Week 1 Introduction

 

For this week's blog, I would like to talk about the importance of the element carbon. After watching this lecture, I was amazed at how much my love for science and art can be combined and where this class stems from. From one of the first slides, the phrase “carbon is the building block of life” really stood out to me because I am a STEM student here and I have always learned that carbon is the most abundant element but have not truly learned the importance of it. I see in all my practice problems that carbon is present or when I do general chemistry or organic chemistry homework, carbon is always in the question in some way or another. In an article that I read called “Chemical Interactions Between Inorganics and Activated Carbon,” they wrote how early application of activated carbon was mainly used for sugar, refining, oil, and for drug purification. They also wrote about how the use of activated carbon began in the United States in 1930. After seeing the crazy amount of examples of where carbon is used, it amazes me how everything on this Earth is a form of art. From a pollen particle shaped in a hexagon to the way a tree grows. In my chemistry class, I remember learning about entropy, which is the measurement of disorder and chaos of molecules and how everything wants to be in its more stable, efficient, and least pressured form. In an article titled “Entropy,” there was a quote that read “No one really knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage” from John von Neumann and this showed me that science is ever growing and things will constantly be changing within our lifetime and beyond. Furthermore, this has proven to me that nature prefers hexagons because they are incredibly stable and the most efficient way to take up space and not feel pressure. 

Next, I would like to talk about the process of my drawing with no electronics. I chose to sit in the garden at UCLA and put all my electronics away. From memory, after the lecture, I drew what I could recall from the lecture and used my own imagination to put that on the paper. From my chemistry and biology courses, I remembered that all of our nucleotides include carbon which is why DNA stood out to me. I am a premed student and so many concepts were coming together. Of course, plants need carbon to survive which is why I drew a tree. However in a research paper called “Carbon: Freshwater Plants,” they found that many aquatic plants draw from a finite carbon pool which means that biochemical discrimination is reduced. I remember being told about the eyes of flies and so I drew a butterfly. Lastly, I chose to draw a pencil of course because that is the sole foundation of this week's lecture. We learned about how pencils are made and how much time and effort it takes to produce the abundance of pencils necessary for us. I read an article that said that “graphite, an allotrope of carbon, although faly wide in distribution, does not seem to have been known in the classical era. The few obscure references that might be relevant are more likely to refer to some form of metallic lead” (Voice 2014). In other words, people often confuse graphite and lead because of the mechanical pencil which was also talked about in the lecture. 

Lastly, overall I felt that having to spend time away from electronics and really listen to the pencil scrape against my paper as I drew the images felt surreal. It was something I had never experienced because when I draw, I generally have a TV show playing on in the background. I have learned or I feel after this lecture that everything on this Earth has been strategically placed or created in a way that causes the least amount of chaos and instability. In a paper titled “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is reused,” it made me realize that even the art works that are created in thai world, they are just made up of other things, as cliche as it sounds. 

 

Citations:

Bein, Berthold. “Entropy.” Best Practice & Research Clinical Anaesthesiology, Baillière Tindall, 17 Mar. 2006, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1521689605000558?casa_token=GN2vGDLV4qcAAAAA%3ALxkHT0UmgDz82-BAVfw4Yx2tdGyvlp_aPy1wl4AAd0SFCQh3y6jHRms-q0CXkmU0nBm_qXLv.

Corentin FIVET and Jan BRÜTTING, Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is reused: structural design for a circular economy, The Structural Engineer, vol. 98(1), p. 74-81, 2020

Huang, CP. “Chemical Interactions between Inorganics and Activated Carbon .”

KEELEY, J. E., and D. R. SANDQUIST. Carbon: Freshwater Plants .

Voice , Eric. The History of the Manufacture of Pencils.