Today's seminar is simply wonderful. Prof. Green is really a humorous presenter and he never failed to make everyone laugh. He started off by saying that it's actually quite silly for most industrial people to envision a future world making use of Hydrogen as the fuel since it is difficult to store it and dangerous to use it. You'll need a very thick metal container to store a few litres of liquid Hydrogen at 20K! Imagine using it as a fuel in the car, going to the "hydrogen" station to "pump" hydrogen; it's simply impractial. A better way will be to create hydrocarbon from cheap starting material like Hydrogen and Carbon Monoxide (both can be obtained from the Water Gas Shift reaction. This process is known as Fischer Tropsch Catalysis. Prof. Green's Group was the first to make a homogenous Fischer Tropsch catalyst and he basically talked about the whole process of successes and failures in the seminar.
What is most interesting is the thing he mentioned to us before he ended the seminar. He talked about this new reaction known as Alkane Metathesis! Alkene (Olefin) Metathesis is well-known to the chemistry readers but hey, now he's talking about Alkane Metathesis - synthesizing a higher alkane from 2 lower alkanes in a controlled manner. There are 2 person currently working on it - Basset JM and Coperat F. I'm searching for some information on it now. :p It's a pretty exciting development in the area of organometallic chemistry.
An interesting incident happened after the seminar. Alice and I wanted to take photos outside the chemistry department (with the words and logo) and she approached a friendly lady to help us take. We later realized that she is actually a professor in the department. o_O Later on, Alice said something which made me pretty unhappy. I was telling her that I might be attending a seminar on 12th Oct since it's on organic synthesis and it happens to be before the Organic structural elucidation mid-term. She remarked that she can't be as relaxed as me in going for seminars as and when I like as since I'm an exchange student, I just have to pass a module. I was a little pissed as I don't think I am any less hardworking than in NUS. Not that I'm very hardworking back in Singapore but it's jsut that I'm as relaxed back then. I'm actually pretty slack back in NUS and I am actually working slightly harder here. Afterall I have to "maintain" NUS's world ranking of 18; can you imagine a student from a ranked 18th in the world scoring just an average score? What will people think of NUS? What is most important is that I have to prove myself that when I go to another university, I'll be as good as I am in chemistry (organic in particular) as in NUS. So what if I'm one of the top in Organic in NUS and end up medicore in HK? One of my aim of going for student exchange is to see whether I am really that good in organic chemistry (as what most of my peers and friends in NUS think). Other people's perception is one thing; I want to see for myself whether I am really that good. Readers who understand me will know that I'm not being competitive here; I just wanna experience the world of chemistry out there and see whether I am up to the challenge.
Had 2 tests earlier on in the day. The Material Science test was kinda trash; at least to me, it's rather easy. If I'm not able to get full marks, it'll only mean that I'm sloppy in my written answers. The test on Structural Elucidation in Organic Chemistry was even more crappy. Got 4 questions wrong and hence 80% of the marks. Those 4 questions, 2 careless, one which I think no one gets it right and another one which is debatable. The question which I think most people got it wrong is "How many times Nobel prizes were given to works on NMR? I picked "3" but the answer is "4" o_O. I don't think I can even answer how many times were Nobel Prizes given to Organic Chemistry.
Looking forward to go hiking this weekend and I'll be heading for another 2 seminars next week - one at Univeristy of HK and another one at the Chinese University of HK. I'll be reading a lot in the mean time; should be targeting at least 100 pages and 3 journal articles. I'm aiming to complete reading the classic article on MOT by Hoffmann as well; then I'll go and bug Prof. Wu again. :p
What is most interesting is the thing he mentioned to us before he ended the seminar. He talked about this new reaction known as Alkane Metathesis! Alkene (Olefin) Metathesis is well-known to the chemistry readers but hey, now he's talking about Alkane Metathesis - synthesizing a higher alkane from 2 lower alkanes in a controlled manner. There are 2 person currently working on it - Basset JM and Coperat F. I'm searching for some information on it now. :p It's a pretty exciting development in the area of organometallic chemistry.
An interesting incident happened after the seminar. Alice and I wanted to take photos outside the chemistry department (with the words and logo) and she approached a friendly lady to help us take. We later realized that she is actually a professor in the department. o_O Later on, Alice said something which made me pretty unhappy. I was telling her that I might be attending a seminar on 12th Oct since it's on organic synthesis and it happens to be before the Organic structural elucidation mid-term. She remarked that she can't be as relaxed as me in going for seminars as and when I like as since I'm an exchange student, I just have to pass a module. I was a little pissed as I don't think I am any less hardworking than in NUS. Not that I'm very hardworking back in Singapore but it's jsut that I'm as relaxed back then. I'm actually pretty slack back in NUS and I am actually working slightly harder here. Afterall I have to "maintain" NUS's world ranking of 18; can you imagine a student from a ranked 18th in the world scoring just an average score? What will people think of NUS? What is most important is that I have to prove myself that when I go to another university, I'll be as good as I am in chemistry (organic in particular) as in NUS. So what if I'm one of the top in Organic in NUS and end up medicore in HK? One of my aim of going for student exchange is to see whether I am really that good in organic chemistry (as what most of my peers and friends in NUS think). Other people's perception is one thing; I want to see for myself whether I am really that good. Readers who understand me will know that I'm not being competitive here; I just wanna experience the world of chemistry out there and see whether I am up to the challenge.
Had 2 tests earlier on in the day. The Material Science test was kinda trash; at least to me, it's rather easy. If I'm not able to get full marks, it'll only mean that I'm sloppy in my written answers. The test on Structural Elucidation in Organic Chemistry was even more crappy. Got 4 questions wrong and hence 80% of the marks. Those 4 questions, 2 careless, one which I think no one gets it right and another one which is debatable. The question which I think most people got it wrong is "How many times Nobel prizes were given to works on NMR? I picked "3" but the answer is "4" o_O. I don't think I can even answer how many times were Nobel Prizes given to Organic Chemistry.
Looking forward to go hiking this weekend and I'll be heading for another 2 seminars next week - one at Univeristy of HK and another one at the Chinese University of HK. I'll be reading a lot in the mean time; should be targeting at least 100 pages and 3 journal articles. I'm aiming to complete reading the classic article on MOT by Hoffmann as well; then I'll go and bug Prof. Wu again. :p
posted by CS at
9:29 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home