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A scientist and a writer
A major obstacle to chemistry being a deductive science is that its core concepts very often are defined in circular manner: it is impossible to explain what an acid is without reference to the complementary concept of a base. There are many such dual pairs among the core concepts of chemistry. Such circulation of concepts, rather than an infirmity chemistry is beset with, is seen as a source of vitality and dynamism.
Any serious study of molecular models has to mention play as a component essential to their use. A research chemist will use them not unlike a young child playing with a toy: exploring their features, trying out their resilience, probing their innards, tinkering, day-dreaming, and finding out in those ways new avenues for adventures of the mind and in the laboratory. Reasons for such assimilation of a molecular model to a toy are given and assessed critically.
Chemists are legitimately distressed by the chemophobia of the public. One of its manifestations (hardly the only one) is the stereotyped presentation of a chemist as an amoral character, having sold his soul to the Devil. The implicit sin is more than Faustian, for the betrayal is not only personal, but that of humanity. Fritz Haber is often this scapegoat.
Is this stereotyping deserved? And might we, collectively and individually, do something about it? We approach the issue here by way of an attentive reading of a selectioni of the literary pieces featuring Haber, whether under his own name or in transparent disguise, and of recent biographies of Haber.
(texte intégral d’un chapitre d’un ouvrage collectif, d’études du livre autobiographique de Georges Simenon, Pedigree)
