by Ashutosh Jogalekar
A well known physicist turned venture capitalist asked on Twitter the other day why people seem to have a harder time understanding chemistry rather than physics or biology. Chemistry is by no means harder to understand than physics or biology, but it occupies a tricky middle ground between rigor and intuition, between deduction and creation, between creativity and understanding. Understanding it can bring great dividends: Robert Oppenheimer once said that “If you want to get someone interested in science teach them a course on elementary chemistry…unlike physics it gets very quickly to the heart of things.”
Chemistry’s path was partly driven by an impulse to understand the physical world, much like the path of physics and astronomy, but somewhat differently from physics and astronomy, to consciously improve the material conditions of life. What passed for medicine, art, architecture, agriculture and commerce in the ancient world was suffused with chemistry. Whether it was indigo dye for royal textiles, mercury or arsenic for medicine, lime for protecting crops or plaster for holding together stones of medieval stone buildings, the world looked to chemistry, whether consciously or not, to feed, transport, clothe and sustain itself. But this foundational practical role that chemistry played also obscured its philosophy.
The philosophy of chemistry developed in the 18th and 19th centuries through the work of Dalton, Lavoisier, Liebig, Kekule, Mendeleev and other thinkers. They systematized the vast body of observations that natural philosophers had documented and assimilated over the years. But key questions still remained: Why did water freeze at 4 degrees Celsius? Why were gallium and mercury liquids? Why was lithium relatively stable while its cousin sodium a fiery, unstable beast? Even Mendeleev’s famed periodic table, after answering the how, did not answer the why. Read more »
