There have been constantly something I feel strange but couldn’t identified what when reading everyday’s title feeds in Google Reader. The overall feeling can be called as ‘a wrong direction, opposite to science, that today’s chemistry research is on’.

We seems to prefer unpredictable things to predictable ones. Now, we don’t like things to be predictable or expectable. By making our system more complex, adding more building blocks, messing around, and seeing what will happen, we are more likely to publish papers on JACS and Angew. Chem., whereas these research efforts can hardly raise the interests of physicists, who have been providing theories for us chemists, who now consider the works of nowadays chemists as ‘dirty’ and meaningless.

We seems to give up the intention to understand the world in a precisely predictable way after complexity spread across all angles of observation. We are now complacent with messing around among this complexity in search for random, casual ’gotcha’s’.

Unpredictability has high impact. Understandable unpredictability has even higher impact, by understandable I mean the case that the authors succeeded in giving a plausible explanation for their unpredictable results; these deserve being on Nature, Science or PNAS. If the explanation is lousy, explain less, and you can still hit JACS at least. Take some photographs, take a movie if possible.

No, we are not going to response to prediction of any theory. Because if we confirm a theory, we help the authors of that theory, not us, in citing rate; the theory is more likely to be accepted thanks to our experimental confirmation. And if we disagree that theory, we contribute nothing; after all that is only a theory, how strange is it that it fails in one particular dirty experiment, with this or that factor not consistent with the theoretical presumption? And in such a complexity of Nature, how can an experiment be conducted in a ‘tidy’ enough way, so that it really fits a theory’s presumption perfectly well and capable to (dis)approve it? The hypothesis-experiment game is difficult, time-consuming, and therefore boring.

So now we turn our interest to publishing experiments without any hypothesis, experiments that are really hard to hypothesize anything from, experiments that, after reading it, people would say nothing other than ‘well, ya, you guys are really lucky’. Everyone is seeking for crazier ideas, and the ability to realize your idea, to show that it works (better by such visual impact as movies) is enough for you to be on Angew. Chem., etc. You don’t have to pretend that you knew in advance what you would get based on some theory. You are neither answering a question nor asking one.

So, why not ABCDE five-block copolymer? It must self-assembly. Take photos, explain a bit based on the patterns, then I assure you Macromolecules. After all, it has five blocks! Besides this, stimuli-responsive ‘smart’ things still rocks, more so if it changes color, or moves. Combination of click chemistry with ring-opening polymerization or RAFT, better on a surface, even better on the surface of nanoparticles, even much better luminescent, also rocks. Believe me, you can do this. Don’t fear the complexibility. With the old-schooled NMR, MS, light scattering, TEM, AFM, etc. techniques you can always meet the standard of supporting evidence, by putting all these boring things in the supporting information section, leaving colorful photos in the graphical abstract. Putting a .mpg movie in the supporting information section to distract people from the NMR and MS containing boring PDF is just sweet. Who cares why and what causes it to work? Watch that—it just works!

I regret the above cynicism without a single piece of example. Any example is offending actually. And I apologize if I disturbed someone. What I am sharing is just my feeling. I feel that my interest in chemistry is somewhat different from what’s heated today, or what I’m interested in is actually physics, not chemistry.