A NON-COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF 10 WAYS PHYSICAL CHEMISTS MAKE YOUR LIFE MORE COMPLICATED
10. This list is in octal for theoretical reasons that are currently un-testable by any known technique.
7. You always feel “dirty” when you use an approximation, or round to three significant figures.
6. For a while you believed that there really were practical applications for the Schrödinger equation. That’s four months of your life you’ll never get back.
5. Entropy.
4. Unexplained headaches can be induced by any field with over six ways to define an apparently simple concept, like the radius of a molecule. And don’t even ask about viscosity, unless you’ve pre-dosed yourself with ibuprofen.
3. Statistical mechanics was essentially invented by Ludwig Boltzmann, and even he committed suicide over it.
2. Flatulence will never follow the ideal gas law.
1. What part of “if you use an equation, you should be able to derive the equation,” do you not understand?
Vince LiCata is a biochemist in the Department of Biological Sciences at the Louisiana State University. His laboratory studies protein structure and function. He owns two Britney Spears CDs, but one of them is an illegal copy given to him by one of his students. He routinely gives out more than 25% A’s in his General Biochemistry and Biophysical Chemistry courses, yet is considered a hard-ass. He is reasonably sure that if Britney Spears got in a fight with Jessica Simpson, that BS would crack JS like a little twig.
