Hi everyone ☺️
I’m @nicgaston, Associate Professor @UoA_Physics and Co-Director @MacDiarmidinsti; I’ve previously worked at @irlnz (now defunct 🤷♀️) and @maxplanckpress (für Physik komplexer Systeme, Dresden)
#academicCVs 😅
#academicCVs 😅
My work looks at how we can use quantum mechanical simulations to describe the interactions between the building blocks of materials; sometimes atoms, but more often now nanoscale clusters or layers...
I get a bit excited about the periodic table; not ‘periodic tables’ as a concept but the 4-D construction based on quantum numbers that we typically project onto 2D. Every element has its own identity...
We use quantum mechanics and highly parallel computing to describe the way known materials behave... and to predict how as-yet-unknown materials might 😱
One example: how does the relative stability of the solid and liquid phases change for nanomaterials? It leads to some pretty weird behaviour...
The variation in properties between just the *elements* is mindblowing (forget chemistry for the mo, for simplicity); for example, the variation from one metal to another is pretty amazing, when you think it’s just a matter of adding a single electron and proton... 
So the periodic table IN emoji has the properties of each element conveyed in some way by the emoji chosen, and as such, it represents a small sample of the diversity of behaviour manifested by atoms: which when it comes down to it, are neverthess all much the same 🤔
Here’s another version: Mendeleev’s original periodic table had columns and rows transposed, so I think it’s perfectly well justified for the sake of fitting the whole thing in on Twitter 😉
So the thing that is beautiful in all this, is the emergence of this diverse spectrum of properties and behaviours from the interactions between atoms, while those atoms are all more or less the same (plus or minus a proton and an electron along the way...)
And because so many interactions are involved by the time we get from the atomic scale to the macroscopic, it can be really hard to predict what happens. It’s like a flock of birds, interacting in a complex system called a murmuration
But we CAN make some predictions if we know enough about the nature of the (quantum mechanical) interactions (3 cheers for Schrödinger’s eqn!), AND if we have enough computational power to solve the equations...
“The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, & the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved”
-Dirac, 1929
-Dirac, 1929
A good part of that difficulty has been fixed with the advent of highly-parallel computing; however, it’s a really good example of a field of science in which the more we know, the more we realise we don’t know 🤷♀️
What else about me? 😇 I’ve done different things on account of different roles: the link in my bio at @nicgaston will send you to Why Science Is Sexist, that I published in 2015 (more on that later...)
That’s probably enough from me for an introduction but I’ll come back to different aspects of this thread and my work over the week (not always with threads QUITE this long, sorry 🤭); let me know what you’re interested in!
