This new quantum mechanics promised to explain all of chemistry. And though I felt an exuberance at this, I felt a certain threat, too. ‘Chemistry’, wrote Crookes, ‘will be established upon an entirely new basis… We shall be set free from the need for experiment, knowing a priori what the result of each and every experiment must be.’ I was not sure I liked the sound of this. Did this mean that chemists of the future (if they existed) would never actually need to handle a chemical; might never see the colors of vanadium salts, never smell a hydrogen selenide, never admire the form of a crystal; might live in a colorless, scentless mathematical world? This, for me, seemed an awful prospect, for I, at least, needed to smell and touch and feel, to place myself, my senses, in the middle of the perceptual world.[74]
I had dreamed of becoming a chemist, but the chemistry that really stirred me was the lovingly detailed, naturalistic, descriptive chemistry of the nineteenth century, not the new chemistry of the quantum age. Chemistry as I knew it, the chemistry I loved, was either finished or changing its character, advancing beyond me (or so I thought at the time). I felt I had come to the end of the road, the end of my road, at least, that I had taken my journey into chemistry as far as I could.
I had been living (it seems to me in retrospect) in a sort of sweet interlude, having left behind the horrors and fears of Braefield. I had been guided to a region of order, and a passion for science, by two very wise, affectionate, and understanding uncles. My parents had been supportive and trusting, had allowed me to put a lab together and follow my own whims. School, mercifully, had been largely indifferent to what I was doing – I did my schoolwork, and was otherwise left to my own devices. Perhaps, too, there was a biological respite, the special calm of latency.
But now all this had changed: other interests were crowding in, exciting me, seducing me, pulling me in different ways. Life had become broader, richer, in a way, but it was also shallower, too. That calm deep center, my former passion, was no longer there. Adolescence had rushed upon me, like a typhoon, buffeting me with insatiable longings. At school I had left the undemanding classics ‘side’, and moved to the pressured science side instead. I had been spoiled, in a sense, by my two uncles, and the freedom and spontaneity of my apprenticeship. Now, at school, I was forced to sit in classes, to take notes and exams, to use textbooks that were flat, impersonal, deadly. What had been fun, delight, when I did it in my own way became an aversion, an ordeal, when I had to do it to order. What had been a holy subject for me, full of poetry, was being rendered prosaic, profane.
Was it, then, the end of chemistry? My own intellectual limitations? Adolescence? School? Was it the inevitable course, the natural history, of enthusiasm, that it burns hotly, brightly, like a star, for a while, and then, exhausting itself, gutters out, is gone? Was it that I had found, at least in the physical world and in physical science, the sense of stability and order I so desperately needed, so that I could now relax, feel less obsessed, move on? Or was it, perhaps, more simply, that I was growing up, and that ‘growing up’ makes one forget the lyrical, mystical perceptions of childhood, the glory and the freshness of which Wordsworth wrote, so that they fade into the light of common day?
Afterword
Toward the end of 1997, Roald Hoffmann – we had been friends since I had read his Chemistry Imagined a few years before – knowing something of my chemical boyhood, sent me an intriguing parcel. It contained a large poster of the periodic table with photographs of each element; a chemical catalog, so I could order a few things; and a little bar of a very dense, greyish metal, which fell onto the floor as I opened the package, landing with a resonant clonk. I recognized it at once by its feel and its sound (‘the sound of sintered tungsten’, my uncle used to say, ‘nothing like it’).
The clonk served as a sort of Proustian mnemonic, and instantly brought Uncle Tungsten to mind, sitting in his lab in his wing collar, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his hands black from powdered tungsten. Other pictures rose immediately in my mind: his factory where the lightbulbs were made, his collections of old lightbulbs, and heavy metals, and minerals. And my own initiation by him, when I was ten, into the wonders of metallurgy and chemistry. I thought I might write a brief sketch of Uncle Tungsten, but the memories, now started, continued to emerge – memories not just of Uncle Tungsten but of all the events of early life, of my boyhood, many forgotten for fifty years or more. What had started as a page of writing became a vast mining operation, a four-year excavation of two million words or more – from which, somehow, a book began to crystallize out.
I have pulled out my old books (and bought many new ones), set the little tungsten bar on a tiny pedestal, and papered the kitchen with chemical charts. I read lists of cosmic abundances in the bath. On cold, dismal Saturday afternoons, I may curl up with a fat volume of Thorpe’s Dictionary of Applied Chemistry – it was one of Uncle Tungsten’s favorite books – opening it anywhere and reading at random.
The passion for chemistry, which I had thought dead at fourteen, has clearly survived, deep inside me, throughout the intervening years. Though my life has taken a different direction, I have followed the new discoveries in chemistry with excitement. In my day, elements stopped with number 92, uranium, but I have watched closely as new elements – elements up to 118! – have been made. These new elements probably exist only in the lab and do not occur anywhere else in the universe, but I was delighted to learn that the very latest of them, though still radioactive, are thought to belong to a long-sought ‘island of stability’, in which the atomic nuclei are almost a million times more stable than those of the preceding elements.
Astronomers now wonder about giant planets with cores of metallic hydrogen, stars made of diamond, and stars with crusts of iron helide. The inert gases have been coaxed into combination, and I have seen fluorides of xenon – almost unthinkable, a fantasy for me, in the 1940s. The rare-earth elements, which both Uncle Tungsten and Uncle Abe so loved, have now become common and find countless uses in fluorescent materials, phosphors of every color, high-temperature superconductors, and tiny magnets of an unbelievable strength. The powers of synthetic chemistry have become prodigious: we can design molecules now with almost any structure, any property, we wish.
Tungsten, with its density and hardness, has found new uses in darts and tennis rackets and – disturbingly – in coating shells and missiles. But it also turns out – this is much more to my taste – to be indispensable to certain primitive bacteria which get their energy by metabolizing sulphur compounds in the hydrothermal vents of the ocean depths. If (as is now speculated) such bacteria were the first organisms on earth, then tungsten may have been crucial for the origin of life.
The old enthusiasm surfaces every so often in odd associations and impulses: a sudden desire for a ball of cadmium, or to feel the coldness of diamond against my face. The license plates of cars immediately suggest elements, especially in New York, where so many of them begin with U, V, W, and Y – that is, uranium, vanadium, tungsten, and yttrium. It is an added pleasure, a bonus, a grace, if the symbol of an element is followed by its atomic number, as in W74 or Y39. Flowers, too, bring elements to mind: the color of lilacs in spring for me is that of divalent vanadium. Radishes, for me, evoke the smell of selenium.
74
I wish I had realized – but that would not have been easy for me as a boy – that Crookes was wrong, that the new insight about the atom which prompted his thoughts (he was writing this in 1915, just two years after Bohr) would serve, once assimilated, to expand and enrich chemistry enormously, not to reduce it, annihilate it, as he feared. There were similar anxieties about the first atomic theory: many chemists, Humphry Davy among them, felt there was danger in accepting Dalton’s notions of atoms and atomic weights, danger of pulling chemistry away from its concreteness and reality into an arid, impoverished, metaphysical realm.