tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5439168179960787195.post3073231056744391107..comments2024-03-28T17:13:01.117+10:00Comments on Condensed concepts: What were the intellectual highlights of your undergraduate education?Ross H. McKenziehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09950455939572097456noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5439168179960787195.post-86055156765353741832018-02-28T04:12:27.541+10:002018-02-28T04:12:27.541+10:00Dear Feb. 27 anonymous, I'm the very long anon...Dear Feb. 27 anonymous, I'm the very long anonymous. The reason chemists seldom experience aha moments is that very few are very physics-y ones, and hate P-chem classes with a passion.<br /><br />And outside of that ... it really IS too gloppy.dtvmcdonaldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07594633209626059331noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5439168179960787195.post-37917884447862593682018-02-27T22:24:15.320+10:002018-02-27T22:24:15.320+10:00" none were in chemistry" Though chemist..." none were in chemistry" Though chemistry has great application value for example pharmaceuticals etc. the subject is not taught well either in school or even at tertiary level. They try to teach too much in a short period, unlike physics and maths. This overloading in chemistry syllabus leads to rote learning. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5439168179960787195.post-5339376888947982822018-02-27T13:09:14.416+10:002018-02-27T13:09:14.416+10:00Now you have written in in your blog.
"Thes...Now you have written in in your blog. <br />"These moments can be so significant that the student can years later even remember the exact time, location, or circumstance in which the event happened" <br /><br />The reason for your premise ( the above lines) lies in the famous quote below, centuries ago by the greatest polymath Leanardo da Vinci <br /><br />"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding"<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5439168179960787195.post-5284525509035702102018-02-27T04:43:49.622+10:002018-02-27T04:43:49.622+10:00Well, in undergrad, all of the above. But they nev...Well, in undergrad, all of the above. But they never felt like unique "aha" moments.<br />In grad school, yes:<br /><br />1) realizing that Julian Schwinger's 1 grad year quantum class lectures were the Chinese Lunch of lectures ... none of his beautiful arguments, explaining the above, held water upon close thought. Always a catch! See below.<br /><br />2)learning from our experiments that chemical reactions (in a dilute gas) really DO obey the laws of physics and not some sort of organic chemist's magic. You CAN just calculate, more or less, where the atoms go using classical mechanics.<br /><br />2b) corollary: this really should win a Nobel Prize, which it did. And the post-doc later showed quantum effects (not tunneling) on the acattering. <br /><br />As a professor: Some chemical reactions are dominated by relativistic effects! <br />Example: the collisions of Br + I2, which require relativistic electronic structure calculations to get the spin-orbit surfaces split by up to an eV .. they dominate the chemistry! <br /><br />After retiring I decided to learn relativistic quantum field theory. FINALLY, now, I had the real AHA! moment. It all fits, and while one still has to ask Mother Nature for advice, things like the Exclusion Principle are not magic, which they always seemed.dtvmcdonaldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07594633209626059331noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5439168179960787195.post-68722120669006332452018-02-27T01:49:58.717+10:002018-02-27T01:49:58.717+10:00The trick for evaluating the integral of a gaussia...The trick for evaluating the integral of a gaussian function, squaring it and using polar coordinates.Gautam Menonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13380130705745922128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5439168179960787195.post-71952865926609998342018-02-26T23:02:33.239+10:002018-02-26T23:02:33.239+10:00I distinctly remember being wowed by the relations...I distinctly remember being wowed by the relationship between symmetries and conserved quantities in classical mechanics and how this is encoded in Poisson brackets. Furthermore, these brackets turn into commutators in quantum mechanics with the addition of an i*h. I thought that that was amazing. Sleehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09424348412836852071noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5439168179960787195.post-33297919484968972732018-02-26T22:27:29.708+10:002018-02-26T22:27:29.708+10:00I agree with Ross' listing of seeing the ideal...I agree with Ross' listing of seeing the ideal gas equation "drop out" from the classical partition function. Although in my case I didn't see this until I was in graduate school - perhaps this says something about how closely I was paying attention as an undergraduate?Prof. Shollhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01478272124748674635noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5439168179960787195.post-66840996419245041552018-02-26T15:32:32.452+10:002018-02-26T15:32:32.452+10:00Learning how assembler instructions were carried ...Learning how assembler instructions were carried out by CMOS transistors. Bridging the device physics and programming gap was an 'aha!' moment for me.Ted Sandershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15001183656827732917noreply@blogger.com