| Chemistry |
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| Chemistry |
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Monday, October 28, 1996
My father, has for over 23 years heard me say I love chemistry, and that's why I study Chemical Engineering. A little while after I first created this website, he asked me when was I going to write something about chemistry. Here it goes... my chemical view of life...
"I like chemistry because it has to do with everything." I was once asked why I liked it, and that's what I answered. I was sitting on a bench after a dance, it was almost 5 AM, I was tired, but I began to explain: "...See those pebbles? Well, chemistry can analyze them..." And so forth... everything had to do with chemistry.
Some years later I read an article in a scientific magazine, it explained that dreams are electric pulses provoqued by a chemical reaction. Then I read other articles explaining that feelings (emotions, rather) are a result of certain chemical reactions in the brain. So life has a lot more to do with chemistry than one can imagine.
Here I must make a point that is very important for me. It is one thing that science can describe a phenomenon as a result of a chemical reaction, and something very different is to say that it was the reaction that caused the phenomenon. Feeling safe is no caused by the emission of endorphines, but by something else, that then instructs the brain to issue endorphines to calm us down. Adrenaline doen't just show up, either. There has to be a cause, always. And that cause is outside the scientific explanation, always.
Chatting with Professor Pedro Salas Selvas, teacher of Chemistry at the ITBA, I commented that the part I loved best of chemistry was the one that deals with atoms and molecules. He said: "Oh! But then, what you like is the philosophy of chemistry..." I think no one else was ever more right about my true vocation than he. I like to phisolophize with science, that is the focus I give it. That is why it made fun to me when I was studying Modern Physics, with Professor Luis Roque Argüello, and he made some very fundamental question about atoms or something of the sort, and I answered lowly: "That is a philosophical question..."
The truth is that chemistry appeals to me because it can explain everything. It can observe everything, and describe it from some chemical point of view. And I love holistic things, because life is holistic. That is why I study science: to learn the connection between the mental and feelings (religion). That is why I write about these subjects, and I study metaphysics (among other things).
Why do I love chemistry? Because I love life.
