The Beauty of Chemistry – A Glimpse at the Book

I'm Philip Ball. And what first drew me to chemistry was the stuff itself, the crystals, the colored powders, the pungent smells like ammonia and sulfur dioxide, the explosive substances would cook up in my bedroom and which once left my fingers stinging and blackened. remember being allowed to stick finger into bowl of mercury and marveling at this cold unearthly fluid glistening and impossibly dense which wouldn't wet the skin. There is no field of science that works more on the senses than chemistry. The Nobel laureate Robert Woodward put it like this, he said it is the sensuous elements which play so large role in my attraction to chemistry. love crystals, the beauty of their form and their formation, liquids, dormant, distilling, sloshing, swirling, the fumes, the odors, good and bad, the rainbow of colors, the gleaming vessels of every size, shape, and purpose. Much as might think about chemistry, it would not exist for me without these physical, visual, tangible, sensuous things. I've seen nothing that captures these aspects of chemistry better than the astonishing videos made by Yan Liang and Wenting Zhu for their envisioning chemistry project. When Yan came to see me in China several years ago to ask if might collaborate with him, jumped at the chance. And now here's the result, book called The Beauty of Chemistry, published by MIT Press in May 2021. It's filled with amazing images of chemical processes from crystal growth to bubble formation, from precipitation to the color changes of flowers. We hope that this book won't just enchant you with its images, but will help to shake off chemistry's reputation as at best staid science done by people in white coats with test tubes, and at worst dirty, smelly, polluting business. We will show some of the astonishing beauty that resides in chemical products and processes. This beauty too often passes unseen or at least unacknowledged as chemical in nature. We can marvel at the delicacy of snowflake or the rich brightness of flower and its heady fragrance while failing to realize that chemistry is at work here every bit as much as it is in oil refineries and pharmaceutical plants. We've tried to show that because of chemistry, we walk constantly amidst wonders, if only we notice. Science doesn't as he sometimes said de-enchant the world. But on the contrary, it re-enchants. It requires willingness to find strangeness and surprise in the mundane. Once you start asking questions, there's little chance that you'll exhaust them. We've admired flowers since antiquity, but there's still plenty of gaps in our understanding of how their colors are formed or what purpose they serve in guiding the plant along the complex discerning byways of evolution. Chemists are still finding the unexpected in what appear to be the simplest of objects, water molecule, hydrogen atom, subatomic proton. All these studies, all these questions have begun from what we can see, hear, feel, smell, from our own concrete reality and the way it invites our attention and appreciation. You see, scientists as whole and perhaps chemists in particular seem guided by impulses beyond the purely intellectual or practical. If physicists express awe and wonder at the beauty as they see it of their equations and concepts, and biologists have been captivated by the rich diversity and the inventiveness of the natural world, chemists display the greatest creativity, the urge to make. They are engineers of atoms, figuring out how to arrange them into new unions with useful shapes and properties. Sometimes chemists will make molecule simply because they figure it is beautiful. As the writer, I've tried to find words that not only help to explain and create context for Yan and Wenting's wonderful images, but to do justice to their entrancing evocative nature. We've enlisted the help of some practicing chemists too, several of them Nobel laureates who in short texts throughout the book explain how the beauty of chemistry has inspired them. We hope the beauty of chemistry will inspire you to think about the chemical world in new way, as one of the wonders of nature filled with artistry, inventiveness, dynamism, and, yes, beauty.