This post will be even more rambley and less on topic than my normal posts, so beware. I wouldn’t go as far as to advise you to not read it, but I will say that for the sort of person I imagine as my target audience, I expect it to be much less interesting than my normal posts.
This is nominally a chemistry blog, but of the posts I’ve written so far, most of them are not really about chemistry. I think there are a few reasons for this. I’ve deliberately started with the most fundamental stuff, because I expect future posts that are actually about chemistry to build on that. This is strongest in Start at the Very Beginning, which is explicitly about laying the foundations in physics that I’ll need to make the chemistry bits out of. I have a tendency, as you may have noticed, to go progressively deeper into the theories underlying the theories I’m thinking about, this tendency only being stopped when I run into the wall of trying to understand quantum field theory. I somewhat get it, but not properly. I’m blaming the fact that I’m too much of a mathematician and the failure of the physicists to develop a mathematically consistent complete theory bothers me too much for me to focus on the bits which do work fine as excellent approximations (my undergraduate dissertation was on how a certain very restricted case of the path integral could be made actually rigorous). Even the dirac delta function, which I acknowledge is very useful, bothers me. All this is true, but there’s also the possible less charitable explanation that I’m just not clever or hard-working enough to get it. This need to explain the basics before anyone can understand what comes after is also behind Scale and Parameters to some extent.
The second reason is that this sort of stuff, which I can work out in my head and on paper rather than needing computer simulations, is just easier, so I might as well go for the low-hanging fruit. It’s also more significant. The general property of scale invariance is one of the most important things that makes 4D chemistry distinct, and the properties of individual elements are often just specific instances of that.
The two-and-a-halfth reason, related to the second, is that I’m not very confident in the results of my simulations yet, and I want to reach something I can actually be sure is correct before presenting it to the world as facts. I’m pretty sure the broad strokes are correct, but a lot of the broad strokes is the same stuff I’ve already covered in more abstract ways anyway. I don’t have the advantage that actual computational chemistry researchers have of comparing their results to reality. I have done some 3D simulations precisely to be able to do this, but even when that works I still need to be able to trust that the same things generalise to 4D too.
The three-and-a-halfth reason I suppose is simply that it’s still early and I haven’t written much yet. I will cover the more chemistry-ey topics of various compounds and crystals and reactions and colours and so on in due course. That being very slowly, evidently, because I do not have the motivation to do this sort of research very often.
I feel a bit odd about writing here because I don’t even know if I have any actual readers at all. I started this blog because I had been asked a few times whether there was anywhere to read more about my 4D chemistry project, but that hasn’t actually happened since I started it. I’m sure there must be some way to get WordPress to track hits, but I haven’t found it yet. I don’t want to use Google Analytics because it feels ridiculous to have to use cookies just to track hits. I get annoyed at there being cookie popups on every website nowadays so now that I have my own website I’m trying to avoid using them frivolously when there’s no good reason a user would want them. For all I know WordPress does it automatically anyway. I should probably check that. I could just look at the server logs but that’s a pain and it doesn’t distinguish between genuine people and bot traffic. Probably that’s what GA is for. I have had a few comments, but all of them were either obviously spam or both plausible spam (not actually referring to anything specific in the post they responded to) and sufficiently uninformative that I didn’t much mind removing them anyway.
I know this is conventional wisdom but I still get surprised the extent to which actually trying to write out my thoughts and explain them to someone else (even if, as I said, I’m not sure that person actually exists) helps clarify them in my own mind. I have a strong tendency to prefer working things out in my head rather than on paper, to the extent I would often get told off in school for not showing my working. I guess my teachers were kind of right. Who’d have thought it?
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