Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) (41 page)

I sometimes wondered whether any ‘macroquantal’ phenomena existed, whether one might ever be able to see, under extraordinary conditions, a quantal world with one’s own eyes. One of the unforgettable experiences of my life was exactly this, when I was introduced to liquid helium, and saw how this changed its properties suddenly at a critical temperature, turning from a normal liquid into a strange superfluid with no viscosity, no entropy whatever, able to go through walls, to climb out of a beaker, and with a thermal conductivity three million times that of normal liquid helium. This impossible state of matter could only be understood in terms of quantum mechanics: the atoms were now so close together that their wave functions overlapped and merged, so that one had, in effect, a single giant atom.

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I wish I had realized – but that would not have been easy for me as a boy – that Crookes was wrong, that the new insight about the atom which prompted his thoughts (he was writing this in 1915, just two years after Bohr) would serve, once assimilated, to expand and enrich chemistry enormously, not to reduce it, annihilate it, as he feared. There were similar anxieties about the first atomic theory: many chemists, Humphry Davy among them, felt there was danger in accepting Dalton’s notions of atoms and atomic weights, danger of pulling chemistry away from its concreteness and reality into an arid, impoverished, metaphysical realm.

I
owe a huge debt to my brothers, my cousins, and, not least, my old friends, who have shared memories, letters, photographs, and memorabilia of all kinds; I could not have reconstructed the events of so long ago without them. I have written of them, and others, with some trepidation: ‘It is always dangerous,’ as Primo Levi remarked, ‘transforming a person into a character.’

Kate Edgar, my assistant, and editor of many of my previous books, has been a virtual collaborator on this one, not only editing the innumerable drafts I produced, but meeting chemists with me, going down mines, enduring smells and explosions, electrical discharges and occasional radioactive emanations, and putting up with an office increasingly filled with periodic tables, spectroscopes, crystals dangling in supersaturated solutions, coils of wire, batteries, chemicals, and minerals. This book would still be a two-million-word excavation had it not been for her powers of distillation.

Sheryl Carter, also working with me, has opened the wonders of the Internet for me (I am computer-illiterate, and I do all my writing with a pen or an old typewriter), and has found books and articles and scientific instruments and toys of all sorts which I could never have got for myself.

In 1993, I wrote an essay-review in the
New York Review of Books
of David Knight’s book on Humphry Davy, which in many ways rekindled my long-dormant interest in chemistry. I am grateful to Bob Silvers for encouraging me in this.

My article ‘Brilliant Light,’ an early fragment of this book which appeared in
The New Yorker
, was brilliantly edited (and titled) by my editor there, John Bennet; and Dan Frank, at Knopf, has been crucial in helping to steer the book to its present form.

Soon after starting this book I had the great pleasure of meeting a boyhood hero, Glenn Seaborg, and I have subsequently met or corresponded with chemists all over the world. These chemists, too many to name, have been astonishingly hospitable to an outsider, an ex-boy-enthusiast, and have shown me wonders that the wildest science fiction of my boyhood could not have conceived, such as ‘seeing’ actual atoms (through the tungsten tip of an atomic force microscope), as well as humoring some nostalgic desires to see, once again, among other things, the deep blue of sodium dissolved in liquid ammonia; and tiny magnets levitated over superconductors cooled in liquid nitrogen, the magical, gravity-defying floating I had dreamed of as a child.

But, above all, it has been Roald Hoffmann who has been infinitely stimulating and supportive, and who has done more than anyone else to show me the marvelous thing which chemistry is now – and it is to Roald, therefore, that I dedicate this book.

EOF