Cake Engineering

Sports, dessert, and chemistry

Baseball outfielder Jonny Gomes was traded a week ago. Only nine months previously, he had been widely hailed as one of the spiritual leaders of a team that won the World Series, considered to be a ‘chemistry guy’ who changed the clubhouse culture. Many of the narratives at the time chose not to focus on the ability and skills of the players, but instead obsessed over the fact that Gomes had helped convince all the players to grow long beards over the duration of the entire season, leading to Beard Night at the ballpark and to the team labelled the “Band of Bearded Brothers”, an entire ream of sportswriting mindlessly engrossed on chemistry instead of athleticism. Hey, a narrative is a narrative, and God forbid a different approach get written.

This year, Gomes’s team was doing poorly, despite returning many of the same players from that Band of Formerly Bearded Brothers. Upon getting traded, Gomes was asked about the team and his usual clubhouse role, and had one of the greatest quotes I’ve ever heard from an athlete:

“Chemistry is the icing on the cake. It’s not the cake.”

Icing is the only thing you see until you cut in. It’s the artwork and the image presented; if you were to analyze the cake without ever cutting in, you’d certainly be focusing on the icing, whether the icing was clean-shaven or bearded or whatever narrative was to be constructed about the presentation.

And sure, you can enjoy spooning out a couple of bites of icing straight out of the container, but you’ll get sick of it pretty quickly. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll realize that you would really have preferred some base underneath the globs of sweetness.

But this quote works on multiple levels.

If you ask an undergraduate student why they decided to major in chemical engineering, you’ll very likely hear the same line about 80 percent of the time:

“I liked chemistry and I liked math in high school.”

You almost always hear this line.

And then you wait until the chemical engineering student is about halfway through their degree, and you get the standard follow-up:

“There’s not as much chemistry in chemical engineering as I expected.”

You almost always hear this realization.

It’s such a revelation to a student, made at the point that it’s too late to switch out of the major without having to mostly start college over again, that drives some students a little crazy. When I was an undergraduate, I met a student who double majored in chemical engineering and English, and he was ecstatic at that point that he had the double major, because once he graduated, he never wanted to do chemical engineering ever again.

So, no. Chemistry is the icing on the cake. It’s not the cake.

Chemistry is the beautiful visual you think of. It’s the novel chemicals being produced, it’s the elements being discovered or mixed and compounds being constructed and catalysts interacting and the reactions synthesizing and decomposing. It’s the smoking beakers and the dramatic color changes and the bursts of flame. That’s chemistry.

Chemical engineering is the cake. ChemEs say, great, you made these chemicals. Now let’s figure out how we can mass produce them, how we can utilize their properties, how we can find applications for them. Chemical engineering is heat exchangers and distillation columns, it’s fluid friction in pipes and particle filtration, it’s air flow and fluid flow, it’s large scale factories that originated back at the lab bench. Chemical engineering is taking chemistry and implementing it.

ChemEs say, you’ve got something nice there, now let’s actually give it a reason to exist. ChemEs say, you’ve got some nice icing; now, let’s stop eating it out of the container and do something with it.

Chemical engineering is both the icing and the cake — and if you throw a number of layers in there, the amount of icing you squeeze into the final product is up to you. But the cake itself is a whole lot of math with some writing and thinking — and there’s a lot of cake in the cake.

Anyway, that’s why I’m grateful to baseball.

Because now I can finally explain what I do.

And help undergraduates realize what they’re getting into before it’s too late.

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For more work by Dante Shepherd, please visit Surviving the World — a chalkboard photocomic updated seven days a week!