Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
because, as Lavoisier hoped, its language looks like algebra, but with
jaw-cracking long names - the jargon is hard to break into, and now-
adays proficiency in mathematics has become more important than
manual dexterity. Then, the conflict of 1914-18 was 'the chemists' war',
where poison gas particularly struck the public imagination as a horri-
fying manifestation of the science. At the same time, with Einstein and
his contemporaries, chemistry was displaced from its elite and funda-
mental position. It was plausible to say that it was reduced to physics
(though really no truer than to say that architecture is reduced to phys-
ics), and that the new Newton would be found among physicists. Chem-
ists had an essential role to play in the new teams and groups which in
the twentieth century came to replace the lone genius like Faraday, but in
physics or biology it seemed everyone's essential service-science - not
very glamorous.
Chemistry seemed to have the cure for pollution like London's, where
Punch
commented in 1862 upon hopes for a clean-up:
The passenger of Chelsea boat
Unwonted salmon shall admire,
Where dogs and cats he used [to] note,
Defunct that on thy breast did float,
Emitting exhalations dire. [
Punch,
15
th
November 1862, p. 198]
In the event, it was engineers laying a new sewage system rather than
Faraday's experiments with chlorine that brought improvement. Chemi-
cal industry has since acquired a reputation for polluting, and the phar-
maceutical industry for profiteering.
8.
Conquering or Worshipping Nature?
What could be done, if like King Canute we hope to turn this tide?
Chemistry was a problematic science for natural theologians, because
while astronomers wonderingly contemplated the starry heavens, and
natural historians the eye of a fly, chemists busily sought to improve on
nature (Brooke & Cantor 1998, Knight 2004c). This led to a rhetoric of
conquest (Schummer 2006), deeply unpopular in our 'green' days. The
rhetoric of chemistry has long been macho (Knight 2000a), full of im-
