The 4th Dimension, God, and Buckaroo Banzai

In The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!, the hero drives his amazing rocket car into the eighth dimension, through a mountain, and  re-materializes on the other side. The titular character (physicist, neurosurgeon, race car driver, and rock star) explains that he didn’t actually drive through the mountain. He drove onto another plane. For [...]

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The Fighting Chemists

Everyone knows that the way we name the members of the periodic table is largely arbitrary. In the beginning, we got fun names based on Latin roots. For example, the name for oxygen, which was discovered around 1772, was derived from the Greek “oxys”, meaning, “sharp” and “genes” meaning “begetter” because it was early believed that [...]

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Sweat Is Cool!

It is rather hot out. This observation, and others like it have taken up approximately thirty percent of my brain power this past week. The other seventy percent has been taken up, in large part, by the heavily Walter Scott–C.S. Lewis–Steven Moffat inspired story I have been writing. (It is so good to be out of school!) Seeing as I plan to be spending the remainder of my time before my summer job begins, outside, I thought I would post some of my thoughts on the matter of heat, mostly on sweat.
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1. It is possible to become acclimated to the heat. However, there also seems to be a gene that determines one’s propensity to feel the heat. A down-side to becoming acclimated to any temperature however, is that one’s internal thermostat is regulated by that temperature. Thus, any temperature very much lower, no matter how high the acclimated temperature, feels very cold. The opposite holds true for people from a cold climate.
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2. A thin film of sweat and dead skin forms on the surface of the skin. However, after coming inside, it forms a sort of gel-like consistency and does not evaporate or disappear until one takes a shower. I realize this is a disgusting observation. However, for some reason, I find it immensely interesting, especially in light of this post, which mentions that there is a thin layer of water molecules on natural surfaces. I also wonder whether this layer could be utilized to form some sort of natural barrier to mosquitoes.
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3. Hot weather is more conducive to sloppy dressing in the normal world, and elaborately beautiful dressing in the fashion world. For example, I recently learned that if I am to wear a dress well I must possess coordinating accessories. Accessories are hot. However, if I simply wear a nylon soccer shirt and jean shorts, I can blend into the masses of normal people who do not accessorize. Hot weather also leads to sweaty shirts and mussy hair. (Yay!)
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4. Dogs do not appear to sweat. (much) The chief reason that fans are so useful is that they move the air around, displacing the humid air with not-so-humid air, which in turn allows the sweat to evaporate off our skin, absorbing its heat of vaporization from our skin, cooling us. Yet dogs enjoy sitting in front of fans, and my dog was actually cooperative when I clipped her hair this last hot week. I can think of one reason for these phenomena: the fan also displaces the hotter air surrounding people and animals; thus shorter hair–or crew-cut hair–allows more cool air to get to the skin. The heat probably also exhausts dogs to such an extent that they are beyond struggling against the clippers. Though they do not sweat much through the surface of their skin because panting is their heat-coping mechanism, laying in front of the fan allows them to get cooler air over the tongue.
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5. Heat, or perhaps changes in the humidity, seem to release certain scents. A good example is the smell of hot tar. Recently, the local Aldi repaved their parking lot, and, I realize this is common, the smell was really strong. It became notably hot this week, and, while my parents were out, I opened all the windows and turned on fans. That evening I smelled the scent of cinnamon and allspice very strongly. It was the scent of my mother’s reed diffuser, which she got for Christmas and which I had stopped smelling months ago. Finally, and perhaps most disgustingly, my sweat began to stink. My sweat has never stunk. I have been able to wear antiperspirant for days before it broke down. Perhaps it is something to do with getting older, sweating more, or spending more time outside. Perhaps the heat and sweat flushes out the glands in our noses, giving us a hyperactive sense of smell. Finally, perhaps the heat speeds mold and decay and the evaporation of those surface water molecules bearing smells.
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Perhaps I should take a look into the chemistry of sweat. Today in a human physiology textbook, I ran across the idea that humans do not feel the actual temperature, but the difference from their recent temperatures. I like the idea that it is all relative. Within a certain range, the human body does not have to lower the temperature of the body by much, only making the body feel cooler works. I also find it fascinating that the body has its own coping mechanisms, although I wonder why dead skin and salt is involved. Perhaps this is so the ratio of salt to water in the body remains the same and avoids a sort of salt-sea phenomenon, or maybe this is because all the water in the body is salt water. Anyway, sweat is cool.

Thoughts? Exclamations of disgust? Comments?

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Science Is Not Exact

I once thought that I liked science because it was so exact. There were rules, and everything turned out exactly the way you expected it to. There is only one problem–it does not. On paper, you can predict exactly what product will form, and maybe even predict our percent yield? (We speak of chemistry here.) In other words, the conventional view of science is that it can quantify everything–and if it cannot, well, then at least it can quantify the exceptions. That is a problem. Science is not exact.
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My first experience in a freshman chemistry lab was somewhat harrowing. Do not misunderstand me (or my self-contradictory double-negative construction)–I loved every minute, but I learned a lot about scientific error that I had not learned in our makeshift homeschool laboratory (the kitchen) where I attributed all my errors to things sticking to the pans. The first things I learned in the lab were what a Bunsen burner and hot plate looked like, much to the amusement of my lab partner, but I also learned several other things that the general public could benefit from knowing.
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1. We do not understand chemistry. I was aghast to discover that most of what we know about chemistry was discovered in the 20th century. Before then, it was just carefully experimenting with elements–which may or may not have been pure–in order to classify them by what happened when they reacted with other elements. I have some of my grandfather’s old chemistry textbooks (c) 1921, 1940, and 1946 and they are primarily descriptive chemistry. What is sulfuric acid? How does it react? How can you make it? They lack the why. Today we know a little bit more, but we are still fumbling to figure things out. I have only just begun organic chemistry–which is rumored to have a lot of memorization of reactions. (Indeed, my father concentrated on chemical mechanisms so he could focus on the why rather than the memorization.) Even so, it seems that in organic chemistry, we are still trying to figure things out. We have classified different kinds of organic compounds and know in general how they react, but the why does not seem widely known.
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2. We have invented several aids to help us, such as the scientific method, but science will never be exact as long as humans (and pieces of equipment) are fallible. The main problem a lot of us have with evolution, and, to a certain degree, global warming is the amount of subjectivity involved. You did an experiment, but did you make an error and does the experiment prove your hypothesis? The temperature of the earth is rising, but is this due to the natural heating and cooling cycles, the placement of your sensors, or even what you want to believe? In the end, it comes down to what the researcher is willing to believe. I routinely researched and wrote my lab reports with the “right” answer in mind (listing the myriad of experimental errors, of course). In addition, science comes down to observation, and thus to the observer. My lab partner would not record deviations from the standard 1 mL release in a titration because he said it was “experimental error.” My partner and I also routinely disagreed on whether the solution was yellow or orange. The scientific method is useful, of course, but as long as the human mind is not a computer, subjective differences will exist.
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3. Sometimes Things Happen. We all remember times where, for some reason, the cookies came out of the oven looking like a smoking heap that had barely escaped the fires of Mordor. We remember times when, despite all our planning, trips just did not work out. Science is like that too sometimes, often because of our own ignorance. I remember my roommate coming home one night and telling me that neither she nor her professor had any idea what their experiment had produced. Whatever it was, it was not what they expected. However, this does not have to be a bad thing. Sometimes it is an opportunity to discover new things. Fleming discovered penicillin this way. My roommate told me another night that by accidentally spilling water into their experiment, they had sped it up and increased the yield. Their only problem was duplicating the results.
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4. Finally, there are always exceptions to the rule, plain and simple. These are not due to human ignorance, error, or the mysterious forces of Things Happening, but because there just are. One thing I have not meant to do in this post is to imply that there are not exact rules in science or that exact truth does not exist. It does, just as it does in every subject and in life, (You may debate that with me in the comments.) but the absolute truth does not have blanket rules, that is all. There is a new rule for each exception. Or perhaps we do not understand the science well enough to write good rules yet.
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Thus, science is not exact, at least not off-paper. I compared science to math before I came to college, but it is not like math; science is more like a cross between math and golf. You can calculate a stroke with mathematical precision to fall into a hole, but the golfer does not necessarily hit it into the hole, although he may come very close. And the more strokes he takes to get to the hole, the more imprecise the experiment gets, or something like that. I do not know anything about golf.
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This discussion raises a new question. If science is not exact, and I liked it because I thought it was, then why do I like science now? I suppose I like it because it is a search–a search for truth, an effort to classify what we know, and a study built around discovering new things and helping people. That is why I like science, though my humanity and my lab partner may sometimes annoy me.
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Agree? Disagree? Did I miss any other reasons that science isn’t exact? Send me a comment!

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