Lecture

Last night I went to a lecture by Sir J. Fraser Stoddart called "Mingling Art & Science". I just read about it on BYU's calender and thought it sounded interesting. Since I don't have classes to go to, it's nice to still learn things sometimes. Since art is my career and science is so fascinating I thought this would be great. And I'll say it was interesting, I didn't get bored at all, but I didn't realize this was being presented by a chemist and everything I know about chemistry I learned 12 years ago.
The professor talked about Borromeans interlocking circles and Solomon's rings. It was interesting art history, but then when he explained how he created these artistic symbols using molecules and things on a microscopic level through bonding - I was lost. And I didn't really get the point of it either. At the end when there was questions I wanted to ask why this was an important accomplishment he had worked on for so many years, but since I know nothing about chemistry I figured it was a dumb question. Later he mentioned how some critiques don't see the point to his work since it doesn't have any useful application and that's why he recently switched universities. I was glad I wasn't the only one who wondered about that.