Entropy

Random. Randomness. Things happening by chance. On the way home from a late Saturday night Uni study session Nick and I began to talk about randomness. He explained to me a theory about things in the economy happening randomly; how some people think GDP is totally unrelated to anything at all. It feels like that. We drove windows down, wind rustling through the open frame, night lights flickering past as vague ethereal things that pass me only for a moment. We are in the car but so out of it. I am thinking of bed and sleep and of randomness. How unpredictable my life is. I would never have guessed, three years ago, stepping out of school where I'd be now. It's all so strange the paths that life has given us. If I embrace the concept of entropy they always tell me about- that the universe seeks randomness and disorder, and that order is strained, fleeting, only local to some greater picture- can this same concept be applied to generalities of life? Can a concept like entropy be embraced? If it is real disorder than it has no face, no descriptor, only defined by the fact it does not. Ice melts when left out in an open room. Sleep comes to me when I turn off my laptop.

Magnesium Can Spontaneously Combust In Air

I'm feeling shitty as fuck, extremely pissed off, a raging combustion reaction which seeks to destroy. I feel like punching people in the face, breaking noses, kicking shins. Before every Chem practical I perform a Risk Assessment form. Do not mix young uni student with annoying adult. Combustion ensues.

Reduction of a Ketone Yields Alcohol

Eh. Hangovers. I still think hangovers are one of the more shittest entities of my week. Currently am lying, sore, half a person, runny nose, head weighing three million kilos beyond normal in my bed. In second year Experimental Chem on Thursday mornings I would always show up to labs hungover after a night at the pub, the intoxicating smell of high percent ethanol and all the other solvents would be revolting and confronting and make me feel ill. It's four hours until my Inorganic contact and I need to break the hangover.

Problems With Regioselectivity

The point group of my brain probably has impossible symmetry. Thursday morning, exhausted, one coffee down and I'm already struggling through the Inorganic lecture.

 It's sad but when I get bored I glance around the room at the rest of my Inorganic class and decide who I'd have sex with. There are about three, all would need alcohol (that's mutual consumption, not just me drinking here) and none who I'd ever consider have sex with more than once.This is out of pure boredom- my lecturer is droning on in a somewhat monotonous tone RE: all this symmetry shit (is a molecule has the same symmetry elements as water, for example, what do we then know about that molecule?). Realistically, I wouldn't have sex right then. I wouldn't want to. I'm exhausted. I got four sleep last night, and now all I want to do is go to sleep.

Something that always is problematic for any chemist is Regioselectivity, which is sort of like where things add in a reaction- where things go when you chuck them all together in a beaker. Sometimes your reactant will bond where you want it, sometimes it won't. CHEM101 highlights that when you are performing an electrophilic addition onto an aromatic ring, there are often problems with where things add. For example, as soon as you add a carbonyl group, electrons are sucked out of the ring and now you can only add to certain locations on the ring, meaning that you must drastically predetermine where you're going with your reaction before it begins.You must have perspective and foresight. You must purify at each step of a complex synthesis if you garner unwanted products.There is an intelligence and forethought required to perform the reaction, so you don't fuck it up. Whenever I perform some synthesis, cook something up in the lab, I sit down and draw what's going to happen. This much perspective I seldom apply to any other aspect of my life. I don't know what I want to do after my degree, which finishes in a year- Honours and Med are on the table, but the choice and effort seems exhausting. I am unsure if I will make the right choice when I finish my degree- or is there even a right choice?

Regioselectivity problems are inevitable.

Retrosynthesis

We were at the usual coffee place when Vanny chose, so astutely, to mention McCready's past sexual misdeeds. It was a quick, subtle reference- 'in the toilet'- and the tone of the conversation changed completely. Without a complexion alteration, her tone snapped darker- 'let's not start. The things I could say about who people have got with here.'

She had a damn point. The study group had formed through an series of total misadventures and coincidence, and to articulate every shred of horrific incestuous drama along the way would surely be to rip us to shreds. We were the tightest knit friends in some ways, and hanging by total threads in another.

The study group had originally been me and the girls from that first Biology prac. Later, friends and acquaintances- Sarah, Dane, Maggie, Gina, Mokachino, Samuel, Kieran- all had joined onto, meshing in, webbing together. Hell, I hadn't know Dane half a year ago, and now I rent with him. Adele and I had only met a few times before that first biol prac, and now she too rents a room over. We were the quintessential study group, and now as we reclined at Wordies, waiting for that second round of coffees to steer head long into the brief social impasse, my mind ticked over to Retrosynthesis.

I study a BSc, and all morning in my Chem lecture it had been "Retrosynthesis". Retro, backwards. Synthesis, to make. I guess it could be approached two ways. You start with something and then tear it down, breaking the bonds of your original molecule as you go. It's a good way to look at complex molecules, complex chemical scenarios and see where they came from. In another sense though- as you go backwards, you aren't so much tearing down, but making new compounds. These are the rawer, the simpler compounds from which your advanced one formed. Often with chemical retrosynthesis, as you look at a complex structure and then break it apart, you end up with an entirely different starting product than you perceived. Benzocaine, for example might best be synthesised with Toluene to start, rather than Benzene. And yet the structure of Benzocaine (an anaesthetic, by the way) screams for you start simply with benzene. The point is that the end, though complicated, can come from equally deceiving beginnings.

As with most of our fights, it quickly dispersed. Jokes resumed, Anyway, most of the people there had other thoughts on their mind- GAMSAT was a few weeks away, and everyone was partially shitting themselves. Sarah C and I made plans for our drinking tomorrow night. We all had lectures at 2, so we departed out separate ways, almost in two by twos, except for myself. Wordies is right on a bookstore, and so I lingered, not buying anything in particular, apart from a new Chemistry lab book.

I begin to think about Retrosynthesis in terms of people, of groups of friends, of networks of "I know them"s. Breaking back, once at a time, through a series of calculated disconnections, the social bonds of our group made me wonder what were the simple things that we were together. Drinking buddies? No, far more than that. The study group was a kind of rock to me- a surprise as well, for reasons worth explaining later- them more of a Toluene vibe, a pleasant surprise, than the obvious expected outcome of a benzene.

This blog is a place where each day, I will come and say something about Chemistry. I am studying Microbiology/Chemistry as my two majors, and I would not pick myself as the stereotypical Chem guy. I reject jeans and joggers. I drink too much. As somewhat, in some ways, of a Chem outsider for a 3rd year Chem student, I will document, observe, and share tidbits. Really, to explain my motives I guess I'd have to go back to the start. But that retrosynthesis is for another time.