The Periodic Table

5:12 AM

→ 281 messages moved to Discussion on answer by Jan: Will adding up protons and electrons (without neutrons) create a new element?

Martin - マーチン

5:22 AM

The caretaker has taken care.

skill patrol

5:33 AM

care is in the air?

Martin - マーチン

Yes, when need be...

user161117

7:27 AM

Woah I have found some truly remarkable crystal that will never dissolve in a certain liquid despite both of them being highly ionic.

Jan

So caring!

@StevenGrigsby I'm not even surprised that that be possible ;)

user161117

Yeah unfortunately I'm talking about water crystals not dissolving in liquid NaCl :P

user161117

Haha oh hey I saw your conversation earlier, you got me thinking about how current flow is thought of in QM

Jan

Just because they are on opposite sides of the phase diagram? xD

user161117

Do you think it would be the kind of thing you could model with the particle in a box and considering the insulators as the infinite potential or do I need to start thinking in terms of band structures maybe of the wire. Or I guess you said you have no f*cking clue haha but

user161117

7:50 AM

@Jan Hey I'm going to be applying to some universities for computational chemistry pretty soon, would you happen to know where they have the good super computers? haha

Jan

8:21 AM

@StevenGrigsby Ask @Martin-マーチン, he does that for a living ;)

Martin - マーチン

Depending on what you want to do, you don't really need good supercomputers, you should mainly focus on what you are interested when choosing a place

user161117

Hmm well

user161117

I've always been interested in organic mechanisms

user161117

I've started reading through Jensen and Bacharach's books

user161117

so I guess I'll just start googling in that direction but any helpful advice would be great.

user161117

8:34 AM

Pericyclic reactions interest me a bit at the moment I've been looking into the Mills-Nixon effect, kind of curious about how annulated aromatic compounds like benzene might have angle strain induced bond localization

user161117

and if you know any more blogs like Henry Rzepa I'm digging in deep or at least trying to haha

user161117

looks like a fun intense road ahead hopefully

Martin - マーチン

What is your current educational level?

user161117

bachelors in chemistry, math minor. I've taken up to advanced organic chemistry and fourier analysis

user161117

I don't have too much experience programming, started playing around with Java about a year ago so I can mess around in Matlab and python and other OOP more or less

user161117

8:43 AM

Sorry I'm not really responding quickly, I'm helping out a friend with some calculus homework

Martin - マーチン

yeah no problem...

before thinking about programming you need a decent knowledge of the basic principles

and maybe get to know what you actually want to calculate

if you want to elucidate reaction mechanisms, you don't need many programming skills

you will be much more using (mostly) commercial programs to calculate things

mechanisms unfortunately take a long time to develop

from there on you can get into pretty complicated territory, but I guess, that's more of a thing for a phd or later

user161117

Oh, what about mechanisms take a long time to develop? The theory behind them or the calculations take time?

Martin - マーチン

It starts with the theory, where you have to guess one likely mechanism

one that you would consider the most economical

from there you consider all possible reactions in the conformational space and that can be a very lenghty process

and of course you need to consider possible side reactions

and their conformational space

and that is only the initial setup, you need to calculate most of it

guessing a transitionstate can be quite a lengthy process, verification also takes time then connecting it to the local minima

once you have a couple of plausible mechanisms you have to check your methodology

with different methods... and you always have to keep in mind that you might not find what you were looking for

your initial hypothesis might be flawed... things are more difficult

like a solvent effect, an intermediate dimerisation, h-bonding can mess things up

there is a lot to think about

user161117

9:00 AM

Makes sense, so I suppose I should start on something a little simpler but related at first, so what kind of stepping stone sort of projects would be good to take on before this?

Martin - マーチン

I think a general masters course will do the trick, maybe you find some place, where they are doing research in that area... guidance is the best way to learn

so if you are interested in mechanism development and elucidation, go somewhere where they do it

learning all different methods, their application, weaknesses, failures and so on is important, so that you know what to do with your results

some bonding analysis can's hurt

It's basically best you just get the foot in the door doing computational chemistry...

and take it from there, interesting prospects might arise...

and while you are working on the one thing you'll find that excited states are much more fascinating

or you like the programming aspect more...

there is really no good advice someone can give, apart from just try it

Martin - マーチン

9:44 AM

If someone could have a look, I don't want to hammer it down as off-topic all by myself.

-1

Q: How quickly will steel lose structural strength from a heat flash?

I want to know if a sustained jet fuel burn around steel has the ability to make the steel structurally unsound. It seems like any applied heat that effects steel will be a kind of "heat flash": a sudden, and possibly quite short-lived, burst of heat. In this situation, we assume steel has a melt...

user161117

Hahaha

user161117

Yeah I would say this is off topic

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