Lee Cronin
speaker
545 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Jun 2024
Lee Cronin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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yeah and so and what you do is you look at the minimal constraints on that graph of course it has some mapping to the synthesis but actually you don't have to know all of chemistry you just have to understand you can build up the constraint space rather nicely um but this is just at the beginning right there are so many directions this could go in and i said it it could all be wrong but hopefully it's less wrong what about the little criticism i saw of do you uh
No, no. Well, let's go back. So no, not less likely, but react. So no. So let's go back to what we're looking at here. So the assembly index is the minimal path. Mm-hmm. that could have created that object probabilistically. So imagine you have all your atoms in a plasma, you've got enough energy, you've got enough collisions.
What is the quickest way you could zip out that molecule with no reaction constraints?
It's just basically a walk on a random graph. So we make an assumption that basically the timescale for forming the bonds. So no, I don't want to say that because it's going to have people getting obsessing about this point. And your criticism is a really good one. What we're trying to say is like, this puts a lower bound on something. Of course, some reactions are less possible than others.
But actually, I don't think chemical reactions exist. Oh boy. What does that mean? Why don't chemical reactions exist? I'm writing a paper right now that I keep being told I have to finish. And it's called The Origin of Chemical Reactions. And it merely says that reactivity exists as controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics. And reactions, chemists put names on reactions.
So you could have like, I don't know, the Wittig reaction, which is by Wittig. You could have the Suzuki reaction, which is by Suzuki. Mm-hmm. Now, what are these reactions? So these reactions are constrained by the following. They're constrained by the fact they're on planet Earth, 1G, 298 Kelvin, one bar. So these are constraints. They're also constrained by the chemical composition of Earth.
Oxygen, availability, all this stuff. And that then allows us to focus in our chemistry. So when a chemist does a reaction, that's a really nice compressed shorthand for constraint application. Glass flask.
pure reagent temperature pressure boom boom boom boom boom control control control control control so of course we have bond energies this so the bond energies are kind of intrinsic in a vacuum if you say that so the bond energy you have to have a bond and so for assembly theory to work you have to have a bond which means that bond has to give the molecule certain laugh a half-life
So you're probably going to find later on that some bonds are weaker and that you are going to miss in mass spectra. When you look at the assembly of some molecules, you're going to miscount the assembly of the molecule because it falls apart too quickly because the bonds just fall. But you can solve that with looking at infrared.
So when people think about the probability, they're kind of misunderstanding. Assembly theory says nothing about the chemistry. Because chemistry is chemistry and their constraints are put in by biology. There was no chemist on the origin of life, unless you believe in the chemist in the sky. And they were, you know, it's like Santa Claus. They had a lot of work to do.
But chemical reactions do not exist anywhere. in the constraints that allow chemical transformations to occur do exist.
Exactly. The grammar of chemistry, of course, emerges in reactions, and we can use them reliably, but I do not think the Wittig reaction is accessible on Venus.
They're pretty happy. Well, most of them.
Everyone is grumpy on some days when you challenge. The problem with this paper is it's almost like I went to a party. I used to do this occasionally when I was young. Go to a meeting. and just find a way to offend everyone at the meeting simultaneously. Even the factions that don't like each other, they're all unified in their hatred of you just offending them.
This paper, it feels like the person that went to the party and offended everyone simultaneously, so they stopped fighting with themselves and just focused on this paper.
Yeah, I mean, so when we originally sent the paper, we sent the paper and the editor said that, you know, this was like, this is quite a long process. We sent the paper and the editor gave us some feedback and said, you know, I don't think it's that interesting. It's not, you know, or it's hard. It's a hard concept. And we asked, and the editor gave us some feedback
um and we and sarah and i took a year to rewrite the paper was the nature of the feedback very specific on like this part this part or was it like like what are you guys smoking what kind of yeah it was kind of the latter what you're smoking okay and you know but polite and there's promise yeah well the thing is there was the edit was really critical but in a but in a really professional way yeah
And I mean, for me, this was the way science should happen. So when it came back, you know, we had too many equations in the paper. If you look at the preprint, they're just equations everywhere, like 23 equations. And when I said to Abhishek, who was the first author, we've got to remove all the equations. But my assembly equation saying Abhishek was like...
you know no we can't i said well look if we want to explain this to people there's a real challenge and so sarah and i went through the i think it was actually 160 versions of the paper but we basically we got to version 40 or something we said right zero it start again so we wrote the whole paper again we knew the entire amazing and we just went bit by bit by bit and said what is it we want to say and then we sent the paper in um
And we expected it to be rejected and not even go to review. And then we got notification back it had gone to review. And we were like, oh, my God, it's so going to get rejected. How is it going to get rejected? Because the first assembly paper on the mass spec we sent to Nature went through six rounds of review and was rejected. And by a chemist who just said, I don't believe you.
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