Out of curiosity, what do professional chemists refer to when they need a quick reference for something like this? Is it all in their heads by that point, or is there special software that they use every day (some sort of knowledge base type thing...?) or how does it all work?
As a software dev I think I take it for granted that I can look up anything I need to in a second or two. How does it work for other professions with special knowledge bubbles?
I am a professional chemist (Ph.D.). After a time, one gets a chemical intuition (as I've heard it called). There are just things that you know or you know where to look and how to filter irrelevant information.
All of that depends on your training and experience. I am not particularly strong in the organic department; however, I am quite expert in areas of physical, aqueous, and computational chemistry. I'm also a geochemist, and have significant lab experience in mostly analytical chemistry. Needless to say, I'm a decent programmer, know a bunch of lab stuff, am quote proficient in linear algebra, and so on. Those main and ancillary skills together give me a pretty good idea of what's going on without having to consult any references.
Resources that I use daily: PubChem, ACS journals, my textbooks, visualization tools, and some software if I'm targeting a certain outcome. IUPAC for naming organics (rarely for me).
Also, I answer questions on the Chemistry Stack Exchange site (not so much these days) which requires a decent amount of digging in order to answer coherently.
You develop an intuition and general understanding. It’s like a carpenter sees a chair and can understand how it was built. He doesn’t have to remember every combination of pieces. With chemistry it’s the same. You just see it.
90% 0f that stuff is second nature if you've gotten a PhD.
Asymmetric boration would need a red for me, but I'd just Google it and look for an undergrad .edu explainer and sample 3-4 answers
If it's more esoteric, I'd just search through a couple of papers. There's usually a paper.
If it's some specific number, pubChem or chemSpider usually have what I'm looking for.
Honestly, I probably look stuff up on Wikipedia as much as anywhere else. They usually have plenty of basic physical properties for common chemicals. And a useful svg structure that's easily stealable for a presentation....
Most of what's in these handouts, and much, much else, is just in their heads--at least the part that's relevant to their field, obviously an organic chemist is going to have slightly different things memorized than a geochemist. For things that you have to look up, for decades the first thing you reach for would be the CRC Handbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRC_Handbook_of_Chemistry_and_... although it's on the web now https://hbcp.chemnetbase.com/contents/ContentsSearch.xhtml?d... as well as other reference materials.
Not a professional chemist (by any stretch of the imagination), but for several of these, it's as much in their heads as "what are the keywords in C?" is for C programmers. For at least some of these well, too, software exists already to do things like draw molecules [1]. Databases also exist to do things like find known properties (spectra, physical properties like melting point) for known chemicals.
[1] I guarantee every molecule drawn on the page was drawn with ChemDraw or similar tool.
A lot of special knowledge is also available within seconds on the internet, but you (solardev) don't know where. Part of being in the bubble is that you know where to find things that are in the bubble.
For an example that comes easily to my mind, a while ago there was an HN thread where someone asked what made a cross-language dictionary (e.g. English-Japanese) good or bad, and I responded with a link to FrameNet ( https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/ ) and the observation that I'd like dictionaries to include information about how to supply relevant semantic roles to the word you're looking up, which they almost never do.
There's nothing stopping anyone else from looking up FrameNet and seeing what it's about. (Though academic papers on frame semantics might be less accessible.) The obstacle is in knowing that it's there in the first place.
This would be primarily aimed at the large number of students who have to take organic chemistry as a requirement.
For organic chemistry graduate students and professional organic chemists, all this stuff will largely be so ingrained as to not to require these kinds of resources.
There are, however, a large number of people who are in chemistry fields who need occasional refreshers on introductory concepts and for that purpose, these are excellent.
All of the topics in these handouts are the kind of general knowledge that you'd get in a college undergraduate chemistry program, so it would all be familiar, i.e. if you encountered it you'd know where to look up more specific information on your particular problem.
However, a lot of the databases and tools needed to do analysis, say of an unknown compound, aren't readily available to the public, it's often curated proprietary libraries of things like spectra data, for example this is a short interesting discussion of the software used to match an unknown sample to a reference in a library, which I think might now be applying AI approaches as well:
Usually you're working on some specific problem, and thus you need access to the historical chemical literature on that problem, which as often as not is hidden behind paywalls and not available on sci-hub or similar, so you need access to a university library or similar to get all the old papers (especially their materials/methods/results) on the topic. Industrial chemistry advances might not even be published over IP concerns, which I guess is somewhat like Nvidia proprietary GPU drivers.
Highly specific software and programming information is certainly a lot more accessible, everything that's highly specific in chemistry is often harder to find and/or costs money to access.
As a software dev I think I take it for granted that I can look up anything I need to in a second or two. How does it work for other professions with special knowledge bubbles?