In technical chemical terms, we speak of water's intimate relations as being mediated by hydrogen bonds. It is from them that all the properties, functions, and uses of water emerge. They are weak, fleeting, dynamic, dancing, and plenty. But together they are strong.

Behold water and learn. Consider water like you've never done before. And be enlightened. And be wise.

III. In the whistle of the wind

In the whistle of the wind we hear if we listen, experience. It’s been where we haven't; it’s seen what we haven't; it knows what we've not experienced. It has felt pressures, high and low, and is here to tell the story. It has stories, of summer, of fall, of winter, of spring. Over desert lands and verdant valleys. From Atacama to Antarctica. Listen to the whistle of the wind. Sometimes it groans, deep and undecipherable. Sometimes it seems like praise, soft and melodic. Listen to its temper, listen to its song. Sometimes it carries our burdens, sometimes it lingers too long. Listen as it whispers between branch and leaves; listen to its cadence in hurricane and storm. It can bring both carnage and clearance. Listen to its fret and fuss; listen as it overwhelms us, dawn to dusk. The wind is not moral, constrained by neither purpose nor intent, it just is. Listen to its freedom. Listen to the whistle and the wisdom of the wind. And find your voice. And find yourself.

IV. Percent Yield

We have all often heard, ‘Life is not perfect.’ As it is in life, so it is in chemistry; as it is with chemistry, so it is with life. Chefs don’t cook the perfect meal, wineries don’t cultivate the perfect wine, athletes don’t play the flawless game, religions don’t make us God’s. Chemical reactions remind us that life isn’t all perfect. We must learn to live with nature’s imperfections, our foibles, and other’s mistakes. This is life. Yet for all life’s imperfections we can still revel in the beauty of a Caribbean sunset, in the soothing orchestral renditions of a rivers babble, and marvel at the rainbows caught in a drop of water clinging to the tip of a leaf.

In chemistry, we acknowledge imperfection and take advantage of it by measuring percent yields of reactions. This gives us a way to calibrate the efficiency of a chemical process. Theoretical yields, that is, reactions that give 100% products are rare in chemistry. There are any number of reasons why a reaction is not perfect. Yet, this has not stopped us from utilizing them. 

The lesson here is that you don’t need to be perfect to be worthwhile.

V. The Mystery of It All

Time to redefine mystery.

Mystery is why we question, do research and why we exercise faith. It is faith and curiosity that penetrates mystery and are our first steps to making it permeable and knowable. Without mystery, we would know it all, and there would be no need for curiosity, research and faith. Imagine a world, a universe without mystery. It would be in a word boring. Tomorrow would be as known as yesterday even before it arrives. There are the never-ending mysteries of our mortality, and of the natural and spiritual worlds. They can make our lives passionate and purposeful.

Whatever certainties we believe are themselves incomplete and shrouded in mysteries; they are not beyond query and questioning. Indeed, the thing about certainty is that it tends to make us think we know it all, that there is nothing more to know here; it diminishes our humility and mindfulness and our innate impulse to be curious, to explore, to discover, and to innovate. It makes us lazy, intellectually and spiritually. We become like Laodicea of Biblical lore, neither hot nor cold, drunk and satiated on our own prideful self-sufficiency. Indeed, the case can be made that Matthew 7:7 makes no sense and has no urgency without the precondition of mystery. “Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you.” – Matthew 7:7. Why are you asking if you already have? Why are you seeking if you already know? Why are you knocking on open doors?

In fact, our entire motivation, all our premises and edifices as Seekers would be nonexistent but for the mysteries of it all. That we live in a state of continual mystery is a supremely good thing. Mystery is built into the foundations of our universe and our eternal quest to understand it. Do not fear nor shun mystery, embrace it. If we view mystery only as troublesome and frustrating, we lose out on the opportunities it brings and the triumphs and advances waiting to be revealed. It is an unopened package of revelation, knowledge, and understanding. Mystery opens our hearts to wonder, our souls to awe, and our minds to understanding. At the end of mystery, another revelation awaits, another truth unfolds, another mystery emerges, curiosity grows, faith deepens, ad infinitum.

VI. Chemistry’s Identity

It is ironic that chemistry the quintessential science of identity and transformation is itself now in search of its own identity. A search due in part to its own success. Through its history from ancient alchemy to modern chemistry this field of human discovery and creativity has had several makeovers.

One enduring image that chemistry has worn is one of service. Whether it be for aesthetics, war, economic or even religious, chemistry has served humanity’s ambitions. It is the tool without which there would not have been progress from wood and iron to aluminum and nylon. It is the instrument that has most directly brought longer life span and greater leisure time. Without it there would have been no Industrial Revolution and modern knowledge-based civilization would crash precipitously.

Yet, for some chemists this image of servant is troubling. They would rather have an identity of a transcendent science, one that is ‘pure’ as opposed to ‘applied.’ They envy the status that physics and mathematics are given as the languages of reality that are best reducible to laws, formulas and numbers.

Chemistry, this realm of isomerism and variable reaction conditions, is not so neatly packaged. It is a little bit too much like ...... real life. But it is precisely because chemistry is everywhere and that its elements show up in life’s explosive diversity of molecular arrangements, that chemistry is the archetypal service science. It is an eclectic collage of ‘pure’ and ‘applied,’ of art and science. It is a mulatto with multiple identities, transformative capabilities and biological functions. For me, if chemistry is in fact Diderot’s ‘dusty laborer,’ I am not troubled. To paraphrase the words of a wise man: the one who serves is in fact the master.

VII. The Same but Not the Same

There is a fundamental phenomenon of life, nature, and the universe that can be summarized as "the same but not the same." It is a basis for the diversity, emergence, and functionalities of the universe, life, nature, and human existence.

It shows up in mathematics, language, religion, and multiple aspects of human existence.

It is manifested very simply as two numbers that are very different due to their arrangement, e.g. 14 and 41.

It is manifested in words called anagrams where the letters are the same, but the words are different, e.g. care, race, acre.

It is manifested in the chemical concept of isomers, in which substances with the same formula may be differently connected or arranged.

It is manifested in the cultural differences of humans and human civilizations. The same but not the same.

These differences have consequences. And the differences don't have to be large to be consequential.

People who want to abolish DEIR have no concept of the fundamental far-reaching constitutive nature of differences, diversity, emergence, functionality, and the foundational phenomena of "the same but not the same." Indeed, they themselves are evidence of this reality, as Kendrick Lamar says, "they not like us."

VIII. Facts and Faith

Facts are unapologetically uncaring about our opinion of them. Whether you believe them or don't, facts are unmoved. They are joyless. Their existence does not depend on our awareness or knowledge of them or even our own existence. Facts don't care about your politics or religion or the image you have cultivated of yourself.

And yet, it is also true that we have not as humans lived by facts alone. Facts are necessary but insufficient in our lived human experiences. We live extra-factually, beyond facts, through imagination, through hope, through creativity, through vision and insight, through literature, through the arts, and yes, through faith.

Civilization and civility, achievement and advancement, exists in creative tension within this necessary equilibrium and exchange between fact and the extra-factual. We live both in the what is and the what can be, in both reality and aspiration. Indeed, aspiration is not only part of reality but can also inspire and create it. This is how we can see a better kinder, greener world for those who come behind us. This is how we hope and have faith that the best is yet to come.

This is how freedom emerged from the dreams of the enslaved and the blues people to create a new American and New World reality. In the face of cruel facts, they sang "We Shall Overcome," "A'int Got Time to Die," and "Before, I'd Be A Slave, O Freedom."

See more at https://www.negrospirituals.com/songs/index.htm.

Furthermore, we did not arrive at our modern science and technology solely through known facts but through the vision and work of Seekers and Innovators being curious, asking questions, and conducting experiments about what lies beyond our present knowledge and understanding. So, the antagonistic stance that some place between fact and faith, is at best artificial, bogus, hollow, and narrow-minded.

Man cannot live by facts alone. Nor should we.

IX. Uncertainty

Uncertainty is a feature of life. It is embedded in the quantum realm by the well-known uncertainty principle. In the macroscopic real world, I believe it is embedded in complexity and emergence. A feature of emergence is its unpredictability as complexity increases. Evidence of this is found in the biological, sociological, technological worlds, in our natural lives and our digital lives. Put another way, messiness increases as a function of complexity and emergence. But, alas and ironically, so too does beauty and creativity. Life is endlessly fascinating and seductive.

X. Ceaseless Creativity

Time to redefine.

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." - Ecclesiastes 1:9.

Yes, there is.

"Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert." - Isaiah 43:19.

So, which is it?

It is both!

God, himself/herself, invites us to behold 'a new thing.' He is an eternal Creator and has imbued all creation with the attribute of ceaseless creativity.

All creation - the universe, nature, the environment, our ecosystems, all living things, you, me, all humanity, for all time engage or are engaged by ceaseless creativity. Ad infinitum.

For us, ceaseless creativity is evidenced and expressed through our curiosity, imagination, innovation, and discovery of the new. Behold, we are the beneficiaries of new things each day - new insights, new revelations, new knowledge, new science, new technology, new seasons, new consumer products, and new births.

Yet, still in a deep sense this ceaseless creativity is not new, though it produces the new. Our nature, like God's, is the same - forever curious, ceaselessly creative. "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again ...." "Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?"

This represents the synthesis and confluence - the interface of being and becoming, of imagination and reality, of convention and creation, of tradition and progression, of old and new. Of new emergent from self-similar (fractal) ceaseless creativity. The new, is, has been and will always be in us and with us. This is our repeating (looping) algorithm. This is how we roll. This is who we are.