Plastics. The future is plastics.
But perhaps you'd prefer to work on sub-millibarn resolution bio-hyperdimensional plasmatic space polyimaging.
The coolest computational chemistry I have run across for some time was a study released about two weeks ago, from the Weizmann Institute of Science, which studied quantum effects in chemistry
To see if quantum phenomena were in play, the researchers looked at reaction rates -- a measure of how fast a reaction proceeds -- at different collision energies. At high collision energies, classical effects dominated and the reaction rates slowed down gradually as the temperature dropped. But below about 3 K, the reaction rate in the merged beams suddenly took on peaks and valleys. This is a sign that a quantum phenomenon -- known as scattering resonances, due to tunneling -- was occurring in the reactions. At low energies, particles started behaving as waves; those waves that were able to tunnel through the potential barrier interfered constructively with the reflected waves upon collision. This creates a standing wave that corresponds to particles trapped in orbits around one another. Such interference occurs at particular energies and is marked by a dramatic increase in reaction rates.
(Puns about it being the "coolest" because the study went down to 0.01 Kelvin will not be tolerated :-) )
