Of the wonderful scientists who built artistic bridges to and from the sciences, one Italian chemist stands out for having left us with some very significant and distinctive writings. In fact, Primo Levi started out as a scientist and eventually made his name very much as a literary figure.
In his book “The Periodic Table”, first published in 1975, Levi spun 21 brilliant stories about chemistry as a metaphor for life, human characters and properties of human relations.
One of the most compelling stories, “Zinc”, is about the element with the atomic number 30. Levi was working with zinc samples that he realised must be impure to yield to acid (zinc as a metal refuses to react when it’s very pure), which triggers an insight about the importance of difference:
“Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed”.
Levi's thinking and writing was also shaped by having survived Auschwitz by accident. Fascism, on the other hand:
In “Vanadium”, he recounts how, decades after the war, when he was working with an industrial-varnish business, he found himself dealing with a German from the Auschwitz factory he worked in; pondering how “reality is always more complex than invention: less kempt, cruder, less rounded out”. Vanadium, of course, has 4 common “states” (+2, +3, +4 and +5): it can readily accept 2, 3, 4 or 5 free electrons.
If you had read the chapter on “Carbon”, you would not forget how the atom journeys across hundreds of millions of years – fixed in limestone, liberated by a pickaxe and becoming carbon dioxide, photosynthesised into a grape vine, drunk as wine and exhaled, and finally finding its way into Levi’s own brain to guide his hand “to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one” – with which the story, and the book, concludes.
This book showed how a scientist was able to magically use the chemical elements as metaphors that inspire stories about our humanity in all its rich strangeness, wonder, passion and horror. In 2006 the UK’s Royal Institution named “The Periodic Table” as “the best science book ever. (The actual Periodic Table, of course, was first put together just over 150 years ago, with the Russian physical chemist Dmitri Mendeleev putting the 60 or so then-known elements into a table according to their atomic weight, making 60 further versions of it and landing on a table with a periodicity ("the law of periodicity") that show elements in columns with similar chemical properties [including un-named blank spaces for yet-to-be-discovered elements], and today there are over 1,000 versions of it).
The other art-creating chemist who brought the sciences and the arts together in a beautiful way is the Nobel Chemistry prize-winner Roald Hoffman who waxed lyrical on the beauty of chemistry: in his wonderful poem “The devil teaches thermodynamics”, he drew from the second law of thermodynamics, a most important principle about “entropy always increasing” and one that has governed chemistry thinking for over 150 years, the important lesson that “love is the greatest entropy-increasing device invented by God”, furthermore urging us to be “at peace with the disorder that orders”!
Hoffman also reminds us how chemistry is perhaps the most visual of the sciences, how the 3D structure of a molecule often matters, and how much of today’s most exciting research in chemistry is in synthetic chemistry. He especially took the subject of “molecular beauty” seriously and explored the question of what made for “molecular beauty”, highlighting how function is part of it: he wrote and spoke about the “beautiful molecule” that is haemoglobin and how its “enigmatic” shape is well-built for the molecule’s task which is to take oxygen from the lungs to the cells. To be more specific, the proteins sub-units keep folding but there is a particular space to hold the molecular piece (the “heme” sub-unit) that binds the oxygen, and further, to change the shape of the molecule in a particular way once the oxygen is bound. You can see a “dazzling beauty” where shape and function are brought together.
Our third hero is the physicist-mathematician Roger Penrose who has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics: as a young academic, he was attending a conference in Amsterdam when his friend’s print of the Dutch artist MC Escher’s Night and Day spurred him into going to the Van Gogh Museum, where an Escher exhibition was held. It was there that he saw the Escher’s Relativity painting and its “impossible staircase”, which triggered him to write a paper that in turn was sent to Escher and inspired the latter’s famous Waterfall drawing. (Today you can find a series of Escher's Relativity prints at the Escher in het Paleis museum in The Hague).
You could say that Penrose saw physics in beautiful art and beautiful art in physics: his “conformal cosmology” suggests that the beginning and the end of the universe are in effect the same, since these two phases of its evolution contain only massless particles. As time ends in the era of massless particles, the fate of our universe can actually be reinterpreted as the big bang of a new one: “Our universe is what I call an aeon in an endless sequence of aeons.” It is close to a model Escher would have loved.
Our fourth hero is another physicist-mathematician Michael Atiyah, who saw beauty in physics and is also the recipient of both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize for the work he did proving the index theorem in 1963 (that resulted in the Atiyah-Singer index theorem). He and his collaborator achieved this by finding a hidden bridge that connected two fields of mathematics in an utterly surprising way, producing a result that stunned mathematicians; later on this theorem transformed a large area of theoretical physics and was used as a mathematical tool for string theory.
Atiyah liked to wax lyrical about how beauty (or more specifically “elegance and simplicity and structure and form”) is an important ingredient in mathematics, and he explained that in terms of what mathematicians try to do, and yes, you can have both beautiful results or theorems as well as beautiful proofs. In fact, Atiyah compared it to getting to the top of the mountain, and how maybe the first time you achieved that beautiful result of getting to the top of the mountain you went with a round-about method but later on you find a more beautiful way.
“You go back … and try to evolve various variations of the proof … and you might find yourself building beautiful steps in between … you may end up with a beautiful road with marvelous scenic views all the way to the top”.