Assignments for Week Five

1. Inert gas of the week

My inert gas of the week is helium.  Helium’s chemical symbol is He, atomic number is 2  and atomic weight is 4.  Helium is the second lightest element and is the second most abundant element in the universe.  It is colorless odorless tasteless non-toxic.  It is also the lightest of all the inert gases.  Its boiling and melting points are the the lowest among the elements.    

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium)

2. Color of foods in your own kitchen

Sharing living space with my sister and my TCM supervisor has add an abundance of colors to my kitchen.  As all three of us are vegetarians and work in the field of health we are aware that we need to replace nutrients from meat with various vegetarian alternatives.  Starting with nuts we have almond, walnut, pecan, cashew, pistachio, macadamia, peanut, hazelnut, pine nut and others.  All these nuts have a combination of color brown, yellow and white in them.  However each has its own unique shades of colors and textures.  

As to legumes we also have a variety of them with an abundance of colors.  The azuki beans are dark red; mung beans are green; soybeans are milky yellow; black-eyed peas are yellow and black, chickpeas are white and green.    

We also have a variety of sea weeds in our kitchen such as kelp, nori, kombu, wakame.  Their colors range from light green, dark green, indigo, violet to black.   

My sister and I also go to the farmer’s market to get fresh veggies fruits and mushrooms of various colors. Veggies usually have cooler greenish/blueish colors and fruits have warmer reddish/orangish/yellowish colors.  Mushrooms usually have more earthly colors of brown and yellow.

In addition a variety of spices in our kitchen cabinet adds many different colors as well. For example cinnamon, pepper, garlic, thyme, basil each has its own unique color.    

Even oils and vinegars have unique colors of their own.  Olive oil has a more translucent green/yellow color while sesame and flax seed oil has shining dark brown colors.  Balsamic, apple, and rice vinegars all have unique colors of their own and each contributes to our health in its unique ways.

3. Thought on the class’s discussions

I enjoy our class discussion on color spectrums of food and different ideas of healthy eating.   It shows that nutrition is such a vast field as it is intimately related to subjects such as chemistry and physics (color spectrums). Learning its relations to chemistry makes learning chemistry more interesting and relevant to us as TCM practitioners.

  

Assignments for Week Four

1. Catalyst of the week

Iron is my catalyst of the week.  Iron’s chemical symbol is Fe.  Its atomic number is 26 which means it has 26 protons and electrons.  Its atomic mass is 56 which gives it 30 neutrons.  Iron belongs to the D block elements which makes it a good catalyst.  D block elements have empty d orbitals which allow them to absorb electrons and act as catalysts.

One example of iron being used as a catalyst is in the manufacturing of ammonia.  It not only uses iron as catalyst but also potassium hydroxide as promoter.

2. Comments on Green Chemistry Discussions

During class our discussion covered different aspects of Green Chemistry such as its purpose and 12 principles as well as its relations to our environment, corporate profit, legal regulations, politics, economy as well as our entire social and political structure.  

An interesting way to carry the discussion further is to divide these different aspects into two broad categories of ethical and non-ethical issues.  On the non-ethical side we talked about how green chemistry can benefit our environment and how we can achieve our goals through the 12 principles. We also talked about achieving it through modern technology, more stringent legal regulation, allowing companies to be profitable through various incentives, and even modifying our current social and political structure.  

On the ethical side we all realize, even if only implicitly, that the fundamental problem for Green Chemistry is that people routinely act out of self interested reasons as opposed to reasons that benefit others or environment as a whole.  IF we assume people are fundamentally self interested then the best we can do is to align their self interests with interests of others as best as we can.  For example we can use legal regulations to punish offenders or provide various economic incentives to entice people into polluting less.  

Even if we drastically modify our social and political structure it will not make a fundamental difference because if people are fundamentally self interested then they will always choose their own interests over the interests of others and environment at large no matter if they are operating under capitalism, socialism or communism.  Furthermore, IF people are fundamentally self interested, then they will always find ways to circumvent legal regulations and receive economic benefit without really being green (ex: green washing).  This means that as a social movement Green Chemistry can only achieve very limited success.

It is also at this very basic ethical level that the problem of Green Chemistry is related to other problems of our world, big or small.  Big problems such as wealth and class inequality, imperialism, global warming, health care, animal protections, racism, religious wars and etc. are all fundamentally about people who have the resources of some kind, be it money, social status or natural resources, not willing to give them up for the benefit of others or people who have the power to obtain resources from others do so without regard to the detriment and the plead of others. Simply put they act in self interested ways. Similarly small problems such as people cheating on their love ones or fighting for career opportunities, despite their apparent differences, are really also about people behaving in a self interested ways.          

If ethics is at the foundation of most of our problems, big and small, then the fundamental question is: Is there a scientific and rational basis for being ethical?  Surprisingly this question is a very difficult one to answer as Schopenhauer once said “to preach morality is easy to establish its foundation is difficult.”  In fact Nietzsche explained the problem as one of modernity because before science and rational thinking became mainstream human societies have used religion as a foundation for morality.  They would claim that if you behave in unselfish ways then you will go to heaven in afterlife.  If not then you will be punished by God or some super natural power.  However once modern science and rational thinking have taken the credibility out of religion they also inadvertently take away the very foundation for ethics.

If we looked at academic subjects that are related human behavior we would realize that it is indeed very difficult to promote ethical behavior scientifically and rationally.  Subjects such as Economics is based on the assumption of self interest.  Psychology and Human Biology explain human behavior according to theory of evolution which ultimately is about survival the fittest.  Even apparently altruistic  behaviors are explained, according to the theory of evolution, as self interested ways to pass on individual’s genetic traits.  

The problem, it seems, goes beyond the theory of evolution but rationality itself.  Its almost like rationality demands a reason for any and all behaviors but once we found a reason behind a behavior, whatever this reason maybe, it automatically links back to the actor and takes the “selfless” quality away from the behavior. Following this trend of thought, If we think rationally, even religious basis for ethics is based on self interest. The promise of eternal life in heaven and the threat of afterlife punishment in hell are not that much different from legal regulations and economic incentives that we talked about for promoting green chemistry.  If a person acts ethically for these religious reasons then that only makes him/her a self interested person, and ethically speaking, is no different from the polluting manufacturers.

Is there a rational and scientific solution out of this conundrum? I believe so and it lies in the Buddhist idea of “no-self”  The basis of the conundrum is that we started out assuming that we are all individual actors.  Once this assumption is made then all the rational reasons for a person’s behavior must somehow be traced back to this individual actor which in turn makes the behavior self interested by definition.  However as obvious as this assumption seems it is not based on actual experience.  

One way to explain why the actor is not an individual is to conceptually divide our experience into two categories: objects and subject. Everything that we can experience whether its physical (outer experience) or emotional (inner experience) can be called objects and that which is doing the experiencing is called subject.  For instance the words that we are reading is an object just like the chair under us and the computer screen in front of us.  

Our inner experience whether its happiness or sadness are also objects in this sense because they can also be experienced.  Whether outer or inner objects if they can be experienced then they posses certain qualities and hence have individuality.  In other words we can say there is one chair one word or one instance of happiness and so on.  However that which is experiencing the objects, which is called the subject, cannot itself be experienced.  And if it cannot be experienced it cannot be said to have any observable qualities and hence cannot be an individual.  And if the subject is not an individual then its behavior, whatever it is, cannot be said to be individually or “self" interested.  

This insight ,I believe, is the core of Buddhist philosophy which gets rid of the illusion that we are all individual actors.  However the illusion of individuality is so great that even a great philosopher like Descartes cannot get away from it.  Descartes’ famous statement "I think therefore I am” is his way of confirming that “I” as an individual exists, which for him is the most certain of all knowledge and serves as the base of all other knowledge.  However the buddhist critique of Descartes would be that there is only thinking and experiencing.  The “I” that is doing the thinking or experiencing cannot itself be found in experience.  And if “I” cannot be found in experience it cannot be an individual.

Even though difficult to obtain, the realization that “I” as an individual actor does not exist help us ethically in two ways.  With regard to our own actions we are freed from choosing either to benefit or sacrifice our individual interests.  As there is no “I" our interests are fundamentally inseparable from interests of people around us, our environment and our experience as a whole. Second, with regard to the good/evil actions of others we no longer need to morally praise or blame the “individual” actors behind these actions as the very idea of individual moral responsibility is based on the assumption of the individual “I”.  And it is only after we can find it in our hearts to forgive the “evil doers” of the world can we eliminate the inner toxins that come with our negative emotions and promote green chemistry in our internal environment.