From owner-chemistry@ccl.net Thu Mar 12 05:54:01 2009 From: "Michel Petitjean petitjean.chiral^_^gmail.com" To: CCL Subject: CCL: Computational Chemistry - Arm chair Scientists !!! Message-Id: <-38816-090312042504-14981-s0kGHJ+EP7T8BWxHKdgXlQ[]server.ccl.net> X-Original-From: Michel Petitjean Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:24:42 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Sent to CCL by: Michel Petitjean [petitjean.chiral%a%gmail.com] Dear All, Here (France), only experimental chemistry is recognized. Tasks requiring computers are often considered as low level secondary tasks, easy to do (or to be done by some student). Proof: the ten years old son of the experimentalist plays on the net all the day, so computer tasks are easy to do (however it may be boring the experimentalist). The true researchers are the experimentalists, and the other ones must serve the experimentalists because they are not true researchers. Only one exception: the quantum chemists (called here "theoretical chemists") constitute a well recognized community, of which many members consider themselves as superior to any other chemist, probably due to the stupid ranking math > physics > chemistry > biology > social sciences and all the rest (quantum chemistry thus appears closer to physics than the rest of chemistry). A consequence is that chem/info people not falling in the quantum chemistry field are ignored, and by no way are considered: difficulties to get funds, evaluation of activity done by quantum chemists who do not care, etc. By the way, please let me know where I can read the definition of the following fields: computational chemistry, theoretical chemistry, mathematical chemistry, quantum chemistry, cheminformatics, chemometrics, structural bioinformatics, molecular modeling. Particularly, I would be interested to know how cheminformatics is defined, and in what it differs from the other fields enumerated above. Finally, in-silico chemists play and do not work. Proof: they have time to read and to write posts in the CCL forum while the experimentalists really work. Thanks. Michel Petitjean, DSV/iBiTec-S/SB2SM (CNRS URA 2096), CEA Saclay, bat. 528, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France. Phone: +331 6908 4006 / Fax: +331 6908 4007 E-mail: michel.petitjean*cea.fr, petitjean.chiral*gmail.com http://petitjeanmichel.free.fr/itoweb.petitjean.freeware.html Sent to CCL by: "Soumya Samineni" [soumya_samineni|*|rediffmail.com] Dear all, With the ever increasing computational power, there has been an enormous growth in the theoretical/computational chemistry ( personally i feel the word "Theoretical Chemistry" has been abused by considering it as an alternative word for "Computational chemsitry" by people practising computational chemistry). while people doing computational chemistry are also growing like mushrooms and the volume of pages occupied by it has also exploded, the number of people doing the theoretical chemistry (analytical) is dwindling with time. Any ways: It would be nice to hear comments from the leading (and novice) experts of computational and theoretical chemistry regarding the general feeling of the experimental community (who consider that they toil pretty hard physically for every bit of the sentence they write .. ) that we are "Arm chair scientists", who like to quench our thirst for science sitting before a computer all through the day and gulping loads of liquids !! I hope a small debate would make things more clear. regards Soumya