A Soft Matter Approach Toward the South-North Water Transfer (SNWT) Project

Science fiction is an alternative way in which science touches the public, besides the science stories and research highlights in TV and newspapers. In the past few days however I did came across some discussions that suspected the misleading effect of current media coverage of science-related issues (Bryan Wetterow and Brian Clegg). So how’s science fiction doing then? Is it no better than science journalists at conveying the right image of science to the public?

As a chemist I should be well frustrated at the oversight of science fiction toward chemistry. There are plenty of particle physics, astronomy, AI and molecular biology in science fiction but seldom is there…Wait…molecular biology? isn’t it in fact biochemistry? But still too ‘bio’ one, filled with gene cloning technology, sometimes even something about neuroscience. Bioscience fiction is the dullest because the discoveries about gene have too explicitly implied too much for sci-fi writers to suppose literally anything. Gene only encode the sequence of amino acids in one or more peptides. How does the sequence determine the subsequent folding, packing and functioning is mysterious. But the sci-fi works just keep telling us that we only need the primary structure of something to have the desired functions, regardless of its secondary, tertiary and quaternary structures. That is, biology is omnipotent; chemistry is nothing.

So how about other areas that have nothing to do with life science? High performance materials, maybe, is the most involved chem-topic in sci-fi, whenever the windscreen of a spacecraft needs to defend some antimatter emission, for instance. But still, the chemical details about these materials are oftentimes omitted, or at the most adding the omnipotent prefix, ‘nano-’, to render the materials just omnipotent themselves.

When it comes to physics or astronomy, science fictions tend to put more details in the technical aspect, and the readers are welcome to prove with current physics theories that what’s imagined in a science fiction is impossible. This kind of debate is constructive also because a large number of science fictions base the story development on the imagination in physics or biology, for example time-space relationship, or cloning human. So if the imagination is not possible, neither is the whole story. But chemical imaginations are always some temporary fulfillment of the minor technical gaps in the stories (like the abovementioned omnipotent windscreen). The readers just don’t mind any absurdity.

I suppose that the status of chemistry in science fictions is just reflecting its status in the present public. Chemistry is indeed regarded as something just useful to fill the minor gaps in our everyday life, thinking about all those plastics, detergents, and insecticides. Science fictions are just putting people today in a different age. The environment may be different, but the thoughts are the same.

The most ‘chemical’ science fiction I have read is about surfactant, or bubble (soft matter, always my favorite). A highly developed surfactant that is able to form extremely stable bilayers between two gas phases, that is, bubble membranes, is postulated in this sci-fi work. The surfactant, once in solution, displays a low surface tension, low enough to form a bubble as large as a whole city. Moreover, its rate of evaporation is also low enough to withstand the breakage of the bubble for hours. It is a Chinese science fiction, so the bubble is used to solve a Chinese problem: to deliver the moist air above the South China Sea to the western part of China where people are suffering painful drought. Bubbles at the size of a city containing moisture can be driven by the monsoon from southeast to northwest, and finally break above the dry land offering precipitation. I like this little piece of science fiction because it gave at least some details of what it imagined: why there can be such an ultra-stable bubble (low evaporation and surface tension), although the exact chemical structure was not proposed. And what’s more, the whole story very much depends on this kind of bubble, by which chemistry is capable to accomplish a magnum opus – the South-North Water Transfer (SNWT) Project.

I also very much like the Reaction series of interview in The Sceptical Chymist, one of the questions in which is: How can chemists best contribute to the world at large? This question stimulates imagination. In fact we all do our research with more or less imagination. Just read some paper on Angew Chem or Adv Mater and you can find such similar statements in the Introduction sections as ‘the present work may pave the way to …’, ‘finally enable us to …’, or ‘find applications in …’. Unfortunately, the public won’t be surprised too much even we realize all these imagination because they have been waiting for long. They will just shrug their shoulder and mummer: ‘Finally!’ Finally what? Finally a little inconvenience in the life is wiped away. And just don’t mention anything about drug discovery or natural products – they are regarded biology.

So let’s do some chemical science fiction here. Which of the currently fashionable chemical research (key words like self-assembly, nanorods, CdSe, ionic liquid, etc.) may possibly change the world at large? Or do you think what you are doing have the similar potential?