The post’s description can be roughly translated to “Said I never worked a day, always treat it like a hobby”. Casting work-life boundaries aside, science can be seen as a work of income and a work of art, depending on how passionate one feels about it.
I am currently in queue to join a Master’s program in Chemistry, researching in a group that focuses in fundamental electrochemistry. Working in this field feels to me like racing a Daytona 5001: always daunting, always feeling inexperienced, always mysterious. And that’s one of the reasons my coworkers and classmates always asked:
“Why is that you like electrochemistry so much?”
I’ll be honest: I have no clue. Writing a post like this is a way of looking into my heart and pointing at a certain reason I want to stay. So, open heart surgeries aside,
Electrochemistry is cryptic — in a wide sense, just as thermodynamics is and just how all physical chemistry arrives at being so after several decades of theories. However, any endeavor involving electricity in chemistry is quite rare outside this specific branch, so it is very welcome to work with something half-wet, half-dry.
Electrochemistry is mysterious: what kind of observable science lets you conjecture about the fate of trillions of trillions of atoms confined to picometer-thick surfaces, and produce anything near a feasible response? Again, one could argue in favor of physical chemistry overall – without denying it, there is an allure (to me) when electricity is involved.
You’re very familiar, from an early age, with what heating or pushing things feels like – but electricity? Unless you live with someone working in the field as a technician or engineer, electricity is its own untamed beast. It’s a force you cannot easily control, that travels through air and vacuum2 and requires special equipment to be correctly managed and detected.
Even among early-career scientists, most of the mathematical joust required to understand mechanics to begin with, lacks most of the special tools that explain electromagnetic phenomena. For example, the Dirac distribution and all the frequency-domain jargon, Maxwell’s laws and whatnot.
To me, even if it’s old, electrochemistry is in its infancy. We do not know why steel shows an inductive loop when you record its impedance spectrum. We do not understand why the constant phase element begged to appear almost everywhere in impedance responses.Wwe do not know why nickel and its older brothers, palladium and platinum, are extremely affine to hydrogen and thus almost unbeatable at reducing bonds with it. Us being fascinated with such questions, even after 200 plus years of toying with them
What’s special about electrochemistry, and not physical chemistry overall or electromagnetism in physics, is the apparent bridge I’ve caught between the atomic scale (0.1 to 10 nm) and mesoscale (up to μm) in this branch. What you see is the complex interplay of surface phenomena: diffusion, (electro)sorption, redox reactions, transient EM fields… and the like. When you watch it in the nanometer window, it all makes no sense as a puzzling soup of equations; when you throw caution at the wind and average their behavior over time and space, electrochemical reactions appear as natural as the blue sky, erratic behaviors coalesce into a coherent set of steps, and breaking every bond3 becomes possible.
- I easily become possessed by academic challenges, which is why I’m eager to begin my graduate studies. This doesn’t rule out physical chemistry, again, but that’s why my concentration is in this branch. Someone who loves symphonies may understandably have a preference for a wind or percussive instrument. However, they will without a doubt understand that, for their favorite instrument to sound accurate to the composer’s emotion, it has to be surrounded by other beautiful instruments, completing its flavor without relinquishing anything.
I’d sum up that this is how I see electrochemistry: after seeing the wonders of physics and chemistry, and falling enamoured of the mysteries of electricity, what comes after? What’s the symphony that will sound the loudest, the most mysterious, the most cryptic but yet the sweetest? In a poetic way, I chose electrochemistry because I don’t understand it, and even hoping for the best I’m not sure that many of its puzzles will be solved for how long I am alive. In the same spirit which by I prefer certain music, electrochemistry is so authentic and unique that it allures me to keep researching. That’s why I think it’s so great.
Footnotes
The Daytona 500 is a namesake race lasting five hundred miles in the Daytona International Speedway (Daytona Beach, Florida, USA). The equivalent of a Super Bowl or a World Cup Final for the NASCAR schedule, it has raised many competitors to a legendary status, even after many tries (such as the story of Dale Earnhardt).↩︎
Or through the ether, as the founding scientists would have noted. This footnote serves mostly to satisfy my habit of writing footnotes.↩︎
What I say here is a fair depiction of what electrochemical synthesis, often coupled with electrocatalysts, has accomplished that was banished even from imagination to organic chemistry and thermal catalysis. See the myriad of papers…↩︎