Notes On Roald Hoffmann’s Lecture “One Culture,” Part 3
More notes from Roald Hoffmann’s lecture at the Nobel Museum, titled “One Culture: Or the Commonalities and Differences Between the Arts and the Sciences.”
Four points on art and science; I can’t remember any details, though:
- “both create things that weren’t on earth before”
- “economy of statement (poetry)”
- “craftmanship”
- “poetry/therapy” (strange notes here: poetry “may be” therapy; but real poetry isn’t; I guess he meant that poetry that is therapy is written solely for oneself, and thus doesn’t communicate with others; Hoffmann is a poet as well as a theoretical chemist)
Next – and this is interesting – Hoffmann shows Mendeleyev’s periodic table, then the earliest found draft on it from Mendeleyev’s notebooks. 90 degrees rotated from what we’re used to now. “The evidence of a struggle to understand.” (Aside: “Inspiration matters, not perspiration,” in the naïve view of creativity, the notion that poets walk around, and out comes the poem in a flash.)
Then he shows a William Blakes “The Tyger” – the last draft, which is very sketchy. Lots of things crossed out and changed. And he shows it alongside Medeleyev’s periodic table.
Incredibly fascinating.
“Not the same world … both are a struggle … to make sense … of a beautiful/terrible world that is around us.” (That is, the drafts and sketches of Medeleyev and Blake are both evidence of struggle to make sense of the world.)
This marked the end of the lecture, after which a Q&A was held.
To be continued (I’m only halfway through my notes).