Is this the place to expose new foundation for polymer physics?
Warum nicht?
It may sound odd to use a public blog to discuss a subject interesting mostly to specialists. I agree, but, after publishing over 100 peer-reviewed articles, most of them never referenced nor read, the direct exposure to the public via a different route takes some justification. At least, I hope this blog will be read by those students intrigued by its title.
Why would anyone need to create a new school of thoughts in polymer physics?
1. “Timing is every thing”, people say (I have seen Agassi’s commercial), and it’s the right timing. 30 years of intense research on the subject is not enough to have exhausted my investigation, but now is time to communicate.
2. Sometimes in science, an established school of thoughts has enough control over the publishing channels that it prevents, although in a subtle way, publication of new or controversial ideas that may shaken its stable grounds, or lead to the impression that its understanding is at best shaky, that the subject is not as well known as it should, after all these years of publications and awards to praise the important people who constantly write about them (the H-rating obliges...) The pity is that despite the fact that important results were, indeed, obtained, there seems to be a cover up now to avoid exposing the limitations reached by the models, and their ramifications, which led to these achievements.
3. Fundamentally, I advocate, the science of polymer physics is now working in circles, patching up with more and more band-aids a model of polymer deformation, the reptation model, that has prevailed for the last 35 years, and now stands like a crippled soldier returning from the first world war, with scars everywhere, crotches and a black eye, after all the modifications to make its stand. Support from the establishment consists in the protection at all cost of the POW returning home: no one is allowed to say bad things about heroes. So here we are. The generals will not allow a tolerant debate, because the subject is so deeply rooted in terms of classical reptation polymer physics that showing a different approach looks useless or insulting, which, in the polite way of saying things in science, means “wrong”, unpublishable.
4. If the experiments you show (or re-analyse) cannot be explained by the established model, it’s not the model to question, Monsieur, “these experiments are wrong”, say the Generals. They must be. Period. No discussion. Paper rejected: “these results contradict our present knowledge on the subject”.
5. If you can explain with your new model the features described by the established model, but you use a different statistics, place a new focus on what defines your thermodynamic system of interactive units, or define entropy of deformation in new ways, then the comments take the subtle tone of irony (“who do you think you are?”), with an elegant gesture of the full arm that says: "here is the Exit door, mon cher".
6. The Generals’ tolerance Chart reads like this: Yes, we are tolerant to controversy, the best proof is that your paper is allowed to be presented at our international convention on Thurday night (when every body has left) around 6: 30 pm (when the few left are hungry and tired), or in Poster Sessions. Yes, Sir, Posters are extremely well-attended, don’t disagree please. By the way, send a check for $ 750 for being part of this well organized meeting. Do you need a receipt? And the Circus of the Establishment rolls on.
7. I have only reached 5 minutes into this writing, and am experiencing this sense of freedom in style which is so far away from the congested, “constipated” style we normally use in scientific publication, where we feel obliged to quote references every two lines, as if someone was there to justify the validity or the importance of what we write. I want to be able to put anecdotes into my story, make the scientists I have met live through recollection of meetings with them, or courses tought by them.
8. My philosophy at this point on polymer physics and polymer processing stands like this: in order to continue to progress, i.e. imagine new experiments, explore new commercial applications, especially based on non-linear effects in visco-elasticity and melt deformation, we need to pause and step back, re-evaluate the work done for the last 70 years, and go back to Treolar, Bueche, Kuhn, Alfrey, Boyer, Flory, Gibbs Di Marzio and other giants from the 60’s and 70’s. Is it possible that de Gennes’s extraordinary insight in coining “reptation” has lead to 35 years of too-fast forwarding which now needs a total rewind. The situation is the same in many disciplines, not just in science of course (the string theory has reached in theoretical physics this same situation of dogma, which is equally intolerable), but also in other activities organized by humans. The total surprise is that scientists behave like human beings. Who thought otherwise?
I remember, back in the early 60s, in Courchevel, skiing was taught by instructors de l’Ecole Francais de Ski (EFS)who told you to plant your pole, adjust your skies to have one move forward and turn around your pivot. Then came Grunberg, Falcose and other instructors who presented a very different style, invented “la godille”, were not allowed to teach this different method to ski, were fired as instructors from the established EFS school, and had to create their own “Nouvelle Ecole de Ski Francais”. That eventually became the “ski moderne” with Perillat, Killy and all the other champions illustrating the success of this technique. The tension and confusion between who was the real school lasted for several years. Humans at work, “same same but different” , as the Vietnamese say.
This is why I have created this blog. I want to expose an entirely new way to explain polymer physics. I started this work a long time ago, actually in 1972 as I had started Graduate studies at MIT. Of course, I have not finished, but I am now intensely focused.
Let’s rewind polymer physics back to 1971. The big name was Flory. There are two things that pop-up in my mind when I remember the man, Paul Flory: one is a picture of him at the blackboard while he was teaching Prof. Edward Merril’s class at MIT for a semester, as a Visiting professor from Stanford: he was obstructing with his body what he was writing on the board, and at the same time mumbling with a very inaudible voice some comments about it. We were all making gestures to each other, stopping writing our notes, and wondering if this guy was the same great Flory from the “Principles of Polymer Chemistry”( 1953), a book that we all considered the equivalent of the Bible in the field. He did get the Nobel price a little bit later (1974), to show you how well Flory was considered at the time (the last person to receive the Nobel in the field of polymers was Staudinger himself, the inventor of the concept of macromolecules, decades earlier). De Gennes would be next.
My second recollection of Flory dates back to 1979, I believe, attending an international conference on polymer networks in Jablonna, Poland. At the end of the several days conference, there was a piano recital, and I was sitted near Flory in the first row. I noticed his beautiful fingers resting on his knees, and I could also admire the size of his jaw. It is kind of weird to observe someone’s jaw, but people were saying that he was shredding, “eating alive” they said, every one who stood against his ideas. Apparently, Prof. Corradini once stood up to Flory and disappeared in these powerful jaws. So, I was on the watch, carefully examining my chances. Of course, Chopin in the background was re-assuring, but, nevertheless, I had asked Flory a question, during one of the breaks between sessions, which I considered a little dangerous. The question was controversial, but I had used my best “I am a stupid-idiot” look to raise it, and had avoided to remind him that I had been one of his students at MIT:
Me (shaking): “Professor Flory, you once determined, through volume-temperature data in the melt, that there was a higher than Tg transition, later designated TIl by Dr. Ray Boyer of MMI, could you tell me what physical significance one should assign to this transition-relaxation”.
Flory: “ None. It does not exist, I don’t know any Boyer.”
End of the discussion, he had already turned around, after closely reading my name off my tag (putting a chill in my back, I was thinking of Corradini’s fate...Jaws III? ).
I heard of Flory’s death from Boyer himself. I had told Boyer that Flory denied knowing him, which amused him greatly, and he had called me to assure me that it was now safe to walk in the streets. I must add that I was somewhat shocked by this phone call. After all, I considered Flory as one of the giants in my field, and his second book, “Statistical Mechanics of Chain Molecules” (1969), on conformational computation, was one of my favorite classics (although some had said that he had “borrowed” many ideas from Volkenstein). Cf course, it would be fair to also add that Flory’s fame, when he received the Nobel, was indirectly negative to my reputation, because I had written a long paper in Prof. Uhlmann’s class about the uncertainty of Small Angle Neutron Scattering results to the determination of whether or not a polymer glass was in a theta-solvent condition, the same results (from Benoit) that got him the Nobel. Houps!
My contention was that there was enough uncertainty in the scattering resolution, especially demonstrated when temperature varied, to accept both Flory’s views, that the chains were Gaussian like in a Theta-solvent condition, or Boyer’s views, that there was local order present.
I had built a model in my thesis that could explain Boyer’s views. It explained rubber elasticity and visco-elasticity, and many properties of the glass, including crazing and yielding in terms of cooperative systems of "interactive conformers", and whether the radius of gyration was that of the chain in theta conditions or not was irrelevant to my new definition of entropic changes. BUT, if there was no local order to maintain my “EKT systems” thermodynamically stable in the melt, below Tll to be precise, how could my systems exist? My MIT thesis supervisor, Prof. Fred McGarry, started to gasp for air after Flory got the Nobel price! I was placed in a vaccum box and went into a deep coma shortly thereafter (I said in my profile that I like to maintain a good humor on things...).
If only I could find a way to make these systems of interactive units stable, without the need of local order. I searched for such a solution for several years, almost non-stop. The solution came to me in 1981. Of course, by then, the school of polymer physical chemists, the Flory, Boyer, Bueche, Volkenstein, Mark, Alfrey, Ward, Ferry, McCrum was long forgotten ( I learned later). Graessley had survived and had endorsed the new reptation ideas.
So, while I was creating a new statistical model to describe stable systems of interactive-coupling units (the Dual-phase statistics), the buzz word had become “de Gennes” in my back. His reptation model had been coined in 1971, but his success had started only in 1979, when Doi had fluctuated the tube’s length to stretch the exponent of the molecular weight dependence of viscosity from 3 to 3.4. The book by Doi and Edwards has become a classic, de Gennes’s beautiful mind, his elegance and charism convinced the world community.
In the next blog, I will focus on ‘the Myths of polymer rheology”, re-examining the basic experimental knowledge (the facts) that led de Gennes and others to introduce their model and claim that it described well those results. We will see that Myths can mislead even great scientists.
Basically, THE problem with the current established view stems from the focus to describe the motion of individual chains. In my proposed research the active system is not the single individual macromolecule, embedded in a sea of interactions. I use a different statistics bearing on the whole system of conformers in interactions, from all the macromolecules at once, and try to determine the coupling laws which makes this canonical ensemble react to a macroscopic influence, a deformation for instance. Entropy of deformation is different when the system is redefined. I call this new physics of polymers "poly-conformers physics". It leans on the presence of the chains, of course, but understands the specific particularities of polymers from a statistical approach which applies to smaller chain molecules as well.
The transition to polymers involves the famous concept of "entanglements", which is at the heart of the misconceptions, I believe, of the present state of understanding. I will present experimental results on polymers that are going to shake up the established views to such a point that the immediate reaction will be as I expect it to be. But I will continue to present the evidence, step by step, like the famous inspector of Agatha Christie. I already have the mustache, anyway...
