Physical and Biological Modes of Thought in the Chemistry of Linus Pauling

✍ Scribed by Mary Jo Nye

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 126 KB
• Volume: 31
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1355-2198
• DOI: 10.1016/s1355-2198(00)00028-9

✦ Synopsis

disciplinary identities demarcating chemistry and the chemical sciences from other sciences and from each other have been discussed elsewhere. The emphasis here is the ongoing interplay of physical and biological problem-setting and problem-solving in twentieth-century chemistry, with Linus Pauling's work from the 1920s to the 1950s as a focus.

2. Physical Modes of Thought and the Programme of Reductionism

When Linus Pauling embarked upon his graduate education at the California Institute of Technology in 1922, Caltech was not his "rst choice. Had he heard something positive from Berkeley, where G. N. Lewis directed the College of Chemistry, Pauling would have gone to study with Lewis, whose new theory of the electron-pair bond he greatly admired. During Pauling's junior year at Oregon Agricultural College, 1920}1921, he had been asked to give evening lectures for students having trouble with freshman chemistry. In the library he ran across Irving Langmuir's recent papers on the structure of atoms and the electron theory of valence (Langmuir, 1919a,b,c). These, in turn, led Pauling back to Lewis' 1916 paper and to the theory of the chemical bond that was only becoming known in European scienti"c centres at this time, following Langmuir's appearance at the BAAS meeting in Edinburgh in 1921.

After 1921 Pauling rarely had the chemical bond far from his mind. Nor did he leave behind a fascination with molecular form and structure that was catalysed by his undergraduate college professor Samuel Graf's course in the crystallography of metals.