What chemistry teaches us about life, relationships and innovation
The internet was abuzz last week when a NYU chemistry professor was fired after students complained about his grading.
The New York Times?first reported ?that Maitland Jones Jr., a longtime professor of organic chemistry and the author of a well-regarded textbook on the subject, had been dismissed by New York University. That decision followed a petition signed by 82 of his students in his introductory organic chemistry course, who complained that their grades hadn’t reflected the effort they’d put in.
The story sparked debate around several topics:
The story made me reflect on my chemistry studies. I majored in chemistry at Harvard. I spent years as a high school chemistry tutor in New York.
Studying organic chemistry was challenging. It required grit and focus. I remember marathon problem-solving sessions with classmates, stretching deep into the night, using ball-and-stick molecular models to figure out complex chemical reactions.
Today, I look back on organic chemistry as one of the most rewarding experiences of my academic career. I learned to think rigorously and visualize problems three-dimensionally.
Learning chemistry gave me insights that go beyond science. The principles of chemistry shed light on fields ranging from philosophy to psychology, economics and urban planning, even interpersonal relationships.
Chemistry has important lessons for all of us—even if you aren’t a doctor or scientist.
Here are the top things chemistry can teach us about life.
A reaction is only as fast as its rate-limiting step
The rate-limiting step is defined as the slowest step out of all the steps that occur for a given chemical reaction. In other words, a reaction can only proceed as fast as its slowest step, just like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.?
When I was a McKinsey consultant, we used this concept to analyze complex business processes. To increase the efficiency of a system you need to identify the bottleneck and figure out ways to increase speed or throughput.
Imagine?a 4-lane freeway with a traffic bottleneck caused by a lane closure. The rate of traffic flow will be dictated by whatever car is traveling at the lowest speed.
Fireworks are chemical reactions made visible
Why are fireworks different colors? It’s chemistry. Mineral elements provide the color in fireworks. Barium produces bright greens; strontium yields deep reds; copper produces blues; and sodium yields yellow. These metal salts produce intense colors when they are burned.
When an atom is exposed to enough energy, such as the heat created within a firework explosion, an electron can absorb this energy and get promoted to a higher energy level. Shortly after, the electron will fall back down to a lower energy level, releasing energy in the form of light.?The wavelength, or color, of light depends on the energy that is released (i.e. the energy difference between the electron’s two energy levels).?
Life is built around connections
Why is carbon the essential element of life? Carbon is a connector. It has four valence electrons that make it well-suited for forming connections with other atoms, particularly hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur—and, crucially, with other carbon atoms.
Carbon’s versatility enables it to form complex molecules like nucleic acid (DNA) and proteins, the building blocks of life. The molecules they form mark the point at which chemistry and physics give way to biology.
The lesson: You need versatile, easy-to-use building blocks if you want to create complex, dynamic systems. Just as we needed the microchip before we could create the computer or mobile device you’re reading this on.
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Change is usually reversible to some degree
“Chemistry is the science of change.”
-Walter White, Breaking Bad
Chemical reactions aren’t a one-way street. In any chemical reaction, there’s an equilibrium constant, K, that describes the relationship between products and reactants. A large “K” means you’ll have more products, while a small “K” favors the reactants.
Le Chatelier’s principle states that if a dynamic equilibrium is disturbed by changing the conditions, the position of equilibrium shifts to counteract the change to reestablish an equilibrium. If you change the pressure, concentration, or temperature, you can shift a chemical reaction from one side to the other.
Everyday activities like drying clothes can be seen as an example of Le Chatelier's principle. On a windy day, the water vapors are carried away faster. The wind establishes a new equilibrium where the clothes dry more quickly.
The lesson: Nothing is set in stone. You can change things if you’re willing to apply energy to a problem and tackle it from a different angle.
The universe tends toward randomness and disorder
This is the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy or disorder (aka “delta S”) of a system always increases over time. Disorder is the natural state of things.
You can use energy to make a system more ordered temporarily, like when you clean your house. Over time, without a continual application of energy, in the form of cleaning, the house will become dirty and disorganized. Eventually, it will be infested with insects and overrun by nature. Just as the human body is a temporarily organized system that requires energy (food) to sustain life and ultimately returns to nature when we die.
Liquid networks foster growth and evolution
Chemistry teaches you about different phases of matter. A gas can be seen as high-energy chaos; a solid is order and stability. A liquid sits in the middle. Why are liquids important?
The computer scientist?Christopher Langston observed that innovative systems ?have a tendency to gravitate toward the “edge of chaos”—the fertile zone between too much order and too much anarchy.
Steven Johnson, author of?Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation , writes:
“A liquid creates the most favorable environment for a system to explore the adjacent possible. New configurations can emerge through random connections formed between molecules, but the system isn’t so wildly unstable that it instantly destroys its new creations.”
Similarly, the billions of neurons in our brains are densely interconnected, constantly exploring new patterns, but also capable of preserving useful structures for long periods of time.
Other examples of liquid networks can be seen in the trend of open-office setups, work environments designed to encourage spontaneous mingling and chatter. Or a city sidewalk—like water flowing through an organism, sidewalks and other public spaces encourage open-ended collisions and vitality.
The more random collisions, the more innovation
When you increase the pressure and heat of a system, you increase the rate at which chemical reactions occur. More molecules collide and have an opportunity to react with each other.
This principle explains why human innovation blossomed with the rise of cities and other complex systems like today’s global information networks. Johnson writes:
“The increased population density and increased ability to form connections among other people results in a greater number of possible combinations that can be formed within the group. Good ideas can more easily find their way into other brains and take root there. New forms of collaboration become possible.”
Chemistry teaches us that innovative experiments help us explore the “adjacent possible.” They bring together a wide and diverse sample of spare parts and encourage novel ways of recombining those parts:
“The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.”
Strategic Marketer | Innovation & Growth Strategist | Problem Solver
2 年Enjoyed this, as much as I enjoyed organic chemistry - a lot! Another similarity between people and organic compounds is that just like reactions occur in their environment (pH, temperature, pressure etc.) so also people work together well in the right environment. To produce magic (or a reaction) one needs to understand both the people and their environment.