Cathedrals of Science

Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry
by Patrick Coffey

With physicists and evolutionary biologists routinely hitting bestseller lists, chemistry can start to seem an unsexy scientific pursuit. In Cathedrals of Science, Patrick Coffey returns to headier days for the field, when the work and relationship between a dozen-odd chemists – their brilliant collaborations, bitter one-upmanship, shifting loyalties and long-standing grudges – came to define modern chemistry and show how exactly scientific theories come to attributed and accepted.

The career arcs of the leading turn-of-the-twentieth-century chemists are surprisingly similar. Between equation-laden explanations of their work, Coffey traces their lives, all following something of a rubric, the classic tragedy for scientists: pursue chemistry despite early setbacks; struggle to step out of the shadow of one’s dissertation advisers; pursue smart work and make friends; win a high-level post and make enemies; win (or fail to win) a Nobel; work until or close to death though the best years are far behind, while sometimes pursuing ill-founded work in a separate scientific field.

Coffey examines two American chemists in particular – Gilbert Lewis and Irving Langmuir, the focus of his original research – along with a host of Europeans. Lewis proposed the concept of the covalent bond (now one of the first lessons any chemistry student picks up) and became the “Henry Ford of thermodynamics” – that is, he didn’t invent the discipline, but he made it usable for everyone. That fact, along with his provincialism and the paradox of his broad but “insignificant” bond findings, lost him the Nobel. Langmuir invented the type of incandescent light bulbs we still use, and studied the chemistry of surfaces, which won him the Nobel.

The two both served the American effort in World War I but had a falling out shortly after. Langmuir – a charismatic personality, particularly compared to the grouchy, isolated Lewis – began to receive credit for a theory Lewis believed was his own. When Langmuir’s name was attached to it, Lewis wrote him an icy letter: “Your formula…should be called the formula of Lewis, Languir and W.A. Noyes, and so on…or perhaps it would be simpler to call it the formula of Lewis, and not mention the names of all the others who have quoted it.” Lewis never forgave him, though the two happened to lunch together on the day Lewis died under mysterious circumstances, in a lab filled with hydrogen cyanide. And Langmuir, though long distinguished, spent his final years trying his hand at the “pathological science” of rainmaking.

The bickering of scientists fills these pages – most egregious, perhaps, is one Svante Arrhenius, who sat on the Nobel committee and doled out prizes to his friends and kept them from his enemies. But more engrossing is the drama of the chemists’ role in the World Wars. Lewis studied nuclear chemistry; Langmuir pursued antisubmarine research and protective masks. The German chemists’ were more involved, and more impacted, by both conflicts (Germany was the center of chemistry for decades). Anti-Semitism ended many careers – with a quarter of all of Germany’s physicists and chemists leaving the country – but benefited some who remained and joined the Nazi effort. Walther Nernst, a main character of Coffey’s, discoverer of the third law of thermodynamics and a self-proclaimed prima donna, volunteered as a driver in World War I before figuring out a mechanism for deploying gas warfare. He refused to be involved with the Nazis in World War II.

But it was Fritz Haber whose career was most personally and dramatically connected to the World Wars, as Coffey shows. Haber, a German-Jewish chemist who was baptized at age 24, in 1892, enthusiastically joined the German effort in World War I, organizing the first lethal gas attack with chlorine, which he advocated for its ability to sink into trenches and poison quickly. (His wife despised the stuff, particularly after she saw it kill a scientist at Haber’s research institute.) He went on to invent mustard gas. He never voiced regret over the gases, and escaped war crimes prosecution when the Allies did not demand his extradition after the war. In 1919 he accepted the Nobel Prize – as Allied scientists threatened boycott – for a discovery of his that allowed the manufacture of artificial fertilizer, in effect saving countless many from starvation and paving the way for a global population boom.

But Haber would have another deadly legacy, which Coffey saves for his epilogue, a postscript on the later lives of each of his characters that teasingly shows how much more might have been written. Haber died in 1934, after being asked to fire his institute’s Jewish scientists, and after tendering his resignation. But research he performed in World War I would yield Zyklon B, the killer of Jews in concentration camps, including many members of his family.

Excerpt: “Langmuir was, of course, not alone in enjoying point out others’ errors. Walther Nernst had made a point of picking apart Svante Arrhenius’s immunochemistry, Gilbert Lewis had published every one of Nernst’s errors he could find, and Linus Pauling had dedicated an entire paper to dissecting Dorothy Wrinch’s cyclol theory. But Langmuir, although somewhat rough at times, does not seem to have been vindictive or to have focused his attacks on those he regarded as personal enemies. Now let’s turn the table for a moment. Was Langmuir guilty of ‘pathological science’? … The cyclol theory was wrong, but it was eventually testable, and it did not involve threshold effects or self-delusion by the observer. But there is another area, cloud seeding, that becae Langmuir’s great passion at the end of his career, and it is much closer to his description of pathological science.”

Further Reading: The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition, and Science and Molecules of Murder: Criminal Molecules and Classic Cases


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