Chemistry in soft focus
Chemistry in soft focus: an article published in Chemistry in Britain 38(9), 32 (2002).
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CHEMISTRY IN SOFT FOCUS
An article published in Chemistry in Britain 38(9), p.32 (2002)
Chemistry seems to have more than its fair share of romance. Who can resist the story of Kekulé’s sleep-drenched vision of carbon chains on the last bus to Clapham before “the cry of the conductor· awakened me from my dreaming”? Or Louis Pasteur picking apart tiny crystals of tartaric acid with tweezers in hand before verifying his intuition of chirality, shrieking “Eureka!” and running out of the lab to embrace a bewildered Dr Bertrand in the corridor?
These stories, repeated endlessly and uncritically, have entered the mythology of chemistry. It is only in recent years that a more careful dissection of the discipline’s history has revealed how flimsy is the evidence to support many of them. Some of chemistry’s popular tales are probably outright fabrication, the product of wishful thinking, over-embellished recollection, wilful self-aggrandisement or a skewed historical agenda. …