Yesterday my boyfriend was sitting in the chemistry lounge, listening to a podcast of an NPR interview with David Foster Wallace. One of my chemistry professors walks by and starts chatting about how David Foster Wallace taught at Pomona at the same time he taught at Pomona.

Alan (my professor): So apparently he wasn't a very happy guy.
My boyfriend: Well, you know, that's what writing about the postmodern condition will do to you.
Me: Or thinking about molecular orbital theory too much.
Alan: Oh that was sharp. Is this a disgruntled chem 324 student I hear? [i.e. advanced mechanistic organic chemistry]

Yes, Alan. Yes it is. I have such a love hate relationship with MO theory. On the one hand it explains...just about everything more or less and is really fundamentally important for understanding chemistry. I switch between thinking the quantum mechanical explanations behind it are fascinating at a conceptual level and not particularly interesting in its details. Bond models feel like bullshit to me; with all the different iterations of orbital theory, I don't know how someone can graduate with a degree in chemistry thinking that it's any more than an amalgam of useful models that sort of kind of approximate reality and happen to explain shit well.

Usually I'm ok with this fact. If I felt that science was free of "woo woo" (as one of my bio profs liked to call things like lit theory and epistimology) then I would really be a headcase. At the same time I'm sick of hearing soc majors after taking a sociology of science class tell me that science is just socially constructed and no more legitimate than any other dicipline of study because, yeah, bonding models do--at some level--contain some "bullshit" but people have still used them to, like, make an LED out of a fucking semiconductor. And band theory is hella useful for explaining that behavior.

quantum mechanics won't solve all your problems

It took three years of chemistry education, but I think I finally understand what a wavefunction is and what quantum chemistry is. While I have very little native interest in the process of integrating over all space and solving differential equations to reach quantum mechanical approximations (I'd rather appreciate the fruits of other people's labors in that area...or get the computer to do it), I think I finally get quantum chemistry is all about conceptually (and why it is very bizarre). I think having calculus, statistics, and physics really solidified all of this for me--even if I can't do the math facilely operationally, I do know what a differential equation is, what the dot product is, why probabilities have to integrate to one, what the complex conjugate is, and what polar coordinates are...and Dan, Maggie, and Alan have given me a pretty solid conceptual idea of what the mathematical gears behind orbitals and energies are.

Depending on what I do later in life, I may or may not need to confront all this at a higher level, and beyond just a conceptual level, but I think I'm content now with the fact that I'm not going to have time to take it before I graduate.