We Are All Stardust by Stefan Klein

Author:Stefan Klein [Klein, Stefan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781615191536
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2015-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

The Poetry of Molecules

Chemist and poet

Roald Hoffmann

on beauty

“DON’T MAKE THE CHEMIST LOOK TOO STIFF,” admonished the photo editor. “Don’t worry,” replied the young photographer assigned to accompany me on my conversation with Roald Hoffmann. “He’s a poet.”

She was right. In Hoffmann’s office at Cornell University in rural upstate New York, there’s not much to remind you that a world-famous scientist works here. Indian masks and a statue of the Hindu god Krishna playing the flute adorn the room. There are pinecones and editions of the Talmud lying about. From the ceiling hangs a net made of feathers. “An Indian artist from the area made it,” Hoffmann explains. “It’s a dream catcher.”

Hoffmann was born in 1937 into a Jewish family in a town near the then-Polish, now-Ukrainian city of Lviv. He survived the German occupation hidden in an attic. After the war, he studied chemistry at Harvard. He was not even twenty-seven years old when he made his first groundbreaking discovery. With his colleague Robert Burns (R. B.) Woodward, he found rules with which chemical reactions could be predicted. That earned him a Nobel Prize.

Scientists are fond of pointing out the quantity of their publications. Hoffmann’s list is five hundred titles long and keeps growing. It includes not only scientific articles, but also essays on beauty, art, Jewish intellectual history—and four critically acclaimed collections of poetry. At the time that I meet with him, Hoffmann is at work on his third play.

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