Classic Chemistry

The cover of our first issue of 2015 features Lewis Carroll’s Alice climbing through a mirror into another world. Inspired by early references to chirality noted by Christopher Welch in this month’s feature on page 26, I went searching for additonal – more visual – representations and chanced upon Carroll’s intriguing and thought-provoking nod to stereoisomers (1):

“How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn't good to drink”, says Alice to her black kitten in the first chapter of Through the Looking-Glass, before embarking on a new adventure.

Was Carroll (actually Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) accidentally referring to chirality or had he more deeply considered the fact that a stereoisomer of lactose – or any other nutritional molecule for that matter – could be indigestible, dangerous or simply tasteless? Perhaps we’ll never know for sure, but given the timing of the novel (1871) and Pasteur’s work on discriminating enantiomers in a mixture (1861), I think it’s more judgment than luck. Dodgson’s Oxford University background (in mathematics) probably saw him rubbing shoulders with the odd chemist or two...

Eager for more classic literature and chemistry, I came across another interesting use of chemistry in Elective Affinities where Goethe uses chemistry – specifically, the reaction between dilute sulfuric acid and limestone – as a simile for the unexpected but inevitable relationships that form when certain combinations of people come together:

“Suppose an A connected so closely with a B, that all sorts of means, even violence, have been made use of to separate them, without effect. Then suppose a C in exactly the same position with respect to D. Bring the two pairs into contact; A will fling himself on D, C on B, without its being possible to say which had first left its first connection, or made the first move towards the second.” (Elective Affinities, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 1809). Life and love, it seems, are a little more complicated than ‘opposites attract’.

Finally, Charles Dickens really captures the spirit of analytical science with a wonderful simile: “Meanwhile the retainer goes round, like a gloomy Analytical Chemist: always seeming to say after ‘Chablis, sir?’ – ‘You wouldn’t if you knew what it’s made of.’ (Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens, 1864.) Thereafter, the servant is amusingly referred to as the Analytical Chemist.

Can you offer any classic references to your field?