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Brilliant Light: A Chemical Boyhood
From: Columbia University
| By:
Oliver Sacks |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Oliver Sacks has a relationship with each chemical element in the periodic table. He describes with delight the distinct  characteristics of each one, how each came to be discovered and received by scientists, and his own enjoyment or disagreements with each. He channels the chemists of the last three centuries and speaks of them as if they are old friends. Sacks (right) is perhaps the most well-known practicing neurologist in the United States and is a successful and commended writer of seven books. He is best known for his book Awakenings and the movie based on it starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, which dramatized Sacks's pioneering work, early in his career, with catatonic patients.
Drawing from his new memoir, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (Fall 2001), Sacks reminisces about his childhood fascination with the periodic table and the history, theory and physicality of each of the chemical elements. |
Oliver Sacks describes his childhood fascination with chemistry. "My uncle's light factory for me was a classroom, a lab, a museum, a place where I had tutorials."
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 see how alive and well chemistry is at Columbia. I've seen something of the organic, physical and inorganic chemistry going on here, and, most memorably, some STM [scanning tunneling microscopy] images of atoms and molecules. Dalton or Perrin would have given their eyes to see this! |
 In my day, of course, there was no thought that one would ever see an atom, and 50 years before my day there was some doubt as to whether atoms actually existed. Roscoe, for example, thought that atoms might be nothing more than little wooden models invented by John Dalton. |
I have very much enjoyed touring the relics of the chemistry department's Chandler Museum, and seeing the wonderful lightbulbs and batteries. I have a thing about lightbulbs, and batteries and minerals and old chemical apparatus. I do hope this museum can be put together again. I think many of the most important influences on me were of a nineteenth-century sort, and they included museums, so I felt very much at home today. |
Chemistry was my first love and passion. Obviously I cannot say anything lectorial or prescriptive or informative about it; I can only be somewhat reminiscent and try to give you some idea of what it was like being a boy growing up in London during the war. "The war" for me, of course, was World War II. I was a boy who had seven chemical uncles--my mother was the 16th of 18, and seven of her nine brothers were in chemistry or mineralogy--and, not unnaturally, I developed a passion for chemistry. |
Uncle Tungsten and his heavy metals
Before the war, I'd been fascinated by all sorts of things around the house and garden, in particular by various metals. I was full of questions about metals. Why were they shiny, why smooth? Why cool, why hard, why heavy, why did they bend, not break, why did they ring? My mother tried to explain, but eventually, when I exhausted her patience, she would say, "That's all I can tell you, you'll have to quiz Uncle Dave to learn more." |
We had called him Uncle Tungsten for as long as I could remember, because he manufactured lightbulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire. I often visited him in his old factory in Farringdon and watched him at work, in a wing collar, with his shirtsleeves rolled up. The heavy, dark tungsten powder would be pressed, hammered, sintered while red hot, then drawn into finer and finer wire for the filaments. |
Uncle's hands were seamed with the black powder, beyond the power of any washing to get out. After 30 years of his working with tungsten, I imagined, the heavy element was in his lungs and bones, in every vessel and viscus, every tissue of his body. I thought of this as a wonder, not a curse, his body invigorated and fortified by the mighty element. |
Whenever I visited the factory, he would take me around the machines, or have his foreman do so. The foreman was a short, muscular man, a Popeye with enormous forearms, a palpable testament to the benefits of working with tungsten. I never tired of the ingenious machines or the furnace where the black powder was compacted from a powdery incoherence into dense, hard bars with a gray sheen. |
During my visits to the factory, Uncle Dave would teach me about metals, with little experiments. I knew that mercury, that strange liquid metal, was incredibly heavy and dense. Even lead floated on it, as my uncle showed me with a lead bullet and a bowl of quicksilver. But then he pulled out a small gray bar from his pocket, and to my amazement it sank immediately to the bottom. This, he said, was his metal, tungsten. |
Uncle loved the density of the tungsten he made, and its refractoriness, and its great chemical stability, and he loved to handle it--the wire, the powder, but the little bars and ingots most of all. He caressed them, balanced them, tenderly, it seemed to me, in his hands. "Feel it, Oliver," he would say, thrusting a bar on me. "Nothing in the world feels like sintered tungsten." He would tap the little bars and they would emit a deep clink. "The sound of tungsten," Uncle Dave would say. "Nothing like it." I did not know whether this was true, but I had never questioned it. |
Tungsten, W, remains a very favorite element. I always need to have some around. You know how it is. I love all the minerals of tungsten; a piece of wolframite is one of my paperweights. I also have a bar of magnesium, by comparison not very dense. I wish I could have a bar of lithium, and perhaps one of you will find a way of rendering a bar of lithium safe and handleable. I don't have a bar of osmium; alas, I don't think I could afford one, but in the Chandler Museum I saw some early lightbulbs with filaments made out of osmium. And that was very nice. |
My uncle's light factory for me was a classroom, a lab, a museum, a place where I had tutorials. It was the place where I was inducted into something of technology and metallurgy and chemistry. There were various processes involved in making the lightbulbs. It was fascinating to see how the glass was blown, and how the filaments were prepared, and the tungsten wire made into coils, and then coiled coils. |
I was given a nice demonstration of what happens to a decapitated bulb. If it's turned on, it flares brilliantly, and in a few seconds the tungsten oxidizes and you end up with a little yellow WO3 at each end. Irving Langmuir, who was at Columbia and who was one of my uncle's heroes, was the first man to think of replacing vacuum bulbs with bulbs filled with an inert gas. He originally used nitrogen, but tungsten tends to form a nitride at high temperatures, so then he used argon. My introduction to the inert gases, at least to argon, was in my uncle's factory. |
Xenon birthday balloons and gallium swimming pools
I loved the inert gases. On our cricket field during the war there was an enormous barrage balloon filled with helium, and helium was a favorite element. At the other end, xenon was another favorite. I liked to see helium balloons go up, but I wondered what would happen if one had xenon balloons, whether they would fall with a thump on the floor. |
I had a fantasy for 53 years that I would like to see and have a xenon balloon, and on my 65th birthday the people at Columbia were kind enough to give me access to some xenon, and I had some xenon balloons. They were a most unusual feature at a birthday party. You don't see xenon balloons everywhere. Helium, as you know, makes your voice go very high, and xenon makes it go very low. |
I like heavy gases, as I like heavy solids. I did wonder about a gas, a vapor at least, which was even heavier than xenon, namely tungsten hexafluoride. It is just about a vapor at room temperature, but is a little unstable and hydrolyzes to produce HF, and you don't want that. So I stuck with xenon. |
Sometimes, to get the last traces of oxygen and nitrogen out of bulbs and vacuum tubes, uncle would have to use a "getter," and he used cesium as a getter. It was a hot day when he showed me the cesium, and it was liquid. I didn't know one had any liquid elements beside mercury. Later, of course, I learned about gallium. Gallium is lovely stuff to handle, and after awhile, with the warmth of your hands, it starts to leak through the fingers. |
There was a time when I was a boy and I had a mold which I used to make teaspoons of gallium, and this pleased the guests. As the gallium melted, the spoon would gradually sink deeper and deeper in the cup, until all you would have left was a little pool of gallium in your tea. I like swimming as well, and another one of my fantasies was swimming in gallium. |
By the way, I'm glad that the world's supply of gallium is OK. As you know, in 1997 there was the Great Gallium Heist. There is a big neutrino detector in the Caucasus, which has 400 tons of ultrapure liquid gallium. Some thieves came with an enormous container truck and a siphon. They got through all the locks, and almost got to the gallium, but were stopped just in time. It's nice stuff, gallium, and as you know it's the first element that Mendeleev predicted. |
Kitchen chemistry
In my uncle's factory I saw all the processes which went into making a bulb. He also had a well-equipped lab where he introduced me to a lot of chemistry, his enthusiasm for chemistry and his enthusiasm for the history of chemistry. For me the history of a subject is inseparable from the subject. My uncle was given to hero worship, and if Langmuir was his twentieth-century hero, Scheele was his eighteenth-century hero. He himself was a rather eighteenth-century man. |
I got more and more excited by chemistry in my uncle's lab, and I decided I needed to have a little lab of my own. Not just a chemistry set, but a real lab. My parents and my brothers had introduced me even before the war to some kitchen chemistry. Pouring vinegar on a piece of chalk in a tumbler and watching it fizz, and pouring the heavy gas that's produced like an invisible cataract over a candle flame, putting it out straight away. Or taking red cabbage pickled with vinegar and adding household ammonia to neutralize it. (Once I forgot to tell them that I had added ammonia to the cabbage.) Adding it would lead to an amazing transformation, the juice going through all sorts of colors, from red to various shades of purple, to turquoise and blue, and finally to green. |
I had a great love of colors, and looking at color was part of the fascination of chemistry for me, especially with the transition metals, and above all with vanadium. There is no joy like taking pentavalent vanadium (which is yellow) and putting in zinc amalgam and seeing it go blue, then green and finally mauve, the color of lilacs. Even now, 50 years later, whenever I see lilacs they remind me of divalent vanadium. And then, of course, you add some permanganate and it goes to green, and blue, and yellow once again. |
I enjoyed these experiments, but I did not feel a real chemical passion, a desire to compound, to isolate, to decompose, to see substances changing, until I met Uncle Dave and saw his lab and his passion for experiments of all kinds. |
<I>Chemical Recreations</I> and other vintage tomes
After hearing him talk about chemistry and starting to read about chemistry and chemists myself, I longed to have a lab of my own. One of my first readings in chemistry was called Chemical Recreations, and the very title of the book tells you that it's in the mode of fun, but it's serious and creative fun. All the books I had were dated around 1860. It was very easy to get them cheaply in secondhand stores. They must have been produced in enormous editions--with Griffin's Chemical Recreations, originally printed in 1828, I had the 10th edition. |
There was another very popular book I loved, John Henry Pepper's The Playbook of Metals. These books are charming, of course, and they have pictures; this one has a picture of Faraday. In this book, ammonium is regarded as a metal. Thallium had just been discovered at the time--it was one of the first metals to be discovered because of its spectroscopic appearance. No one knew what to do with thallium, and so it was grouped with lead. The metal is rather leadlike, but as you know it is also sort of a chemical platypus. It's like the alkaline metals in some ways, but also like silver, and like the Group III metals in other ways. |
After many pages spent on metals, Pepper gave a tiny space for organic chemistry. Organic chemistry had not really developed at this time, although it was just about to do so. Here I have to apologize, because my love was for inorganic chemistry. I made some mercaptans, and ethyl acetates, and other esters and this and that, but my real love was for inorganic chemistry and the metals. |
 Another book of the same vintage which enchanted me was J. Norman Lockyer's book The Spectroscope and Its Applications. Lockyer was the first editor of Nature. It was Lockyer who, during the solar eclipse of 1868, found a new yellow line in the solar spectrum different from the sodium line, and he called it helium. (It had an "-ium" ending because he thought it was going to be a metal, and all metals were -ium. I know you'll mention tantalum and platinum, but in general they were -ium.) |
 One of the lovely things about these old chemistry books was the advertisements. Lockyer ends his book by saying that everyone should have a pocket spectroscope so they could do instant analyses of the sun and the stars. I did have a pocket spectroscope, but I don't know that I discovered anything much. |
After Bunsen and Kirchhoff, spectroscopy was intensely in the air. It was in the cultural climate. In Our Mutual Friend, written in 1864, Dickens imagines a moral spectroscopy. He wonders whether the inhabitants of some distant planet might look at the moral light of the earth through a spectroscope and wonder what sort of species we are. |
I'm not sure whether Sherlock Holmes ever detects old bloodstains spectroscopically. But in one of Conan Doyle's "Professor Challenger" books, the advent of a poisonous cloud of gas is first noted by some change in the Fraunhofer lines in the spectrum. These spectral things were common knowledge, literary knowledge, in the last third of the nineteenth century. |
All this was pre-Mendeleevian. My own first chemistry was pre-Mendeleevian. I looked at things almost at random, although obviously I started to see similarities. Humphry Davy was one of my heroes. In my day one had these beautiful little Alembic Club reprints. I had The Decomposition of Fixed Alkalis by Humphry Davy, The Elementary Nature of Chlorine by Humphry Davy, and Scheele on The Discovery of Oxygen. I loved reading original accounts. They were so vivid, so fresh, so enthusiastic. I don't think any textbook description or paraphrase can in any way substitute for the original account. |
A lab of one's own
Obviously, one of the first things one does in a lab of one's own is to throw sodium into water, to throw potassium into water. I loved seeing the comparison. If you throw lithium into water, it moves around in a fairly sedate way. Sodium buzzes round, and potassium throws off streams of flame. It was at this point that my parents, seeing globules of potassium in the air, thought it might be a good idea for me to have some precautions. A few things like goggles and gloves. A fume cupboard and hood were set up. |
I felt Humphry Davy would have envied me having access to rubidium and cesium. Rubidium is more violent, but cesium explodes in water and you tend to get a shock wave. I think cesium was almost the end of me and my lab. But I don't bear it any grudge. So even then I was already thinking of the alkali metals as a group. |
My uncle gave me all sorts of things to set up the lab, but he said a balance was the most important. One of the things which impressed me was his mixing together a strong acid and an alkali, these two lethal things, and then saying, "Drink!" I didn't know which one I was going to die from, but of course by the time they had been mixed it was only salt water. Similarly, I remember him burning sodium and chlorine and producing sodium chloride. The constancy of chemical combination excited me very much, and I reacted with rapture when I heard about John Dalton. The notion of fixities of combination had an obvious explanation in the atomic weights and valences of atoms. |
I soon knew the atomic weights by heart. At the time, London bus tickets had one or two letters and one, two or three numbers, and I used to collect them. I would try to get my initials with corresponding atomic weights. I could get an O 16, and an S 32, and if I was lucky a W 184. Though none of this really made much sense until I saw the periodic table. |
The beautiful truth of the periodic table
While I was having my chemical fun, I was doing classics at school. I hated school, I wasn't very good at school, I didn't like class. No one knew about the chemistry outside the family. But I had the lab, the library and museums. And the real epiphany for me came in the Science Museum, when I was 10, when I discovered the periodic table, up on the fifth floor. Not one of your nasty, natty modern little spirals but a solid rectangular one, covering the whole wall, with separate cubicles for every element, and the actual elements, whenever possible, in place. Chlorine, greenish-yellow, swirling brown bromine, jet-black but violet-vapored crystals of iodine. I remember being struck that the iodine was at the top of the bottle. Obviously, over the years it had sublimed and recrystallized. Heavy slugs of uranium, pellets of lithium floating in oil, they even had the inert gases. They were invisible, of course, inside the sealed tubes, but one knew they were there. |
The actual presence of these elements reinforced the feeling that these were indeed the elemental building blocks of the universe, that the whole universe was here in microcosm. I had an overwhelming sense of truth and beauty when I saw the periodic table. I felt that this was not a mere human construct, arbitrary, but an actual vision of an eternal cosmic order, and that any future discoveries and advances, whatever they might add, would only reinforce, reaffirm, the truth of its order. |
I don't know whether any of you have read Mendeleev's The Principles of Chemistry. He's very easy to read, he's delightful. He has a way of writing footnotes which occupy most of the page. I think my own disposition to long footnotes may have been started by Mendeleev. He wrote one particularly long footnote about ammonium. I was very tantalized by ammonium. Humphry Davy had tried to purify ammonium, but of course he only got ammonia and hydrogen. The idea of a pseudoelement confused and fascinated me. |
The Principles is a deeply autobiographical book. Mendeleev came from a huge family, the 14th of 14 children. He had a very noble mother who gave her own life, trudging for thousands of miles through Russia, from Siberia to Moscow, to get him to university. Even as a student, Mendeleev had had a passion for classification. He was interested in animal taxonomy and botanicals and chemicals. |
But chemical classification was really a mess at the time. Of great importance to Mendeleev and many others was a great conference held in 1860 at Karlsruhe. The conference was designed to bring the chemists of the world together and end a 50-year confusion about atoms, molecules and atomic weights and equivalent weights. In particular there was a wonderful talk given by Cannizzaro, which finally resolved a great many of the problems, and allowed reasonable atomic weights for most of the elements. Lothar Meyer, who was there, described his immense sense of relief; he said the scales fell from his eyes after he listened to Cannizzaro. |
Not coincidentally, there were six independent periodic systems in the 1860s. There was Mendeleev, there was Lothar Meyer, there was Newlands and Odling in England, there was the Chancourtois in France, who designed a "telluric helix," and there was a German in America, Hinrichs. Suddenly it became clear that there was a periodic repetition of the properties of the elements if you arranged them in order of atomic weight. Werner (whom you associate with coordination chemistry) made a lovely periodic table in 1905, which looks virtually identical to the current electronic table. In effect, you have the four blocks--the s, p, d and f blocks--categorized on purely chemical grounds. |
Newlands liked to say that every eighth element started a new chemical octave, and this led him to talk about cosmic music. Incidentally, all sorts of musical metaphors were used. When these complex spectrums were first published, around 1870, one chemist said that atoms must be as complex as grand pianos, and atoms were somehow seen as things with some basic tune and higher harmonics. |
One of the lovely things about the periodic table is that it doesn't have to be a table; it can take all sorts of forms. Mendeleev first published his table in 1869. We had already seen a great circular table by 1870. By 1885 Bohr had modified a table created by Bayley. The octaves (or, if you put in the inert gases, the nonaves) work until you get up to element 21, when you have an extra decad, of the transition elements. Originally Mendeleev used the term "transition elements" for what he called his Group VIII, the iron and osmium metals, but then it was extended to include other elements. |
I was particularly fond of the rare earths, but they drove Mendeleev mad. I think there were only five or six of them known at the time, but during his lifetime another half dozen of them were found. He didn't know what to do with them. But I loved the rare earths. |
My uncle used to talk about "the filament metals." The filament metals have melting points above 3,000 degrees, and there are four of them. Osmium was the one originally used for filament, and then tantalum, and then tungsten. He was fascinated with them, and fascinated by the elements yet to be discovered. He was fascinated by rhenium, the "newest" filament metal, a fascination which he shared with me. In a way the filament metals and my interest in the color of metals made me very interested in the transition elements. |
Mendeleev never knew why the periodic table should work, what the actual basis of chemical properties and periodicity might be. People were also very puzzled by spectroscopy. Why should iron have 500 lines in its spectrum? Balmer in 1885 got his nice formula for the hydrogen spectrum, and it was clear that there was something fundamental here, too, but people didn't know what. |
One of my favorite periodic tables was the Festival of Britain periodic table. It's like a galaxy, like Andromeda, and it makes you wonder why the elements stop at uranium. Why shouldn't they go on and on? I was fascinated by the possibilities of prediction. |
Educated guesses: predicting new elements
It had a stunning effect when Mendeleev made a successful prediction of new elements on the basis of his periodic system. He thought there were several gaps, and he predicted what he called eka-aluminium, eka-boron, eka-silicon. People thought he was this crazy Russian. Then in 1875 Lecoq de Boisbaudran found a new element which he named gallium, either patriotically or jokingly in reference to his own name (Lecoq means "the cock," and "gallus" is Latin for a cock). |
When Lecoq published some of his findings about gallium, he was contradicted by Mendeleev. He thought Mendeleev was trying to claim credit for discovering the new element, but in fact Mendeleev's predictions were simply more accurate than some of Lecoq's actual measurements. People said that the predictor of gallium knew more about it than its discoverer. |
I was fascinated by these gaps in the periodic table. I tried to imagine for myself what 85 and 87 would be like. I thought 87 would be very exciting, a sort of super-cesium. Mendeleev also predicted two heavier analogues of manganese, 43 and 75. Rhenium, 75, was found in 1925-6 by some German workers, Noddack, Berg and Tacke. Noddack also claimed element 43, which she called masurium. But her claim could not be supported and Noddack got discredited, and people said, "She doesn't know what she's doing." |
This was to have momentous consequences, for in 1934, when Fermi shot some neutrons at uranium and thought he had made element 93, Frau Noddack was the first to tell him, "No, you haven't made 93, you've split the atom. You've got lanthanum, you've got barium." But nobody paid any attention to her; she had blown it with element 43. If she hadn't blown it, people would have paid attention, and Germany would have had the atomic bomb and the history of the world would have been different. That's a little aside about element 43. |
I love the elements, all of them--and one could talk forever about each one of them. Every element is more interesting than every other. |
Playing with radioactivity
Another special interest of mine, having to do with another uncle, was radioactivity. Radioactivity was mysterious, it was delightful, it was dramatic, it was fun. People didn't realize, in the early days, that it was so dangerous. Three of my uncles died from exposure to radioactivity. My mother was a surgeon interested in tumors, and she worked at the Marie Curie Hospital in London and had met Marie Curie. My mother gave me the first scientific biography I read, Madame Curie, by her daughter, Eve Curie. |
In 1998 I spoke at a meeting for the centennial of the discovery of polonium and radium. I said that I'd been given this book when I was 12 years old and that it was my favorite biography. As I was talking I became conscious of a very old lady in the audience, with high Slavic cheekbones and a smile going from one ear to another. I thought, "It can't be, it can't be." But it was Eve Curie, and she signed her book for me 60 years after it was published, 53 years after I got it. |
I also read Marie Curie's thesis, which was promptly translated and published by Sir William Crookes in Chemical News. Chemical News was a very important magazine, which for 60 years or more, from its founding by Crookes, promptly disseminated the latest developments and discoveries in chemistry to the world. Crookes was an extraordinary polymath, and I don't know whether there has ever been a really good biography of him, but William Brock is writing one and I'm sure it will be marvelous. |
Marie Curie's thesis is full of chemical details. Details of how polonium comes down with the bismuth fraction, then radium with the barium fraction, and of the innumerable fractional crystallizations needed to separate barium from radium. The story is fascinating. It is also fascinating to see the advertisements on the covers of this special issue of the Chemical News. In the beginning of the century, radium and other radioactive materials were freely available, and no one realized their lethal potential. |
One of my radioactive uncles had been a pioneer in making luminous paints, and our house was full of clocks with this brilliant radium paint. As a child I would take these clocks under the bedclothes, and I would light up a greenish cavern. I would hold them to my eye and see scintillations like fireworks. No one told me that these were alpha particles or whatever, hitting the retina. |
Chemistry grows up
Chemistry, spectroscopy, radioactivity--all deeply mysterious, none of them made sense. Why did they work? I think the end of the nineteenth century and the first 12, 13 years of the twentieth was a most incredible period, with everything really coming together. Quantum theory was ignored at first. There was the Rutherford atom, the Bohr quantum orbits and the Moseley X-ray crystallography, which gives you the number and order of atoms. What had previously been a meaningless atomic weight became an intensely meaningful atomic number, and an atomic number which divides itself up according to the 2-8-8-18-18-32, into the shells, the valence electrons, the inert gas cores. The chemistry I loved as a boy produced in me a series of epiphanies, or raptures. One of them was to do with Dalton and his atoms, one was to do with Mendeleev and the third--the most intoxicating!--was the organization of electrons in the atom. |
After that, of course, there were orbitals and quantum tunneling, and there was probability, which made me feel very queer, very uncertain. The half-lives of elements blew my mind--the idea that one didn't have a young atom or an elderly atom. I found the lack of causality, and probabilistic waves, very difficult to deal with. |
I found it somewhat easier after reading a charming book by George Gamow called Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom. Gamow actually described quantum tunneling in 1928 and later nucleosynthesis in the sun, and he was a charming and very funny writer. Mr. Tompkins is a bank clerk who is ushered into worlds where various physical constants have changed: the velocity of light, for example, to 10 miles an hour. Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland was the first of Gamow's popular books, and is a wonderful introduction to relativity. It came out in 1940, and Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom in 1945. You should read about these smeared quantum tigers in a quantum jungle--it's incredible stuff. |
Quantum theory--even more than curved space--is difficult to visualize or imagine. Really, you can't. There is a reason why so much of it remains at the level of mathematical formality, but Gamow, for my money, made the best effort anyone has to help the rest of us--"ordinary people"--to visualize these realms. |
I was aware, many of us were aware, that something was happening, that a secret was being kept, that things were being put under wraps in the war. Gamow himself talks about U 235, atomic fission and neutron proliferation in the original (1940) draft of Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom--but could not publish the book until the end of the war. Such matters were common knowledge in the scientific community early in the war...and then suddenly no one talked about it anymore. We, the public, didn't know what was happening until the bombs dropped; and then, very shortly after the end of the war, the Smythe report came out, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. It cost two shillings, and--besides all the horror--it helped open for me the wonder of quantum theory. |
The end of a wonderful journey
I would immensely recommend to you a beautiful paper by Cannizzaro, "Considerations on Some Points of the Theoretical Teaching of Chemistry," the Faraday Lecture for 1872. Cannizzaro says that by experiments and suggestions he will try to convey his students to the time of Scheele or Priestley, so that they may feel the full impact of Lavoisier, feel how incredibly startling his conservation of mass, his theory of combustion, his definition of an element, his new nomenclature, etc., is. Then, he says, he will move into the time of Berzelius, so they may feel the full impact of Dalton. It seemed to me that unconsciously and almost accidentally I was living the history of chemistry in a way myself, from my eighteenth-century uncle with his tungsten and his molybdenum, his eighteenth-century elements, through atomic weights, through the periodic table, through valence and structure, to the present century. |
It seemed to me like a wonderful journey, which was approaching its goal or its end. I don't have much of a head for physics or mathematics, so I started getting lost in quantum mechanics. The feeling of the sight and the smell and the touch and the feel and the concreteness of chemistry was vanishing for me in equations which I couldn't follow: the Schroedinger equation, the Dirac equation. |
What I've been describing to you occurred for me between the ages of 10 and 14. At the age of 14, adolescence rushed upon me like a typhoon, and at school I left the undemanding classics side and moved to the pressured science side instead. I'd been spoiled, in a sense, by my uncles and the freedom of spontaneity in my apprenticeship. Now at school I was forced to sit in class to take notes and exams, to use textbooks. This seemed flat, impersonal, deadly. What had been fun, a delight, when I did it in my own way became an inversion, an ordeal, when I had to do it to order. |
In his essay "To Teach or Not to Teach," Freeman Dyson speaks of different sorts of people: students who are best left their independence, allowed and encouraged to develop in their own way, and those who profit most from structured teaching. I was clearly one who flourished best alone. |
It was understood by the time that I was 14 that I was going to be a doctor. My parents were doctors, and my brothers in medical school. My parents had been tolerant, even pleased, with my early interest in science. But now they seemed to feel the time to play was over. One incident stays clearly in my mind. |
In 1947, a couple of summers after the war, I was with my parents in our old Humber, touring the south of France. Sitting in the back, I was talking about thallium, rattling on and on about it--how it was discovered along with indium in the 1860s by the brilliant green line in its spectrum, how some of its salts when dissolved would form solutions nearly five times as dense as water, how thallium indeed was the platypus of the elements, with paradoxical qualities that had caused uncertainty about its proper placement in the periodic table. Soft, heavy, infusible like lead, chemically akin to gallium and indium, but with dark oxides like those of manganese and iron, and colorless sulfides like those of sodium and potassium. |
As I babbled on, gaily, narcissistically, blindly, I did not notice that my parents in the front seat had fallen completely silent, their faces bored, tight and disapproving, until after 20 minutes they could bear it no longer and my father burst out violently, "Enough about thallium!" |
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