The road not taken

Our tutor considers past alternatives.

One of our tutor’s regular students is in an advanced Chemistry program, a product of her particular High School that does not strictly follow the national AP Chemistry curriculum.  To some degree this is welcome, as a break from routine and a chance to deal with somewhat higher-level material.  It is also a challenge.

The AP Chemistry syllabus includes some organic chemistry, that peculiar branch that includes fossil fuels from the ground as well as the building blocks of life.  Mostly (our tutor thinks) it’s there for the system of nomenclature, the systematic but complicated way of naming molecules, just another topic to test students on.  There’s little actually done with the reactions and the actual chemistry, which he found fascinating in his youth.  His unusual student has sent him back to his books, to look at things he hasn’t dealt with in years.  He hasn’t even named an aldehyde in longer than he can remember, much less studied its behavior.

But Organic was his favorite course in High School (it was a very unusual High School), and one of his favorites as an undergraduate.  Indeed, he did a research project that relied on organic chemicals, though there was some physics involved.  It was by no means certain that, when he went on to grad school, he would be found among magnetic flux integrals instead of benzine rings.  But that was what happened.

Could he have been a chemist?  Two of his close friends went that way, though one is now more accurately described as a software engineer.  There was the attraction of a system of knowledge, reaction pathways requiring some ingenuity but leading to magnificent results.  In theory.  He now realizes that he was not great as a laboratory chemist, and might best have been restricted to the chalkboard.  And the synthesis of an obscure molecule of no known use, while a triumph of its kind, does not attract him now (this is an unfair comment, and no doubt shows his unfamiliarity with real research chemistry).

To us, late at evening over a glass of wine, it raises the question of what each of us might otherwise have done.  Though we have little background in biology, if we’d gone into genetics there was much we might have accomplished, considering what has been done in the past years.  Recently we’ve noticed how inadequate translations from the Classical Greek can be; maybe one of us should have dived into the ancient tongues.  There’s no telling where a nudge that didn’t happen might have sent one of us onto an interesting path.

Well, that is all speculation.  Our tutor is reminding himself about organic chemistry; our astronomer is examining popular science books from the 1950s; and others of us are discussing the science of science fiction.