I'm thinking of updating my three minute thesis talk to make roughly the point I make here.
I'm trying to work out how to justify my research. So I've heard that there are two general ways to do this. The first is by appealing to to the wonder factor: Aren't you just dying to know the answer to this question? This is how you justify the Large Hadron Collider or space expeditions. These experiments can tell us about how the universe came to be or what the origin of life is. The second option is to appeal to practical applications: We are looking for a treatment for cancer or unlimited clean energy.
These are certainly worthy topics of study, but it seems to me that there are a third class of research topics that can fall through the gap between these two justifications. They are questions that are slightly obscure and seemingly boring. But which also can not be justified by any single direct and practical application.
A nice example of this is the Schrödinger equation. Schrödinger discovered this equation while trying to discover a mathematical model that would explain the light emission of hydrogen gas. Now this sounds like an obscure, boring and not very useful topic to study. But Schrödinger's equation has turned out to be one of the most important and useful scientific equations of all time. It describes the properties of the periodic table with amazing accuracy, explaining the vast majority of the physical world with just a few symbols strung together.
It is obviously much harder to justify this kind of research, but I think it is just as, maybe even more important than the other two kinds. Wonder inducing research is certainly very nice to read about but it is very limited in terms of actual implications for our lives. Research into direct applications is fundamentally limited in usefulness as it tends to be so specific that often the results are not generalisable for any other applications.
Often the answers that are most useful are to questions about the simplest possible systems. How do we describe hydrogen, the simplest possible atom? How do we describe a ball flying through empty space. What is the link between electricity and magnetism? These questions aren't very exciting and it's not obvious what use the answers are. And yet these answers, once they were discovered, changed the world more profoundly then anyone could have imagined.
I want to work on questions like this. I think "What is the interaction of any two molecules in water?" is one of them, if we had an answer to it I think there would be massive implications for vast areas of science. But few people seem interested in this question. I had never even heard of it until I started my PhD. Popular science articles seem to focus almost exclusively on research that fits into one of the two justifications I mention above.
So I find it difficult to work out how to sell my research. On the one hand it's kind of a mundane topic, and on the other hand there's no direct applications I can point to. All I really have is a kind of long and involved argument about why answering questions about very simple physical systems is really important, which doesn't seem especially suited to the three minute thesis format.
Saturday, 30 August 2014
Solvation Energy
This frustrates me a lot.
So the logical next step is to direct a vast amount of effort into understanding this problem. This lack of understanding should be like a sputnik moment. It is criminal we have no idea how the simplest possible case of something so incredibly important works.
Instead you hear things quite frequently, like there is no funding in this kind of totally fundamental research. You have to tie your grant proposals to direct applications to get funding. But the exact point of government funded research is to build this fundamental science, which doesn't have direct applications but may one day. How does the LHC get funded to discover something of no practical importance? When there are problems that are so fundamentally crucial and so neglected.
Instead you have vast amounts of money thrown at biomedical research trying to discover new drugs and understand biology when the fundamental underlying mechanisms aren't fully understood. It costs billions to develop a drug, normally by an incredibly tedious and costly experimental trial and error. This is analogous to trying to land a man on the moon, without Newton's theory of gravity, or without programs that can predict orbits. You might eventually hit the moon by trial and error or extrapolating from past patterns. But a lot of people are going to die in the process.
I would really love to continue working on this problem and ones like it. Both because of how interesting they are and because I know how important they are. And it is so disheartening to hear that I may not be able to. It would be OK however, if it were because there are too many competent and smart people who will do a better job than me. I would happily find a different career if I knew this problem were in good hands. But instead the reason I can't work on this problem is that there's not enough funding. That is so infuriating, especially considering the costs of theoretical work are so cheap. Just an academic salary and some computing power, are all you need. As well as the fact that vast amounts of money is poured down the drain doing experiments that would become redundant if we had good theoretical models of molecular interactions in water.
It's from an old post of Ashutosh Jogalekar at Curious Wavefunction. He's is talking about what we need to be able to design drugs rationally i.e., using computers. The key quote is:
The basic science is also going to involve the accurate experimental determination of solvation energies. Such measurements are typically considered too mundane and basic to be funded. And yet, as the authors make clear in the paragraph quoted at the beginning, it's only such measurements that are going to aid the calculation of aqueous solvation energies. And these calculations are going to be ultimately key to calculating drug-protein interactions. After all, if you cannot even get the solvation energy right...Once you start learning about chemical modelling you realise how incredibly important it is to be able to calculate the interaction of molecules in water. A vast amount of amazingly important chemistry happens in water. Including all of life. If you can't understand the interaction of molecules in water properly then you have no chance of understanding biology comprehensively. The second thing you realise is that we have no idea how to do this. When you look at the simplest possible cases, a sodium ion interacting with a chloride ion in water. We have no models that can satisfactorily reproduce this interaction.
So the logical next step is to direct a vast amount of effort into understanding this problem. This lack of understanding should be like a sputnik moment. It is criminal we have no idea how the simplest possible case of something so incredibly important works.
Instead you hear things quite frequently, like there is no funding in this kind of totally fundamental research. You have to tie your grant proposals to direct applications to get funding. But the exact point of government funded research is to build this fundamental science, which doesn't have direct applications but may one day. How does the LHC get funded to discover something of no practical importance? When there are problems that are so fundamentally crucial and so neglected.
Instead you have vast amounts of money thrown at biomedical research trying to discover new drugs and understand biology when the fundamental underlying mechanisms aren't fully understood. It costs billions to develop a drug, normally by an incredibly tedious and costly experimental trial and error. This is analogous to trying to land a man on the moon, without Newton's theory of gravity, or without programs that can predict orbits. You might eventually hit the moon by trial and error or extrapolating from past patterns. But a lot of people are going to die in the process.
I would really love to continue working on this problem and ones like it. Both because of how interesting they are and because I know how important they are. And it is so disheartening to hear that I may not be able to. It would be OK however, if it were because there are too many competent and smart people who will do a better job than me. I would happily find a different career if I knew this problem were in good hands. But instead the reason I can't work on this problem is that there's not enough funding. That is so infuriating, especially considering the costs of theoretical work are so cheap. Just an academic salary and some computing power, are all you need. As well as the fact that vast amounts of money is poured down the drain doing experiments that would become redundant if we had good theoretical models of molecular interactions in water.
Papers
So over the past year or so I've had some papers published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B, on the solvation properties of ions. I thought I would explain in simple language what I've done and why I think it's important.
They can be found at here, here and here. I might discuss each paper in its own post but first I thought I'd just explain some background concepts.
The basic idea is that when you dissolve salt in water there is some energy change, normally the ions like to go into water and so energy is released partly in the form of heat. It's just like how a ball will naturally roll down a hill and release some energy in the form of motion, which then turns into heat.
Roughly speaking this is why it takes so much energy to desalinate water, it costs energy to take ions out of pure water as they like to be there.
In technical terms we say that the salt dissolving has a negative free energy change. Because energy is conserved there must be a positive energy increase somewhere else which is why we get our heat released. There have even been attempts to harness this energy, where fresh water rivers mix with the very salty sea.
The calculation of free energies is a centrally important problem in Physical Chemistry. It is normally referred to with the letter G. Ashutosh Jogalekar at Curious Wavefunction does a great job of explaining in a more general context what is is and why it's important.
Here's a nice video of the process of water dissolving salt. The energy change between the start and end of that process is what I'm trying to calculate.
They can be found at here, here and here. I might discuss each paper in its own post but first I thought I'd just explain some background concepts.
The basic idea is that when you dissolve salt in water there is some energy change, normally the ions like to go into water and so energy is released partly in the form of heat. It's just like how a ball will naturally roll down a hill and release some energy in the form of motion, which then turns into heat.
Roughly speaking this is why it takes so much energy to desalinate water, it costs energy to take ions out of pure water as they like to be there.
In technical terms we say that the salt dissolving has a negative free energy change. Because energy is conserved there must be a positive energy increase somewhere else which is why we get our heat released. There have even been attempts to harness this energy, where fresh water rivers mix with the very salty sea.
The calculation of free energies is a centrally important problem in Physical Chemistry. It is normally referred to with the letter G. Ashutosh Jogalekar at Curious Wavefunction does a great job of explaining in a more general context what is is and why it's important.
Here's a nice video of the process of water dissolving salt. The energy change between the start and end of that process is what I'm trying to calculate.
Three Minute Thesis
I'm in the ANU finals for the three minute thesis competition. I thought I'd post the text here:
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