Chemistry Imagined

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In Chemistry Imagined, Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann, in a unique collaboration with artist Vivian Torrence, reveals the creative and humanistic sparks that drive science in general and chemistry in particular. A series of thirty field-color painted collages paired with short essays, personal commentary, and poems evokes the magic of this usually inaccessible field, its historical roots, the richness of modern chemical activities, and the mysterious confluences of science and art. Showing the general reader how science permeates daily life, Hoffmann stresses the social, cultural, literary, and psychological contexts of chemistry. With delicate, surreal images, Torrence explores the highly visual nature and the intellectual essence of chemistry, the way chemists think, and the way they formulate their questions. Chemistry Imagined discusses chemical discoveries, processes, and personalities in an unusually humanistic manner. Perusing the contents, a reader finds the first drafts of the periodic table of elements likened to revisions of a William Blake poem, the chemical reasons behind the success of Chinese folk medicine, a poem about scanning tunneling microscopy, similarities between molecules and musical instruments, and a meditation on why it is that scientists supposediy "discover" but artists "create." The general public, along with scientists and artists, will find that this celebration of how molecular science fits into world culture is surprising, compelling, and poignantly beautiful. Torrence's provocative images and Hoffmann's perceptions of modern and ancient chemistry shape an illuminating collage of a central science.