Plant Yourself - Embracing a Plant-based Lifestyle

Van der Waals Forces to the Rescue: PYP 373

03.06.2020 - By Howie Jacobson, PhDPlay

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When I was in 11th grade, I came in 3rd in the New Jersey Science League Chemistry II competition.

Which was odd.

I wasn't one of the best chemistry students in the state, by far. I wasn't even close to being the best chemistry student in my high school. Hell, I wasn't close to be the best chemistry student in my chemistry class.

My grades were solid Bs, and I only did that well because I was good at following instructions for computing things like acid/base and redox reactions. I never really understood the reality behind those mathematical procedures.

But the spring of 11th grade was the time that all my friends and I were in hot pursuit of anything interesting or impressive that we could slap onto a college application, and when I heard about the state chemistry contest, I entered at once.

I didn't expect to garner any medals, but a lot of my friends would be on the bus, and anyway it would probably be good practice for the AP chemistry exam that I was hoping to pass a couple of months later.

Mr Ghegan's Advice

The contest was on a Saturday afternoon, at some high school a couple hour's drive away from my own. A bunch of us gathered in Columbia High School parking lot and piled into a small bus. Our teacher, Mr. Ghegan, was there to see us off.

Mr Ghegan was famous for being the funniest teacher at Columbia.

His first lecture, a series of demonstrations of all the things not to do in chemistry lab (like secretly hooking up your lab partner's bunsen burner tube to the water faucet) had us all in stitches.

So we didn't take him that seriously when he shouted as we were pulling out of the parking lot, “If you don't know the answer to a multiple choice question, you should always choose ‘van der Waals forces' if that's one of the options.”

Van der Waals Forces

I did not know anything about van der Waals forces.

I had never heard of van der Waals forces before that moment.

I Googled the phrase just now, and was treated to the following definition courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary: “weak, short-range electrostatic attractive forces between uncharged molecules, arising from the interaction of permanent or transient electric dipole moments.”

I have no idea what that means, except that it has something to do with how geckos can stick to walls (but not, apparently, waals).

The Test

I don't remember much about the test itself. Strangely, I recall with clarity that it consisted of 60 questions.

The other thing I remember is that I didn't know the answer to about 10 of them, which didn't seem at the time like it was going to portend anything good. I was competing, after all, against some of the smartest, most competitive, and nerdiest kids in the entire state of New Jersey. (Remind me to tell you one day how I contributed to our high school Quiz Bowl team's loss in the finals to Livingston High (Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me! host Peter Sagal's team) by misspelling onomatopoeia. Never mind — looks like I just did.)

The other other thing I remember is that fully four of the questions that completely stumped me had one multiple choice answer in common.

Can you guess what it was?

Bonus points if you said “van der Waals forces.”

The Bus Ride Home

We didn't find out our scores for a couple of days, but like overeager grade grubbers everywhere, we debriefed the test endlessly on the bus ride home. What was the molecular weight of the compound in question 9? Which of the gaseous compounds in question 52 had the weakest attractive forces between particles? What was the total pressure in the flask after 24 minutes in question 17?

Stuff like that.

Then we got to talking about the questions that could have been answered, van der Waals forces.

I hadn't a clue about any of them, so I did what Mr Ghegan suggested.

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