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A lot of the things we associate with semiconductors is actually chemistry, i.e. photoreactive resists, proper surface deposition of various layers of metals.
by entee 11y ago
A lot of the things we associate with semiconductors is actually chemistry, i.e. photoreactive resists, proper surface deposition of various layers of metals.
Also usually referred to as a joke, but "Plastics." How many things around you are absolutely dependent on fairly advanced plastics? How about all those polymers, the nylons, the kevlars, the polyesters?
And molecular biology itself is the study of chemistry.
Chemistry gets overlooked because it's the backbone, the support for all of these fields, like the doting mother who lets her children go forward and take the spotlight, but without whom nothing would be possible.
- alanwatts 11y agoZooming in, doesn't chemistry become physics? Zooming in further, physics becomes quantum physics?
- mhurron 11y agoOh, hey, guess what https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
- entee 11y agoI don't think that abstraction is particularly useful because beyond extremely simple systems, approaching things from physics becomes 1.) not possible because we don't actually know enough and/or 2.) intractable because there are too many variables/actors at play. You can get insight from physics, but physics doesn't actually help you much when it comes to actually making a molecule, or figuring out how to avoid reacting with one part of a molecule while selectively modifying another. In other words chemistry is to physics as computer science is to math. They're related, you could say one is reducible to the other, but that's not a useful construct in practice.
- dekhn 11y agoMost people- scientists in the areas of chemistry and molecular biology- would say that molecular biology is high up enough on the stack that reducing it to chemistry doesn't make sense. Sure, you're working with molecules. But you are working with so many of them that you have to use abstractions to think about it. Now, biochemistry, that makes sense to compare to chemistry. Biochemistry is organic chemistry (plus a little bit of metal chemistry), although the complexity of an enzyme is such that we often using abstractions.