Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) (2001)
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001)
“When I set up my lab and started some chemical experiments of my own, I wanted to learn about the history of chemistry in a more general way, to find out what chemists did, how they thought, the atmosphere in centuries past. I had long been fascinated by our family and family tree – by tales of the uncles who had gone off to South Africa, and of the man who had fathered them all, and of the first ancestor of my mother’s of whom we had any record, an alchemically inclined rabbi, it was said, one... Lazar Weiskopf, who lived in Lübeck in the seventeenth century. This may have been the incitement to a more general love of history, and a tendency, perhaps, to see it in familial terms. And so the scientists, the early chemists, whom I read about became, in a sense, honorary ancestors, people to whom, in fantasy, I had a sort of connection. I needed to understand how these early chemists thought, to imagine myself into their worlds.
Chemistry as a true science, I read, made its first emergence with the work of Robert Boyle in the middle of the seventeenth century.MoreLess
Chemistry as a true science, I read, made its first emergence with the work of Robert Boyle in the middle of the seventeenth century.MoreLess
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