Notes On Roald Hoffmann’s Lecture “One Culture,” Part 2

Continuing posting my notes from Roald Hoffmann’s lecture at the Nobel Museum, titled “One Culture: Or the Commonalities and Differences Between the Arts and the Sciences.”

Next, Hoffmann showed a slide featuring Carl Barks’s “The Mad Chemist,” in which Donald Duck gets a bump on his head, and suddenly starts producing “Duckmite” (“the most ghastly explosive ever cooked up by man!”). Hoffmann said that chemistry is commonly perceived as being about change, often explosive change.

Then he talked about alchemy. My notes says, except in all caps, “Philosophies of Transformation.” Hoffmann said that “alchemy is very interesting,” that it was philosophy + protoscience. He quoted someone as saying (roughly) that “modern chemists, screaming to heaven that they have nothing to do with alchemy.” Googling, I found this in an article of his in American Scientist, titled “Meissen Chymistry,” seemingly about the art of making porcelain.

Jokes about today’s alchemy being medicine, where chemists make gold by selling products in pharmacies (of course better put than this).

I wrote: “[alchemy] & [chemistry] still in need of each other,” but I can’t quite remember what he said.

Hoffmann showed a Dutch, “late Medici,” painting portraying a scene of alchemy; the “first illustration of the sociology of …” – of what, of alchemy or chemistry? Margin notes: “the professor + the graduate students” (so probably chemistry).

Next he talked about molecules. “Without waiting for microscopes … we have learned that inside these substances” are molecules. Shows a couple of slides of simple molecules, the most complex one being buckminsterfullerene (the Buckyball). Then shows an insanely complex molecular model. Hoffmann says his favorite is hemoglobin (the one that looks like tangled garlands).

“We favor the symmetrical molecule,” he said. Simple mathematical equations. “But nature just refuses to be simplified.”

Now begins to link this to art. Complexity vs. simplicity. Molecular models being architectonic, structural. Shows a neo-classicist building, a Palladio villa, Taj Mahal, a Bavarian church (which he says has the same complexity as the surrounding nature). Shows the baroque interior of another (?) Bavarian church, a Gaudì building, and mosaic adornments in the park surrounding it.

This part made me think of Christopher Alexander, and Stewart Brand, who writes about the organic complexity of buildings, and who also criticise most of modern architecture as lacking this complexity. Brand talks about time and adaptation. Chemistry is about change, which is also about time.

Simplicity/complexity, order/disorder. Aesthetic. The mosaics of the Gaudì park are random, but are still symmetric – “therefore aesthetic,” Hoffmann said.

To be continued.