Every so often

Every so often I think I understand the world.  It fits in the box I neatly construct around it.  It follows the formula, fits the bill and the shoe fits.  Of course then I spend the next 364 days lost in a dazed confusion.         One of the biggest problems with being a nerd is that you are constantly tying in correlations and causation to other things in your life, every so often you have an "aha moment" you turn to the relatively intelligent individual you happen to be with and say something like "I see! It is like electron repulsion theory; positive people tend to have a lot of people around them but most of them don't get along and tend to avoid each other because they are all so negative!  It also explains why so many people are never where you need them to be when you need them, its simple physical chemistry".  To which you are greeted with a blank stare followed by a "Huh?"
      Every so often you experience the heartbreak of discovering that a rule or concept you thought was simple isn't entirely correct.  Like when I discovered that the hydrolysis of ATP actually requires energy; it is the formation of the inorganic phosphate that follows spontaneously that produces the -31.5 kJ change in Gibbs free energy!  Mind = Blown!  Every so often you get a very low rating on your response to a Chegg homework question because it looks like it came from Wiki, you of course reply that it is because you modified the Wiki a few weeks ago due to errors!  Seriously, what do they take me for!
     Every so often you stop to think, and realize it has been so long since you last stopped to think that you better wait till you have more time to catch up with yourself.
This my friends is the dilemma of a nerd!

Magic? No, just awesome chemistry

"Now! I will bend this spoon with nothing other than my mind" says the magician as the people in the audience stare in awe.  They watch as the spoon magically bends over under the telekinetic stare of the magician.  Applause erupts from everyone in the room, everyone that is but the chemist who is too busy laughing to himself about the ignorance of the population when it comes to chemistry.

Next in the show the Magician takes another spoon and starts to stir a glass of water again a gasp as the audience watches the spoon literally vanish before their eyes.  Again the chemist chuckles.  He calls out for the magician to have a drink of the water he was stirring, the magician casts a quick glance of annoyance as he ignores the chemists request.

In truth the magician is using an unseen force to both bend the spoon and to make it vanish!  That force however is not telekinesis, its simply energy in the form of body heat or hot water!    

Wait! You say, how is this possible?  Of course the spoon in the drawer is not going to melt from being held,     else the world would all use chopsticks!   This is where the chemist has advantage, not all spoons are created equal.

 The spoon you see here is not a typical spoon although it may appear as such.  This impostor is made of the metal Gallium, Gallium has several uses most of them involve electric circuits.  Magicians and chemistry professors use it for its specific properties in illusion.  You see gallium melts at 29.8 degrees Celsius.  This is fun because human body temperature is 37 degrees Celsius!  Thus it will literally melt in your hand!

In hot water it will melt away, held lightly it will deform from the conducted heat!

There now I have killed magic!  Or perhaps awakened you to the real magic of chemistry!          

Pi

Normally I am not a numbers nerd but this is where I cross over into the world of numbers. 

This strange number has of course solved equations both simple and complex.  It is however the less interesting portion of its history from my prospective.  All irrational numbers regardless of their identity are continuous,and as far as we know they are infinite, never repeating (starting over).  This led to some serious difficulties in history.  You see numbers were the way man made sense of the world, trigonometry and geometry were especially revered for making the universe make sense.  Yet here we have the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, a seemingly innocuous value somewhere between three and four.  I say somewhere because we really don't know.  How is this you say? Oh know you've just fallen into the rabbit hole, you have asked the nerd a question! See we have tried to determine exactly where pi is on the number line and failed.  Not that we haven't made progress, we have!  We have in fact calculated out to 5 trillion digits of this number, but we will never hit the end of it.  It is as if God is laughing at the human need to solve everything.  The most complex part of this for some to comprehend is that this number is not even remotely unique; in fact it is true that all numbers share this irritating nature.  There is in fact an infinity between any two numbers. If I say I am 99% sure of something that means that I am not 99.9 % sure, if I am 99.999999999999999999% sure than I am still not 100% sure!  As a matter of fact no matter how many nines I put on the end I will never reach a hundred percent! Thus Zeno's paradox Achilles and the tortoise (seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes).  This number pi is different because it was one of the first we cared about.  The different ways we have found to calculate it is why it is interesting to me.  See for a circle the size of the known universe with accuracy in the sub atomic range, we need....wait for it.... around 40 digits!  So why 5 trillion and counting?  Mathematicians are nuts!  A professor at my college put it this way when talking about science "all biologists are in essence chemists, all chemists are essentially physicists, all physicists are mathematicians and of course all mathematicians are crazy!".  So, once you've caught the science bug, you can expect people to use very logical and rational techniques to do the most irrational things!  (Pun intentional).