Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
Dostoevsky as it is of Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood or Kazuo Ishiguro,
to pick out just three contemporary writers who have drawn on ideas
from science. Physics and biology appear to explore the major questions
that a work of fiction might also explore: What does it mean to be
human? What is the nature of existence? Amis used the post-Einsteinian
plastic notion of time to run the Holocaust in reverse in his topic
Time's
Arrow
(1992), while both Atwood (
Oryx and Crake
, 2003) and Ishiguro
(
Never Let Me Go
, 2005) project genetic engineering into a dystopian
future.
Chemistry, in contrast, seems to have little to offer in the way of
grand themes. In fact, it often seems today not to be asking any questions
about the world at all: it is primarily a synthetic science, a science bound
up with making things. Even many scientists, if they have no real knowl-
edge of chemistry, seem unable to find a way to fit this discipline into
their vision of what science is about, namely the process of discovering
how the world works. Most current distinctions that are drawn between
science and technology will place today's chemistry squarely within the
realm of technology, or at least applied science, concerned as it is much
more with invention than with discovery.
That was not always so. When far less was known about the material
constitution of the world and the nature of its elemental building blocks,
chemistry became temporarily a 'discovery science'
par excellence
. This
was why, when chemists were trying to understand what made elements
join in some combinations but not others - to understand what they
called the notion of affinity - Wolfgang von Goethe famously found in
chemistry an appropriate metaphor for the study of human relationships
in his novel
Elective Affinities
(1809).
Now things are different. The 'big questions' of chemistry - what the
elements are and how they unite in the material world - have been more
or less answered. Today the vast majority of publications in the chemical
literature are concerned with synthesis (Schummer 2004), which can
look like, and indeed is sometimes practiced as, more of a craft than a
science.
That is not, however, an
a priori
reason why it should lack appeal to
modern writers. To say that chemistry is neglected in fiction because it
poses no big questions is not to offer a necessary truth; rather, it is to say
