When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a scientist. More specifically, I wanted to be the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. (There was just something about Ginger...) I took all of the science that we had at dear old McLish High School, which wasn’t all that much. There was biology and chemistry, and that was it. The chemistry I had as a senior was the last chemistry course I ever had.
The only experiment I remember from that was one in which we put a piece of aluminum in a test tube that had nitric acid in it. Or we might’ve put nitric acid in a test tube that had aluminum in it. I don’t remember. What I do remember is that nitric acid and aluminum don’t get along. There was a lot of bubbling and heat produced. And I got some nitric acid on my fingers and it turned my skin yellow, but I eventually got over that.
I took some physics in college and a little biology, but that was it. The rest was math. Little did I know I would in the 47th year of my life I would be called upon to live among the chemists as their acting chairman.
It’s been fun.
I know that you are to call no man lucky until you know the manner of his death, such as total body submersion in a bathtub full of acid, but I’ve been enjoying myself. Mathematicians have a rather peculiar idea of fun, you understand, but I’ve got to say that it has been fun.
The first half of the year was dominated by my learning about lab safety. Being a mathematician, the most dangerous thing that can happen to me is a paper cut, or, if things get really wild, getting poked with a pencil. Chemists, by way of contrast, deal with danger on a daily basis. I was briefed on this by Pittsburg State’s environmental officer, aka Jeff, the Safety Guy. He had me read an article about a young lady who’d been involved in a laboratory accident at a university on the West Coast. A substance she spilled on herself caused flesh to pull away from bone. It took her weeks to die.
It had the same effect on me that the driver’s education film “Blood on the Road” did. It made an impression.
If you hear a student complain because they were thrown out of a chemistry lab for being inappropriately dressed, you can blame me.
Another difference between math and chemistry is that chemists use up more stuff. In math, it is mainly — and I know I am being repetitive — pencils and paper. They use up rubber gloves, bottles of gas and chemicals by the jug full. In addition, once they use the chemicals, many times we have to pay to have them disposed of in a green, sustainable fashion.
In math, wad up the paper, put it in the basket, and that’s it.
The other day in a Chemistry Department meeting, we began the discussion of buying periodic tables of the elements for a couple of classrooms. For those of you who don’t know, the periodic table of elements is a list of all of the chemical elements. Chemistry, of course, consists of putting together these elements in various ways to get all sorts of neat stuff. It makes sense that you would want one of these tables in a chemistry classroom.
In the course of the discussion, it was mentioned that perhaps we should hold off on buying any such charts right now because element 118 was recently created by some physicists who slammed some atoms together. There is, as it turns out, a process for naming these new elements and the name hasn’t been decided on yet, so any chart we bought now would be out of date almost immediately.
This is something else we don’t run into in math. We don’t have to worry about anybody coming up with a new number and not knowing the name of it.
This scientist stuff is complicated, but I am just a visitor in the department. Gilligan and the Captain took the professor and the rest on a three-hour tour, and my time with the chemists is temporary too. While it’s not been a shipwreck, living my dream as a scientist has been an adventure.
Bobby Winters is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Mathematics, and Acting Chair of the Department of Chemistry at Pittsburg State University.
PITTSBURG —
