A residue of American Science will remain in the literature after its death.

[NNadir]

Last edited Sat Jun 7, 2025, 08:05 AM - Edit history (1)

When I was a kid, people majoring in chemistry were advised to take courses in German. There were still major and (then) important works relevant to chemistry, notably the reference work, the Beilstein Handbook, (Handbuch) that were only available in German.

Of course, the preeminence of German Science, which had dominated the world in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries was destroyed by the German Nazis, just as American Science is being destroyed by modern American Nazis.

The residue of once preeminent German science still remains in the nomenclature of chemistry, most notably in the use of "Z" zusammen, "together" and "E" entgegen, (opposite) to differentiate a common class of geometric isomers in organic chemistry, generally the arrangement of substituents on double bonds. (One rarely sees these designations used elsewhere, beyond double bonds.)

I am sometimes annoyed by the use of abbreviations of nonsystematic names without at least a brief explanation - for the uninitiated - of the type of structures of industrial or academic reagents, something which is very common in particular in nanoparticle based catalytic systems.

I came across this paper this morning: Highly Selective Oxidation of 5-Hydroxymethylfurfural to 2,5-Formylfuran Mediated by Surface Superoxo and Peroxo on Mo3Cu1/NH2-SBA-15 Qian-Wen Lu, Qing He, Qing-Shuai Zhang, Da Sheng, Song-Hai Wu, Yong Liu, and Xu Han Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2025 64 (21), 10425-10436. I found the paper interesting, even though I'm not really a biofuels kind of guy, although I certainly have a limited appreciation of the utility of biopolymers as tools for fixing carbon in an economically viable way.

Note that the authors are Chinese. I have already noted that the destruction of American Science by American Nazis, now underway on an accelerating pace, has provided the final blow in the surrender of scientific dominance to China: Japanese...Australian...Chinese...Chinese...Chinese...Iranian...Chinese...Chinese...British (Japanese Name)... (A correspondent corrected me to note that what I called a "Japanese Name" was actually an African name, a correction that was wonderful to hear.)

Anyway

Quoth I to myself: "Self, what the fuck is 'SBA-15?'"

God created Wikipedia for the benefit of the uninitiated like me: Santa Barbara Amorphous-15

Quoth the oracle at Wikipedia:

SBA-15, an acronym for Santa Barbara Amorphous-15, is a silica-based ordered mesoporous material that was first synthesized by researchers at the university of California Santa Barbra in 1998.[1] This material proved important for scientists in various fields such as material sciences,[2] drug delivery,[3] catalysis,[4] fuel cells[5] and many other due to its desirable properties and ease of production.

I'm trying to get used to all of these abbreviated trade names when I step outside of my comfort zone, and I may be getting there with zeolites and metal organic frameworks (MOFs).

I wonder how long terms like SBA-15 will remain in the literature, long after the death of American science now underway, before "Santa Barbara Amorphous-15" are substituted with words in Chinese.

Sigh...

I am ambivalent about having lived so long as to see this, the death of American science.