by Graeme Donald The world of science is indeed filled with many stories bustling with serendipity...as such. I was quite excited about reading this book and it makes for a quite interesting read. I use that phrase intentionally because it is written almost as the sort of mini stories told on the excellent QI, which … Continue reading The Accidental Scientist: The Role of Chance and Luck in Scientific Discovery

This is the first thing I've written on this site for a little over a year. Well, that's not strictly true, I have been updating the reports on how my Marie Curie fellowship is going as well as my publication list. But that's not really important in the grand scheme of things. For the entire … Continue reading 2020 – What the f***

This is a bit overdue, but better late than never. Just over a month ago I came crashing into Leiden from Paris, thus starting my two-year Marie Curie Fellowship at the Leiden Observatory. The landing was a tad rough I must admit. Simultaneously moving in officially with my partner and starting this postdoc without a … Continue reading The Cosmic Chemist enters the Leiden Observatory as a Marie Curie Fellow

Two and a half years ago I wrote about the science of Mr. Freeze´s freezing gun with reference to the 1997 epic (flop) Batman and Robin. This small blog is still generating views and is the most visited thing on my site that I've ever written. But why is that? What is it about the … Continue reading Mr Freeze‘s Freeze Gun – The Real One…. or Fake One… Which is Real…yes

Doing research is not a good way to get instant gratification for what you are doing. It’s an arduous process that involves collecting and interpreting data in search for answers to specific questions. This can be a very lengthy process that involves checking, re-checking and starting all over again. It can be frustrating, demoralizing, and … Continue reading Some recent research successes

I'm very happy to report that my first co-authored paper that includes work I've done since starting my current postdoc position has been published. It is astrochemistry-oriented and is entitled "Photoionization and dissociative photoionization of propynal in the gas phase: Theory and experiment". In short we used the SAPHIRS endstation at the DESIRS beamline at … Continue reading First SOLEIL paper (finally) published

As an eleven year old boy I started to watch horror films. Whether this had a negative influence on my psyche remains to be seen but this was really the consequence of circumstance rather than poor parenting on my folks’ behalf. It was just a really bad coincidence that the first horror film I (inadvertently) … Continue reading The Science of Paul Anderson’s Event Horizon – The Science of Our Fear

Science fiction and fantasy alike are ripe with imaginary elements made up to capture the imagination of any viewer/reader/player ensconced in the fictional Universe at hand. Some of these can be clever, funny and even thought-provoking while others can be well... kind of stupid. Creating new elements is already something the human race has succeeded … Continue reading Top 10 Imaginary Elements