Starting up the backlog

It has been a while since I published much here. A variety of job searching issues have come up. However, I do have a slight backlog of posts, so I will be a bit more prolific the next few days. Starting with the book I was reading. Very slowly. I was reading The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager. Here is a link to the book on Amazon if you're curious. The book is supposed to be the story of the discovery and use of the Haber-Bosch process for making ammonia. I have used this example in class many times to talk about why catalysts are useful and important. And to explain Lechatlier's principle. It's a good example. The process is also, frankly, hugely important in terms of feeding the world's population. As we recently passed 7 billion in population, feeding everyone requires finding ways to stretch our natural resources. I loved the historical bits and story. I find it sad to really get inside Fritz Haber's head, and imagine the disappointment he must have felt at the constant barriers of racism towards being a real German, before and after Nazi's came to power. I still want to know why historians don't consider his second wife a reliable source. I also hadn't realized how much of a story of the development of chemical engineering this book would be. So much had to be made from scratch for this process to work on the scale it needed to. That was an incredible achievement. What I didn't think this book would teach is much chemistry. That wasn't the point; I'm aware. The goal is history, not chemistry. And we can find descriptions of the chemistry elsewhere. But I felt that it was a bit of a lack, somehow.