I’ve never found chemistry particularly interesting. School managed to ruin a lot of things but I’ve enjoyed most subjects at some point or the other. Even biology, which I abhorred because one had to draw diagrams seemed more exciting as I grew older- perhaps because it was no longer in the school curriculum. Never chemistry though. But I enjoyed Ashutosh’s write-up on why he likes it.

For some reason, everyone agrees that Chemistry is important. If they are pointed out that almost everything that they see around themselves in the modern world stems from chemical research, they cannot say no. Yet nobody seems to want to study chemistry or be a chemist. The practical and industrial virtues of chemistry are obvious, they are all around us, and I don’t want to probe in detail into them, but it’s the nature of chemistry as a science in itself that I want to talk about.

Physics has its wonders, the deep mysteries of particles and the cosmos, and biology asks questions about life itself. Both hold untramelled allure for the layman. Chemistry, on the other hand, seems to ask no “big” questions, it seems to not particularly wander into “cutting edge” areas, and it’s practioners don’t seem to have the aura that Albert Einstein or Charles Darwin seem to possess.

Not as boring as I thought.