SALKing in Chemistry

Charmaine’s mom is a lawyer. And she wants you to sue the restaurant that Lucille’s mom runs. What? Is this just a coincidence? That doesn’t seem possible, but the alternative… you don’t even know what the alternative is. These thoughts occupy your head through economics in the morning, and before you know it, you’re walking into chemistry in the afternoon. You groan as you feel your head pulsing. You definitely didn’t get enough sleep.

“You doing alright?” Beatrice asks, giving you a concerned look as you slide into the seat next to her. “You’re always there when I’m having an off day, so I thought I’d ask.”

“I’m fine, just had a weird morning is all,” you say. You pause, wondering if you should say more. “You know how I was out sick at the beginning of the semester? My dad wants to sue the restaurant that gave me food poisoning. I’m not so sure.”

“That’s a tough spot to be in,” Beatrice says, giving you a sympathetic look. “They probably didn’t mean it, right?”

“Yeah, that’s what I think,” you say, deciding to hold your tongue on the rest of it. Gossip can spread like wildfire, and you don’t want people whispering behind your back before you’ve even come to a decision. “So I’m still thinking it over.”

Class starts then, with Professor Styles calling everyone to attention. She begins lecturing on the material, continuing on with the material from last class. You take diligent notes, now that the lecture has moved on to fully new material that you’d never seen or heard of prior to starting college. But you’re still really tired, so although you do your best to follow everything going on at the blackboard, you feel sympathy for your classmates scrunching up their faces in confusion at the finer points of the lecture. This stuff about surface diffusion and surface kinetics is hard, and you glance at Beatrice, wondering how she’s doing. She’s busy taking very detailed notes, the diagrams sketched in her notebook full of annotations.

“Okay, that’s enough theory and math. I’m sure you’re tired of seeing equations on the board,” Professor Styles says about halfway through the class. “Let’s look at a practical example. Well, at least, my kind of practical.”

She hits a couple of buttons at the lecture desk, and the projector screen lowers. Two gifs flash up on the screen. Both of them are shaded blobs that begin to morph following the processes that your professor just spent the last half hour lecturing about.

“The green shape on the left shows surface diffusion, while the blue shape on the right shows surface attachment limited kinetics. To spoil the ending somewhat, the Wulff shape here is a regular octagon. Now, the million dollar question is, must the green and blue shape be topologically equivalent?”

There’s silence in the classroom as everyone ponders the question (or tries to figure out what the prof’s even asking). You think about it, too, clueless about the solution. Nobody’s spoken a word or raised a hand. The silence in the room hangs heavy. Professor Styles looks at the class expectantly. What could the answer be? And why are you so tired? You stifle a yawn, raising your hand to cover your mouth, and Professor Styles instantly perks up.

“Yes, Alex?” she asks.

“Uh… I didn’t raise my…” you start to say, but then you figure you might as well try to go for the answer. “Well everything you showed before, they all looked the same-ish, so I guess they’re going to be equivalent, that seems right…”

Professor Styles frowns, shaking her head. Your word salad was not impressive.

“Let me try explaining this more clearly,” she says, skipping the animation to the end. “Do you see how the blue SALK model now contains a hole while the green surface diffusion one is a solid block? Clearly, there’s a topological difference here. The question is, why? Well, we can start by examining…”

Your face is burning up in embarrassment, having gotten this question wrong in front of the whole class. But hardly anyone seems to be paying attention to you. It was a tough question, and lots of people were probably just as confused as you were. You decide to keep your head down and take careful notes for the remainder of class, trying not to draw anymore attention to yourself.

Styles -10