As of today, I am an official blogger! I have recently moved home from Pittsburgh to Providence with my cat, Catman. As a recent unemployed college graduate, I now spend my time running errands for my mom, mediating the dog and cat situation, and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life…

The title “Orbitals & Artichokes” comes from two of my strongest and most interesting talents, chemistry and cooking, plus I liked the way the words sound together ;) Most people know what an artichoke is, but may not exactly know what an orbital is. Maybe you have heard of it in a high school chemistry class as the “path” an electron (negetively charged particle) takes when circling around the nucleus. In fact, there are people in the world who spend lifetimes trying to figure out exactly where one particular electron may be because in reality no one actually knows, they can only guess using this extremely long and complicated mathematical equation that I will spare telling you about. Orbitals are the shapes that the electrons travel that mathematically make sense. Some electrons travel in a circle, some in a figure eight, and it only gets more complicated from there. 

So at this point you may be wondering, what on earth is she talking about. This concept of orbitals is one of my favorite things because its something you can’t see but somehow some very intelligent people have convinced us that this is the way an atom works. In a way this is what all of chemistry is, and I have taken it upon myself to share what came out of my years of painful studying and hours of getting to know the TA’s with the general public. Maybe, as more concepts are explained and ideas are understood, you can look back to this first posting and say, “hey, this kind of makes sense now!” 

Until next time!