Chemist, poet, and playwright Hoffmann on science and art

Internationally recognized for his highly original work in science and literature, Nobel chemistry laureate Roald Hoffmann will talk about the connections he sees between art and science in an illustrated lecture titled "Chemistry's Essential Tensions: A Different Look at Science," starting at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14, in Gannett Auditorium.

A poet and playwright, 1981 recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University, where he teaches chemistry, Hoffmann served as an expert advisor to Molecules That Matter, on view at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery through April 13, 2008. His ideas, which bridge the seemingly unlike worlds of art and science, offer an apt keynote to the Tang's innovative art-and-science exhibition.  As Hoffmann has observed, "Chemists employ hard work, clever construction, and chance to create something original and new, forms of matter that have not been on Earth before…. I think the process is much like art."


You have said that your creative process works not by "pursuit of great ideas but small ones that begin to connect to each other."

I just love solving little problems—I don't work on big problems like the mechanism of memory or the cure for cancer—but I believe that if you solve many problems and keep your mind's eye open for connections, you will understand the world. It's like seeing the world in a drop of dew.


Your work in applied theoretical chemistry explores new ways to look at the geometry and reactivity of molecules. Examples?

I might see a molecule like this one that someone made in the lab:

It looks weird. I've never seen a phosphorus atom surrounded by 3 metal atoms in a T shape. So I try to understand it, through quantum mechanical calculations. And "applied" means that I draw my inspiration from real things, from experiment.


What motivates you to tackle this kind of weird molecule?

Just curiosity. I do not hold a single patent, so it is not utility that drives me.


Is there a difference between the molecules found in nature and those one makes in a lab?

Anything natural is likely to be more complex than anything synthetic. The aroma of a Cabernet Sauvignon has 900 molecules in it. Evolution complexifies. We want the world to be simple but this is not the simplest or the best of all possible worlds. It is what it is. The only thing simple is the human mind and the things we make.  I'm very interested in complexity.


You like to "always do the next interesting thing"—What's that right now?

I'm writing an essay about why we are interested in bent and battered molecules, and what they tell us about normal ones. And I'm looking at why a chemical compound with a simple formula like NaCd2 [sodium cadmium 2] requires a horribly complex structure, with thousands of atoms in a repeating unit in the crystal. Why should something with a simple formula be so complex?

And I am looking at the chemical bonding in matter under high pressure, such as matter in the interior of the earth. We can't do experiments on that matter, because it is under extreme pressure and very hot. But we can sample those conditions indirectly, by studying earthquakes and explosions. And we can reproduce these conditions in the lab by squeezing hell out of things with screws and torture—OK, I'm joking! But here's what some of my friends do in their research with diamonds, which were originally made by compressing coal inside the earth and then brought up to the outside by volcanoes.  They take two brilliant-cut diamonds and place their flat faces together, then put a bagel-shaped gasket around them and squeeze, and observe what takes place in the millimeter between these diamond anvils. It's expensive research-sometimes the diamonds crack. But we can achieve pressure equivalent to that in the center of the earth, and we can measure what happens inside the diamonds because they are clear.

Why should one be interested in matter under extreme conditions? Because this gives us information about how things behave under normal conditions.


Should we be training more scientists?

I have an unpopular opinion: We don't need more technically trained scientists. If we did, we have a time-honored way to solve this problem: immigration. It doesn't bother me if the white American male scientist is an endangered species-women and immigrants are taking up the slack. The marketplace decides if we need more chemists. Right now the situation in chemistry is pretty good. My grads get 1.5 job offers, although they don't start at $170,000 like a New York lawyer. We lose talent to medical school, for mercenary reasons, and to molecular biology, for intellectual reasons.


Do we need a higher level of national science literacy?

An informed citizenry is important. We have a responsibility to learn a bit of science, to understand scientific thinking, to make distinctions between experts and nefarious supposed experts. We have to learn how to decide. It does require some basic science, taught in schools. You don't have to be a science student but you need to be open and reflective about science and the environment.
   

You're on record as being proud and happy to be a teacher, and you've won awards for your teaching. How does teaching illuminate your research and writing?

Teaching is a joy, and it has made me a better researcher. The task of convincing people that my explanation of a T-shaped molecule's geometry is right is not that different from teaching first-year students. I have to reach an audience, and I must do it without the crutch of mathematics. Teaching has taught me to explain.


How many languages do you speak? Does knowing different languages do something to your thinking?

I speak well four—English, Russian, Swedish, German. A few others badly. That's what happens to Europeans.

I think that knowing another language, translating each way, creates curiosity about how things work. And it creates empathy for the foreigner, for the one who can't express his or her humanity through language.


You easily straddle the "left-brain, right-brain" divide between science and literature. Do these two apparently different fields seem different to you? Do you enjoy a shock of difference when you leave one and take up the other?

I try not to separate my worlds—the important word is "try." But I'm not crazy, I won't write my science papers in poetry, for they wouldn't get by the gatekeepers. So I practice my stylistic subversion surreptitiously.


Why do you think artists, playwrights, and poets are so drawn nowadays to science as subjects for art?

Well, science has brought us great knowledge of the world within and around us. That knowledge does not take away from the emotionally based knowledge that a poet or an artist can bring to, say, a bird flying. It adds to it. It makes sense that artists would want to partake of that knowledge.

Scientists have to be enticed, with a carrot and a stick, to speak to the world about what they do. In my lecture, I will speak at one point of alchemy, not as a pseudoscience but as a view of chemical transformation that captured the imagination of people. Somehow, chemistry today needs the magic of alchemy's images. Engaging artists in the contemplation of chemistry, as the Molecules exhibition does, is one way to accomplish this.


Were there molecules you thought should be in Molecules That Matter that didn't make the cut?

The molecules in the exhibition are a pretty good choice, a mix of utility, importance, and beauty.


You just described organic molecules as "beautiful." How do you define beauty?

Beauty resides at some tense edge where order and disorder, symmetry and asymmetry contend with each other in our soul, with both emotion and cognition entering into that struggle.

Posted On: 11/13/2007

Tags: molecules that matter, chemistry