Roald
Hoffmann[1]
There was chemistry before
the chemical journal. It was described
in books, in pamphlets or broadsides, in letters to secretaries of scientific
societies. These societies, for
instance the Royal Society in London, chartered in 1662, played a critical role
in the dissemination of scientific knowledge.
Periodicals published by these societies helped to develop the
particular combination of careful measurement and mathematization that shaped
the successful new science of the time (Garfield 1981 and references cited
therein).
In time, the chemical
article took on a definitive format, which in many ways has not changed since
the middle of the 19th Century. Emotions and history are left out,
and the new is reported in a passive voice, third person style that is familiar
to all of us. What has changed is the quality of the graphics, essential to
chemistry. But the sections of the paper, the mode of presentation and
argumentation has not changed. In this ossified stylistic mode, remarkable new
discoveries, the making of molecules previously unimaginable, is reported. But
there is a lot going on under the surface of the chemical article, some of
which I describe below.
The chemical article is an
artistic creation. Let me expand on
what might be viewed as a radical exaggeration. What is art? - many things to many people. One aspect of art is aesthetic, another that
it engenders an emotional response. In
still another attempt to frame an elusive definition of that life-enhancing
human activity, I will say that art is the seeking of the essence of some
aspect of nature or of some emotion, by a human being. Art is constructed, human and patently
unnatural.
What is written in a
scientific periodical is not a true and faithful representation (if such a
thing were possible) of what transpired.
It is not a laboratory notebook, and one knows that that notebook in
turn is only a partially reliable guide to what took place, it is a more or
less (one wishes more) carefully constructed, man- or woman-made text, that
serves the rhetorical purpose (no weaker just because it’s suppressed) of
making us think better of the author.
The obstacles that are overcome highlight the success of the story.
The chemical article is a man-made,
constructed abstraction of a chemical activity. If one is lucky, it creates an emotional or aesthetic response in
its readers.
Is there something to be
ashamed of in acknowledging that our communications are not perfect mirrors,
but in substantial part literary texts?
I don’t think so. In fact, I think that there is something exquisitely
beautiful about our texts. These
“messages that abandon”, to paraphrase Jacques Derrida (1972), indeed
leave us, are flown to careful readers in every country in the world. There they are read, in their original
language, and understood; there they give pleasure and, at the same
time, they can be turned into chemical reactions, real new things. It would be incredible, were it not
happening thousands of times each day.
One of the oft-cited
distinguishing features of science, relative to the arts, is the more overt
sense of chronology in science. It is
made explicit in the copious use of references. But is it real history, or a prettified version?
A leading chemical style
guide of my time admonished: “… one approach which is to be avoided is
narration of the whole chronology of work on a problem. The full story of a research may include an
initial wrong guess, a false clue, a misinterpretation of directions, a
fortuitous circumstance; such details possibly may have entertainment value in
a talk on the research, but they are probably out of place in a formal
paper. A paper should present, as
directly as possible, the objective of the work, the results, and the
conclusions; the chance happenings along the way are of little consequence in
the permanent record (Fieser and Fieser 1960).
I am in favour of
conciseness, an economy of statement.
But the advice of this style guide, if followed, leads to real crimes
against the humanity of the scientist.
In order to present a sanitized, paradigmatic account of a chemical
study, one suppresses many of the truly creative acts. Among these are the “fortuitous
circumstances” – all of the elements of serendipity, of creative intuition at
work (Medawar 1964).
Taken in another way, the
above prescription for good scientific style demonstrates very clearly that the
chemical article is not a true representation of what transpired or was
learned, but a constructed text.
Scientists think that what
they say is not influenced by the language they use, meaning both the national
language (German, French, Chinese) and the words within that language. They think that the words employed, providing
they’re well defined, are just representations of an underlying material
reality which they, the scientists, have discovered or mathematicized. Because the words are faithful
representations of that reality they should be perfectly translatable into any
language.
That position is
defensible – as soon as the synthesis of the new high-temperature
superconductor Yba2Cu3O7-x was described, it was
reproduced, in a hundred laboratories around the globe.
But the real situation is
more complex. In another sense words
are all we have. And the words we have,
in any language, are ill defined, ambiguous.
A dictionary is a deeply circular device – just try and see how quickly
a chain of definitions closes upon itself.
Reasoning and argument, so essential to communication in science,
proceed in words. The more contentious
the argument, the simpler and more charged the words (Hoffmann 1987 and 1988).
How does a chemist get out
of this? Perhaps by realizing what some
of our colleagues in linguistics and literary criticism learned over the last
century (for an introduction to modern literary theories see Eagleton
1983). The word is a sign, a piece of
code. It signifies something, to be
sure, but what it signifies must be decoded or interpreted by the reader. If two readers have different decoding
mechanisms, then they will get different readings, different meanings. The reason that chemistry works around the
world, so that BASF can build a plant in Germany or Brazil and expect it to
work, is that chemists have in their education been taught the same set of
signs.
I think this accounts in
part for what Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker noted in a perceptive
article on “The Language of Physics” (1974).
If one examines a physics (read chemistry) research lecture in detail
one finds it to be full of imprecise statements, incomplete sentences, halts
etc. The seminar is usually given
extemporaneously, without notes, whereas humanists most often read a text
verbatim. The language of physics or
chemistry lectures is often imprecise.
Yet chemists understand these presentations (well, at least some
do). The reason is that the science
lecturer invokes a code, a shared set of common knowledge. He or she doesn’t have to complete a
sentence – most everyone knows what is meant halfway through that sentence.
A nice, even-toned,
scientific article may hide strong emotional undercurrents, rhetorical
manoeuvring, and claims of power. One
has already been mentioned – the desire to convince, to scream, “I’m right, all
of you are wrong”, clashing with the established rules of civility supposedly
governing scholarly behaviour. Where
this balance is struck depends on the individual.
Another dialogue that is
unvoiced is between experiment and theory.
There is nothing special about the love-hate relationship between
experimentalists and theorists in chemistry.
You can substitute “writer” and “critic” and talk about literature, or
find the analogous characteristics in economics. The lines of the relationship are easily caricatured –
experimentalists think theorists are unrealistic, build castles in the
sky. Yet they need the frameworks of
understanding that theorists provide.
Theorists may distrust experiments, wish that people would do that
missing experiment, but where would the theorists be without any contact with
reality?
An amusing manifestation of
the feelings about this issue is to be found in the occasionally extended
quasi-theoretical discussion sections of experimental papers. These sections in part contain a true search
for understanding, but in part what goes on in them is an attempt to use the
accepted reductionist ideal (with its exaggerated hailing of the more
mathematical) – so as to impress one’s colleagues. On the other side, I often put more references to experimental
work in my theoretical papers than I should, because I’m trying to “buy
credibility time” from my experimental audience. If I show experimental chemists that I know of their work,
perhaps they’ll give me a little time and listen to my wild speculations.
Another struggle, related,
is between pure and applied chemistry.
It’s interesting to reflect that this separation also may have had its
roots in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century; it seems to this observer that
in the other chemical power of that time, Britain, the distinction was less
congealed. Quite typical in a pure
chemical paper is a reaching out after some justification in terms of
industrial use. But at the same time
there is a falling back, an unwillingness to deal with the often unruly,
tremendously complicated world of, say, industrial catalysis, And in industrial
settings there is a reaching after academic credentials (quite typical, for
instance, of the leaders of chemical industry in Germany).
The language of science is a
language under stress. Words are being
made to describe things that seem indescribable in words – equations, chemical
structures and so forth. Words don’t,
cannot mean all that they stand for, yet they are all we have to describe
experience. By being a natural language
under tension, the language of science is inherently poetic. There is metaphor aplenty in science. Emotions emerge shaped as states of matter
and, more interestingly, matter acts out what goes on in the soul.
One thing is certainly not
true: that scientists have some greater insight into the workings of nature
than poets. Interestingly, I find that
many humanists deep down feel that scientists have such inner knowledge that is
barred to them. Perhaps we scientists
do, but in such carefully circumscribed pieces of the universe! Poetry soars, all around the tangible, in
deep dark, through a world we reveal and make.
Derrida, J; in his essay
“Signature Event Context” in Marges de la Philosophie, Editions Minuit,
Paris 1972, pp 365-393; translation (by A. Bass): Margins of Philosophy,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1982, pp 307-330.
Eagleton, T.; Literary
Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1983.
Fieser, L. F. and Fieser,
M.; Style Guide for Chemists, Reinhold, New York 1960, pp 51-52.
Garfield, E.; Essays of
an Information Scientist, ISI
Press, Philadelphia, 1981, pp 394-400.
Hoffmann, R.; Am. Sci. 75
(1987) 619; 76 (1988) 182.
Medawar, P. B.; Saturday
Review, August 1, 1964, p. 42, also argues that the standard format of the
scientific article misrepresents the thought processes that go into discovery.
Von Weizsäcker, C. F.; Die
Einheit der Natur, dtv, Munich 1974, pp. 61-83.
Parts of this article have
been previously published in Angewandte
Chemie International Edition, 27(12): 1593-1602, (1988) and The Scientist,
March 21, 1988 p. 10, Copyright 1988, The Scientist inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.
[1] Roald Hoffmann is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters and Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-1301. In 1981 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kenichi Fukui for his work in applying quantum mechanics to predict the course of chemical reactions