Dirty beakers

Science is a glorious endeavor, but most of my journeys into that realm of wonder begin in the same place: washing dishes. Now, I could go off into a rant right here about the fact that I’m having to wash someone else’s dishes, and how messy the lab can be at times, especially when people spill powders and don’t clean them up, or leave mortars and pestles laying about, covered in powder, with bits of weighing paper and measuring boats casually strewn about, unlabeled solutions, puddles of mysterious goo, books, trash, spatulas, broken glass, and other random things, all cluttering the work bench, but I’m not going to do that here, one, because that type of rant has no place in this article, and two, because I fear it would lead to one really long run-on sentence, and I, for one, am a big fan of grammatically correct writing, even if I sometimes don’t actually engage in the practice. So I’m not going to talk about having to clean up after other grad students, instead, I’m just going to blame it on the occasional undergrad that passes through and get back to the point.

Most of my journeys into the scientific realm of wonder begin in the same place: washing dishes. So, when I found myself once again standing at the sink cleaning beakers to run a set of reactions, I was not at all surprised. If you’ve washed dishes before, you know that sometimes it can be quite a chore. Things get baked into a dish, the dish gets set aside for a few days, and whatever bit of food you had has mysteriously turned into some kind of super-substance that seems to be stronger than steel. You scrub and scrub at it, soak it in soapy water, break out the baking soda, the vinegar, the sander, a drill, and finally, finally! those bits of food start to come loose. The wife comes in and rolls her eyes and you’re like, “What? I’m doing the dishes?!”

It’s like that in the lab sometimes except multiplied by a factor of about 100. Crazy sticky compounds get baked into the glassware at crazy sticky temperatures. Sticky temperatures? Yeah. Because when you’re dealing with the temperatures we deal with, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ just aren’t descriptive enough. And so, after the undergrad takes his sample out of the beaker or crucible or whatever, they set that beaker or crucible by the sink, and that’s where I go the next day to start my experiment.

So there I am, scrubbing and scrubbing on a beaker but there’s one spot that won’t come off. I break out the acetone, the MEK, the high-grit sand paper, but nothing seems to have any effect. Luckily, as I’m standing there debating whether or not I should try some fuming nitric acid, I happen to notice that this particular spot is actually on the outside of the beaker. I’ve just spent the last ten minutes scrubbing the inside of this beaker (the glass is now thin in a few places), and all the while, the spot was on the outside. I look around to make sure nobody had seen this whole spectacle transpire, and resume my work like nothing had happened.

On the spiritual path we are very concerned with the inner world. We are interested in inner process like purification and transformation and meditation and contemplation, and we know that “what’s on the inside counts,” so cleaning the inside is both practical and necessary. In the lab, contamination can have disastrous results on an experiment, while what’s on the outside of your reaction vessel is unimportant. Nonetheless, when it’s there, that spot on the outside is all we can see. A dirty kitchen, a messy bedroom, a looming deadline, an unfinished task – have you ever tried to meditate when all these things are present? It’s difficult. So sometimes getting our outer world in order is the most spiritual thing we can do. It completes those nagging things in our minds so that we can be free of them and get back to what matters. Once the outer world is taken care of, and the distractions are gone, we are finally able to focus, to gaze into the soul and see clearly what’s there.

Life is messy, and there are things that just need to be done. Monks locked away in their monasteries still have their chores, and they do them because it’s necessary, it’s a part of life.

We know that the world is full of distractions, so wash the dishes, feed the dog, take a shower. Let’s take care of the outer world, free ourselves, and continue the journey within.

Ostwald ripening: no free enlightenment

I sometimes find myself on a mountaintop, awakened and transformed, but inevitably, the moment fades, and the normal world returns. Let’s go to the lab and find out why.

Ostwald ripening is the tendency of small particles to become big particles. It can get a bit more complicated than that when you start looking at the mechanics behind particle growth, but ultimately, nanoparticles get together and become bigger particles. In the world of catalysts, Ostwald ripening is bane. This is because the effectiveness of catalysts depends on particle size. The atoms on the surface of a catalyst are the high-energy, highly active atoms, whereas the interior ‘bulk’ atoms don’t get involved in the catalytic reaction. Basically, all the action takes place on the surface.

Ostwald ripening happens because Nature wants to minimize the energy of a system. There’s less energy in the system if all of those small, highly active particles stick together and become one big, bulky unreactive chunk. And so, thermodynamics and various natural laws get together, and atom by atom, bits of small particle diffuse into solution and become part of the bigger particle. This process continues until the energy of the system has reached a minimum.

In order to combat Ostwald ripening, scientists have to come up with all kinds of tricks to keep their nanoparticles the desired size. Long term, this can be accomplished by attaching ligands to each particle, basically putting long bumper-arms on the particle to keep it from getting anywhere close to another particle. Or you can isolate and suspend your particle in some sort of substrate to try and keep them from moving around so much. The final method to maintain these high-energy particles and prevent them from reverting to a bulk state is to continuously put energy into the system. In the lab, this would mean keeping your solution of nanoparticles at some high, constant temperature.

Just as Ostwald ripening is the natural order of the physical world, it applies to the spiritual world as well. As we seek to walk spiritual paths leading to enlightenment, nirvana, or whatever high-energy state you want to call it, again, Nature’s tendency is to minimize the energy of the system, for things to wind down to a lower energy state. For us to maintain our catalytic nature, our ability to cause change in the world or in our lives, we must find tricks to prevent us from reverting back to our bulky, unreactive nature. We can isolate ourselves in a monastery to try and keep those minimizing natural forces at bay, but if we want to stay in this world and be a part of this world, the only option left is to put energy into our system. Like a beaker of nanoparticles, we must constantly apply heat and energy to ourselves to remain in a higher state. A constant application of consciousness, awareness, and self-remembering is required to keep us vividly alive. As soon as we stop, nature kicks in and we begin winding down.

Luckily, these are reversible processes. We may fall asleep and lose our catalytic capacity to ‘do’, but as soon as we wake up, as soon as we start pumping energy back into our systems, there we are again. Regeneration. Small, yet incredibly powerful catalysts capable of causing and being wonders in this world.

Windmill arms

For those of you that don’t know me, I’m a new dad. As such, one of my new favorite pastimes is baby watching. It’s better than television, much more engaging, and there are no commercial interruptions. (Granted, there are messy diaper interruptions, but we won’t go there in this post…) Anyways, I’ve been watching my daughter and noticing all the unusual things she does.

‘Unusual’ probably isn’t the best word. Her movements and cries and laughs and everything she does is really anything but unusual. It’s all perfectly natural, perfectly graceful, and perfectly free. I have the rare pleasure of getting to see a human being without any kind of programming. She isn’t concerned about looking good, looking silly, or even being practical. She just moves. Her arms go up and down and round and round like little windmills. She kicks and rolls and squirms every which way, however she wants. She does whatever feels good in the moment.

So I watch her, and then I look at myself. She moves in 360 beautiful degrees, whereas I only use about 30. With all of our joints and muscles and ligaments, we are capable of a wide range of motion, but the truth is, we don’t use it. Our bodies are mechanical marvels and we regularly use maybe 5 or 10% of our range of motion. How often do we put our arms above our heads? Maybe when we’re reaching for something or waving to someone far away? Instead, we keep our arms close beside us. We aren’t big with our movements. Those few of us that are big and expressive with their bodies are crazy people, weird people, or… kids.  Kids are much more comfortable in their bodies. They move for the sake of movement. They get their whole body involved when they do something. They skip rather than walk, they spread their arms like they’re flying when they run, and they are windmills rather than… posts? We train our kids to be posts, to be rigid and formal and serious, rather than fluid or, god forbid, whimsical and free.

Stretching, yoga, tai-chi… we love the way these things feel because they remind us how to move. They remind us that we can move. Our bodies are wonderful tools of self-expression, capable of so much more than sitting, walking, and laying down. They are works of art, waiting to be explored.

So let’s get in touch with our bodies and feel how good it is to move. Let’s be free, be weird… be windmills.