Authors: Natalie Angier
No, if you want that ton of bricks to shape up into a presentable mantelpiece, you'll have to get out your trowel, bucket, and mortar, and you'll have to invest some of your stored chemical energy arranging and rearranging the bricks and daubing over the rough spots, sort of the way evolution did with us. You can also count on the need for periodic touchups and repointings, as the impact of heat, gravity, dankness, cold, grease, pine tar, mold, the rattle of passing garbage trucks, the time you called in the unlicensed chimney sweep because you didn't realize you had to open something called a "flue," all nudge the wall's brick and cement molecules into predictably shabbier configurations. Eventually, you or one of your descendants may decide that the wall is splintered and sagging in so many places that it's easier to get out the sledgehammer and start all over again.
By the second law of thermodynamics, the energy of a system may remain the same in quantity, while steadily declining in quality. The concentrated energy of petroleum is quite useful; the dispersed energy of excited molecules of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide belched out of a car's exhaust pipe is not. The darkest readings of the second law suggest that even the universe has a morphine drip in its vein, a slow smothering of all spangle, all spiral, all possibility. In this version of the apocalypse, universal entropy is rising, productive energy falling, and the entire package fading into cool irrelevance. Today, the explosive death of one star can infuse a nearby gas cloud with so much energy and matter that it collapses into a brand-new baby star, and the stellar life cycle pedals on. In the bigger and more estranged cosmos of the distant future, there may be no suns left with the will to explode, or nurseries to seed with their heirlooms of light.
But before we get carried away by a formaldehyde gloom, let's remember that, whatever its eventual fate, the universe still has an awful lot of time left to play, and that it is a comic genius and an aesthete that defies its innate sloth, its entropic drift, with sustained symphonies of disciplined beauty. The universe loves patterns, and it can't seem to stop finding new styles of light and character, and functional forms and dysfunctional forms just for the fun of it. From formlessness came the cloud of glory we named atom, from ashes and dust came stars so formally formed that we can tell by their light how long they will shine and when and how they will die. Atoms were not content to stay in their element, as lonely elements, but instead linked arms with other elements, becoming the molecules of which our world is forged, and the chemistry was right to scoff in the face of the law, and declare, Let's go get a life.
T
HE NEXT TIME
you think you are being teased, picked on, and put upon, don't bother getting defensive. Don't give your tormenters the pleasure of your petulance. Instead, why not try the chemist's solution, and fight fire with ... a party trick?
Many chemists admit to the occasional indulgence in a persecution complex. They feel demonized by the public and marginalized by other scientists. Chemistry is the subject that at least 6 out of every 6.0225 Americans insist they "flunked in high school." The boilerplate evil scientist of Hollywood is often some type of chemist, a white coat cackling over his boiling beakers and crackling gadgetry. People rant against all the "chemicals" in the environment, as though the word were synonymous with "poisons." The environment, chemists counter-rant, is nothing
but
chemicals, and the same can be said for us. "We're just self-replicating carbon units, that's what we are," said Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials chemistry at MIT. "We're not a heck of a lot different than the carbon-based fiber in a steel-belted radial tire, so maybe we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously."
When not feared as a threat to air, water, fish, and fowl, chemistry is belittled as bureaucratic, a field neither fish nor fowl. Roald Hoffmann, a chemist and poet-playwright at Cornell University, has observed that because chemistry is "poised between the physical and biological universes" and "does not deal with the infinitely small or large," it may be thought fussy and tedious, "the way things in the middle often are." Some of the most heedless squeezers on chemistry's domain are those passengers seated on either side of it. "Chemistry is the core science, the central science, yet its contributions are often overlooked, including by
many biologists, physicists, medical researchers, and others who should know better," said Rick Danheiser, a chemistry professor at MIT. Even the much discussed book
The End of Science,
which argued that the major scientific disciplines were reaching the limit of their explanatory power and would soon be irrelevant, didn't bother mentioning chemistry. Danheiser sighed theatrically. I guess we're not even sexy enough for an obituary, he said.
Time for that party trick. Danheiser, a boyish-looking baby boomer with a build that could be described as neither infinitely small nor large, and who balanced the casual bohemianism of his beard with the casual preppiness of a polo shirt and khaki slacks, pushed his chair back, and began rummaging through the drawers of his desk. No luck. He walked over to his bookcase, scanned the shelves, and ran his hands over the edges of those above eye level. Still nothing. Finally he asked me if I happened to have any matches on me. I told him, No, I'm not a smoker. "Well, that's good, as far as your health is concerned," he replied. "But it's too bad for the point I want to make." A round of charades would have to do.
Danheiser took a stick of plastic of the type that chemists use to construct stick models of molecules. "Pretend this is a match," he said of the sticklet, and I nodded. "This," he said, lifting the sticklet over his desk, "is physics." He let the stick drop on his desk. Plink. "And this," he said, scraping the stick's virtual phosphor on a virtual matchbook cupped in his hand, "is chemistry." He held up the stick triumphantly for me to gaze on the fabled flame. It was a good thing that I could summon up an image of combustion well enough to smile and nod appreciatively at Danheiser's act because two other chemists went through similar matchless presentations with me, to make the point about the soul of their discipline. Chemists may feel unappreciated. They may be thought by many adult survivors of a high school education to have the sex appeal of a cold sore. Yet chemists know that through it all they can claim Prometheus as their prophet, and that if they can't find a match in their pocket, there's always the fire inside.
And while we're on the subject of myths and fantasies, a couple of other legendary figures are relevant to chemistry's specific alchemy. One is Goldilocks, whose story offers a plangent alternative to the cliché of chemistry as gray middleman. For Goldilocks, it is the extremes that prove stiff and humorless, the extremes that can never suffice. Too hot will strip the epidermis from your tongue, the electrons from your atoms; too cold, and you can't taste a thing. Too hard, you're not alive; too soft, you've already died. Goldilocks's preferred habitat, her optimal
culture medium, is that of the harmonious compromise, the world she calls "just right." It is a world fit for children, human and ursine alike, a world suited for growth, for the calibrated assimilation of atoms into molecules, molecules into compounds, units into chains, chains into pleats, folds, tissues, organs, eyes, snouts, and mouths that shout. A world that is safe for children is a world of immense molecular diversity, where a million molecules and compounds bloom, and where no molecule is left unclaimed for very long. The chemist's world is the world around us, a pampered stratum of relatively mild temperatures, and manageable atmospheric pressure, and liquid water in abundance to bring molecules together and lubricate their discourse.
Roald Hoffmann said, "There is no chemistry to speak of on the surface of the sun. It's all atoms and ionsâatoms that have been shocked apart."
On Earth, under our conditions, we have lots of chemistry. We have temperature conditions where molecules can exist in three different states, as solid, liquid, or gas, and where, with the input of energy, from the light of the sun or the heat of a fire, those molecules can change into other molecules, into other complex assemblages of atoms. "What a dull world it would be if there were only 115 of us, and what a dull world it would be if there were nothing more than the 115 elements, 115 different types of atoms, end of story," Hoffmann said. "But that isn't how our world works. From the 115 elements you can build a near infinity of molecules, of any type you need, to get all the structural and functional diversity you can ask for. There are at least 100,000 different molecules in the human body. Some 900 volatile aroma components have been found in wine. Chemistry is molecules. We are molecules. Chemistry is a truly anthropic science."
On the surface of the sun, where temperatures hover around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the atoms are in shock, yet they are not alone. All around them are other atoms, most of them hydrogen, but with a decent number of helium atoms as well as a scattering of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and neon, to name a few. What is the difference between the atoms that congregate on the face of our sun, and those that compose the face of our daughter? What must atoms do en masse to qualify as molecules, what password must they utter?
"The name is Bond, James Bond." said Donald Sadoway. "Chemistry is all about making and breaking bonds." In his impeccably tailored Italian suit, crisp white shirt, and elegantly vivid tie done in an expert double Windsor knot, Sadoway had a distinctly Bondish beam himself. Molecules, he said, and the broader category of compounds and mixtures, are more than cohorts of atoms that all happen to be in the same vicinity, like passengers on a train or marbles in a box. To merit designation as molecules or chemical compounds, the constituent atoms must be stuck together with some sort of electromagnetic glue. The atoms must share their outermost electrons with one another, or must feel the persistent tugging of an oppositely charged atom by their side. Chemistry is about molecules, and making bonds and breaking bonds. Chemical bonds are forged of electromagnetic forces, of the innate attraction between electrons and protons, and the fickleness of electrons, the willingness of those negatively charged particles to list one moment toward this proton, one moment toward that. Chemistry exploits electron restiveness to snap the hundred-plus elements of the periodic table into hundreds of thousands of configurations, and to break the bonds apart again and rearrange the pieces again and restock the shelves with new and improved molecular merchandise. Brighter whites! Nightlier darks! Sweeter smells, stronger laminates, longer polymers, snappier comebacks. Whatever your chemical demand, whatever shape, size, or attribute your molecule must possess, chances are you'll find it somewhere in the well-stocked toy box that is our Goldilocks worldâif not prefabricated naturally, then conjured in a laboratory. Roald Hoffmann has called chemistry "the imagined science"; the great nineteenth-century French chemist Claude Berthollet declared it an art. "Chemistry is almost alone among the sciences in its ability to make new things," said Stephen Lippard, a professor of chemistry at MIT. "Beyond studying the world as it exists, we can put together combinations of molecules in ways never dreamed of before." A computer screen so flexible you can roll it up like a newspaper and stash it in your pocket; a windshield that cleans itself; artificial arteries that don't get clogged and that the immune system won't assault; antidepressants that conquer despair without the standard civilian casualties of fat and frigidity. Such is the stuff that chemists' dreams are made of.
And as in sleep or art, it is not always clear who is the dreamer, who the dream. "My field is material chemistry, and one thing we don't admit to young students is how clueless we really are," said Frank DiSalvo, a professor of chemistry at Cornell University. "Much of what we come up with we happen on by trial and error, and we can't predict what we'll get ahead of time. We just don't know the rules of the game for more than a handful of the elements we work with." In theory, he said, all the material needed to construct any device imaginable, a warp drive, a transporter, the perfect toupee, is already there, somewhere in the periodic table. It's figuring out where it is, and with whom it should consort, and under what conditions, that keeps the midnight Bunsens burning. "If every person on the planet were a materials chemist," DiSalvo said, "it would still take a millennium or longer to understand the periodic table well enough to make all the things we want to make."
The basic themes of chemistry are molecules and the bonds that bind and define them. As with the lovable British hit man of twenty-odd films, there is more than one way of being a Bond. You have your suave, supple, catlike bond, your stiff-shanked bond, your uncommitted, barely there bond. The type of bond that links together atoms in a molecule, or one molecule to another, explains why the carbon lattices of a diamond are hard enough to be a girl's best friend forever, while the carbon chains in our food are broken down with only moderate metabolic effort, and the carbon molecules on the graphite tip of a pencil can be transferred onto paper using only the most feathery of strokes. Bonds are stirred, bonds are shaken, bonds, like rules, are made for breaking.
The strongest and simplest but by no means most simple-minded bond in nature is the covalent bond, when two atoms team up and share a pair or more of electrons for the sheer goose-down comfort of it. The bond arises between players in a similar state of discretionary desire: their outermost shells don't really need extra electrons, but they have room for them anyway. The individual atoms theoretically are capable of electromagnetic self-sufficiency, the number of orbiting, negatively charged electrons balancing the number of positively charged protons within. But the orbital paths or shells along which electrons travel as they circumnavigate an atom are designed to accommodate a set number of negative particles apiece, the atom's particular proton needs notwithstanding. Orbital shells, in other words, are a lot like closets: happiest when filled.