Not Counting Chemistry: How We Misread the History of 20th-Century Science | Hacker News Reader

Not Counting Chemistry: How We Misread the History of 20th-Century Science

chemheritage.org

27 pointscoderdude13 comments

> World War II, which is usually discussed in terms of atomic bombs and V-2 rockets; these contributions are summed up in the phrase “the physicists’ war.”

I have two complaints about this complaint.

It overlooks the importance of radar and radar detection in WWII, and many of the people in radar development were physicists.

Second, WWI was "The Chemists' War." There's even a book by that name on the topic. That war is known for the use of chemical weapon attacks, and guess who made those weapons. I'll quote from summary on Amazon for Freemantle's book:

> Within months of the start of the First World War, Germany began to run out of the raw materials it needed to make explosives. As Germany faced imminent defeat, chemists such as Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch came to the rescue with Nobel Prize winning discoveries that overcame the shortages and enabled the country to continue in the war. Similarly, Britain could not have sustained its war effort for four years had it not been for chemists like Chaim Weizmann who was later to become the first president of the State of Israel. Michael Freemantle tells the stories of these and many other chemists and explains how their work underpinned and shaped what became known as The Chemists' War.

Thus, while coal hydrogenation helped Nazi Germany stay in the war, the Haber-Bosch process made the ammonia needed to produce the explosives that helped Kaiser Germany stay in the war.

Certainly chemists were important in WWII (as were mechanical engineers, aviation engineers, metal working, and many other specialties). But the appellation "the physicists’ war" also highlights the relative decrease in the role of chemistry on the actual fighting, compared to WWI.

This is a very strange view of the war. The Haber-Bosch process was invented before 35 years before WWII even started, and had been a staple of food and weapons production by the time the previous World War had finished. Far from helping the Nazis Fritz Haber died well before they even took power in Germany. Also Carl Bosch didn't Germany overcome imminent defeat, he was an anti-nazi who died in obscurity very early in the war.

Personally I don't think you can sum up World War 2 as anyone's war. It spanned 6 years, 4 continents and engaged every area of science, politics and economics.

He was talking about world war one, not two.

My mistake, I missed the subject change to World War I.

A lot of the things we associate with semiconductors is actually chemistry, i.e. photoreactive resists, proper surface deposition of various layers of metals.

Also usually referred to as a joke, but "Plastics." How many things around you are absolutely dependent on fairly advanced plastics? How about all those polymers, the nylons, the kevlars, the polyesters?

And molecular biology itself is the study of chemistry.

Chemistry gets overlooked because it's the backbone, the support for all of these fields, like the doting mother who lets her children go forward and take the spotlight, but without whom nothing would be possible.

Zooming in, doesn't chemistry become physics? Zooming in further, physics becomes quantum physics?

Oh, hey, guess what

https://xkcd.com/435/

I don't think that abstraction is particularly useful because beyond extremely simple systems, approaching things from physics becomes 1.) not possible because we don't actually know enough and/or 2.) intractable because there are too many variables/actors at play.

You can get insight from physics, but physics doesn't actually help you much when it comes to actually making a molecule, or figuring out how to avoid reacting with one part of a molecule while selectively modifying another.

In other words chemistry is to physics as computer science is to math. They're related, you could say one is reducible to the other, but that's not a useful construct in practice.

Most people- scientists in the areas of chemistry and molecular biology- would say that molecular biology is high up enough on the stack that reducing it to chemistry doesn't make sense. Sure, you're working with molecules. But you are working with so many of them that you have to use abstractions to think about it.

Now, biochemistry, that makes sense to compare to chemistry. Biochemistry is organic chemistry (plus a little bit of metal chemistry), although the complexity of an enzyme is such that we often using abstractions.

Incidentally, CHF has an awesome museum in Philly. I really don't think there's any point in trying to dispute between chemistry and physics, or in focusing exclusively on world-historic events. Chemistry is important and its history is fascinating! That should be enough to justify a visit to the museum.

The most incredible thing to me in this article was learning that whale oil was once used to margarine!

  A second hydrogenation technology was used to make 
  margarine mainly from nondairy fats, a vital resource at a 
  time when dairy fat was precious. One remarkable and 
  little-known consequence of this technology was the 
  creation of a vast new 20th-century whaling industry. By 
  1914 whale oil was already being hydrogenated for margarine 
  by the emerging great margarine firms, but by the 1930s 
  this was its main use. The 1920s and 1930s saw a huge 
  expansion in whaling in the South Atlantic, using large 
  factory whaling ships. Whale oil was ultimately used to 
  make some 30% to 50% of all European margarine at this time.

The fascinating thing about chemistry's impact was that it was production that drove discovery.

It was companies, not governments who asked the big questions. Conglomerates such as Bayer and BASF drove the development of ammonia, dyes, antibiotics and chemotherapy.

The only real exception was particle physics, which was entirely academic/governmental.

one of my biggest gripes is how physcists always say that science for the superconducting supercollider led to the superconducting MRI. This is totally not correct. Commercial NMRs had superconducting coils long before appropriations for the supercollider, and the oil industry long had its eyes on NMR as a tool for quantitative analysis of petrochemical product.

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