Notes On Roald Hoffmann’s Lecture “One Culture,” Part 1

This Sunday Saturday, I attended Roald Hoffmann’s lecture at the Nobel Museum, titled “One Culture: Or the Commonalities and Differences Between the Arts and the Sciences.” Hoffmann, a theoretical chemist and poet, was awarded the Nobel prize in 1981 for his work on chemical reactions.

Shortly before the lecture, he said, he had decided to recast it to present his view of chemistry, and to base the discussion of the arts versus the sciences on top of that. He said he wanted seize the opportunity to talk about chemistry in a public lecture.

He began talking about “chemistry before there were chemists,” protochemistry. He showed a couple of slides featuring 3,500 year-old Egyptian paintings, saying that creating paint was chemistry. So was metallurgy, medicine, food. One of three views of chemistry he presents is that it “existed wherever people transformed matter.”

His first definition of chemistry is as “the art, craft, and business of substances and their transformations.”

He recommends Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, about which it says, at Amazon, that it interweaves Sacks’s personal recollections with “a masterful survey of scientific history, with emphasis on the great chemists like Robert Boyle, Antoine Lavoisier, and Humphry Davy (Sacks’s personal hero).”

To be continued.