## Organic and Inorganic Chemistry Lesson of the Day – Optical Rotation is a Bulk Property

It is important to note that optical rotation is usually discussed as a bulk property, because it’s usually measured as a bulk property by a polarimeter.  Any individual enantiomeric molecule can almost certainly rotate linearly polarized light.  However, in a bulk sample of a chiral substance, there is usually another molecule that can rotate light in the opposite direction.  This is due to the uniform distribution of the stereochemistry of a random sample of the molecules of one compound.  (In other words, the substance consists of different stereoisomers of one compound, and the proportions of the different stereoisomers are roughly equal.)  Because one molecule’s rotation of the light can be cancelled by another molecule’s optical rotation in the opposite direction, such a random sample of the compound would have no net optical rotation.  This type of cancellation will definitely occur in a racemic mixture.  However, if a substance is enantiomerically pure, then all of the molecules in that substance will rotate linearly polarized light in the same direction – this substance is optically active.

## Determining chemical concentration with standard addition: An application of linear regression in JMP – A Guest Blog Post for the JMP Blog

I am very excited to announce that I have been invited by JMP to be a guest blogger for its official blog!  My thanks to Arati Mejdal, Global Social Media Manager for the JMP Division of SAS, for welcoming me into the JMP blogging community with so much support and encouragement, and I am pleased to publish my first post on the JMP Blog!  Mark Bailey and Byron Wingerd from JMP provided some valuable feedback to this blog post, and I am fortunate to get the chance to work with and learn from them!

Following the tradition of The Chemical Statistician, this post combines my passions for statistics and chemistry by illustrating how simple linear regression can be used for the method of standard addition in analytical chemistry.  In particular, I highlight the useful capability of the “Inverse Prediction” function under “Fit Model” platform in JMP to estimate the predictor given an observed response value (i.e. estimate the value of $x_i$ given $y_i$).  Check it out!

## Discovering Argon with the 2-Sample t-Test

I learned about Lord Rayleigh’s discovery of argon in my 2nd-year analytical chemistry class while reading “Quantitative Chemical Analysis” by Daniel Harris.  (William Ramsay was also responsible for this discovery.)  This is one of my favourite stories in chemistry; it illustrates how diligence in measurement can lead to an elegant and surprising discovery.  I find no evidence that Rayleigh and Ramsay used statistics to confirm their findings; their paper was published 13 years before Gosset published about the t-test.  Thus, I will use a 2-sample t-test in R to confirm their result.

Photos of Lord Rayleigh

Source: Wikimedia Commons