SPECTROSCOPISTAS!!!!!!

Data! Data! I've got DATA!


If you wander around the parts of this ( the chemistry ) building that are devoted to organic chemistry you get to see some strange and wonderful things. Every room is packed with gleaming walls covered in labyrinths of round-bottomed glass flasks and tubing. At first you think "Oh how pretty. How cool! How SCIENTIFIC." Then you see the disheveled and slightly demented graduate students spend 4 years putting in 25 brightly colored ingredients and pulling out (with huge grins stapled to their pale, awful skulls) a white powder. I swear to god, that's all those wierdos make: white powder. I don't understand it, I walk by rooms with round-bottomed flasks the size of beach balls full of spinning purple liquids and all they ever get is white powder. Whatever. The point here actually concerns the aforementioned purple beachball.


That stuff is deadly. That stuff is explosive. That stuff is flammable. That stuff is tended by sleep-deprived social retards. After realizing all that, you look around and think to yourself "Oh... how...oh... my god." And then you start to understand why all those firemen break into a sweat and move down the bar away from you when they hear you're a chemist. Pansies.


At any rate, we don't have any of that crap here in the Hamers group. We DO have a few million dollars of topflight surface analytical equipment that look like props for Brazil. Some of which are homebuilt! Which basically means that a Hamers group member is far more likely to be able to fix your VCR than one of the organic chemists. However, VCR repair skills don't really get you any props in this hood so we're sort of mocked as chemical dilletantes. " You guys look at chemicals, you don't use them" that kind of thing. (I, by the way, am exempt from this the second they look into my terrifying, stained, inorganic synthesis hood...the stains glow under a black light...it's freakin' awesome...and they're poisonous) So we here in the Hamers group try to look for opportunities to show the danger in our lives wherever we can. One fine example is shown above.

This machine on of our Infrared Spectrometers. The basic idea here is that you fire infrared light through a sample and the chemicals in that sample absorb the light at specific wavelengths. So if you scan over a large spectrum, you can measure the amount of light that gets absorbed at various wavelengths and get a chemical fingerprint. It's fast. It's useful. It's sensitive. But there's a problem. Since you're basically looking at how these things react with heat, you need to cool down the detector. In comes the liquid nitrogen. You have to pour, literally pour, liquid nitrogen into this machine from a big fancy thermos called a Dewar. This is fine really, but when the machine fills up, it unexpectedly fountains. This is what's happening here. That's not water. It's Nitrogen at -321 degrees fahrenheit. Which is really, really cold. If this stuff hits your skin it usually rolls off. If it hits your eye, say while it geysers out of the machine as you're leaning over to pour the stuff in from your thermos, then your eyeball freezes and you start steeling yourself for pirate jokes. Luckily, we have protective wear and the machine gives off a telltale noise before spewing liquid blindness everywhere. But still, it's pretty hardcore. Right? And we can fix your VCR.

Anyway, I love this machine. While jogging I had an epiphany moment that led me to a series of experiments based on using this machine. I was coming back from cooling down the machine when I spoke to you Dad and Chris. When I went back I did some badass experiments and produced this graph. If you look in the handy yellow(?) rectangle, you see a series of peaks. The second from the top has a little peak next to the big one. The top graph is the same sample after some heating and the little peak has disappeared. This may not mean much but they're PEAKS. Chemists love Peaks like Satan loves Sinners. We see peaks and entire reams of meaning form in our heads. In this case, the peaks are telling me that I can't get my system to do what I want it to because the chemicals I have stuck to my nanocrystals are flying off when they're heating. WHICH EXPLAINS EVERYTHING!!!!!!! And leads me to some really groovy experiments to design a new ligand. One that I can't buy. One that I'll have to make. Let's hear those organic chemists laughing now.
Anyway, the boss is psyched and says this is the nucleus of a paper (music to my paper deprived ears) and that gives me hope that I may one day be an accredited scientist.
So that's my world. How are you guys doing?