CCL: Computational Chemistry - Arm chair Scientists !!!

 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