Uncle Tungsten

Sacks's bar mitzvah photo

And speaking of chemistry ...

Since my last post, two days ago, I have finished reading Oliver Sacks's memoir, Uncle Tungsten.  Since Sacks's death last summer, his life and work have been much discussed and reviewed.  Therefore, rather than a "review" of Uncle Tungsten, I'll just offer a few remarks.  

The book is a memoir of Sacks's life up to the age of 14.  During most of his boyhood, young Oliver had a precocious and obsessive interest in chemistry.  (Both his parents were physicians, and many members of his huge family of Lithuanian-Jewish ancestry were scientists.)  Sacks uses the story of his boyhood as a framework for a short history of the field of chemistry, from its earliest beginnings in alchemy up to about 1948, when as a young teenager, Sacks began to appreciate the impact of quantum physics on chemists' modern understanding of their field.

Like all kids -- like myself, as discussed in the prior post -- his interest in chemistry began with an attraction to color, smell, tactile sensations -- in other words to the properties of tangible materials.  Because of his family, he had opportunities from a very early age to see scientists in action, as well as to have a source for chemicals and other materials to work with.  Tungsten offered a particular allure, because one of his uncles owned a company that extracted and produced tungsten in many forms and for many uses.

Sacks thus learned chemistry by handling materials, wondering about their characteristics, and seeking out information on his own.  In his memoir, he implicitly equates his first tentative steps toward chemical knowledge with the first tentative applications of the scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  As Sacks the boy learned more, Sacks the adult leads us step by step through the history of the discipline.  He suggests that he is merely passing on to us the knowledge he himself had learned at the age of 9 and 10.  To some extent this may well be true, but the elder Sacks obviously did substantial historical research in order to present this scientific history -- and this research is confirmed in his acknowledgements.

Young Oliver learned chemistry the way that early scientists once learned it -- by observation and by seeking explanations for what he observed.  This approach is the opposite of that taken by high schools and undergraduate programs where, for the most part, students learn theory from books, and may then illustrate those theories by prescribed laboratory exercises.  Sacks was always interested first in the observation, and only then in the theoretical explanation.  And to Sacks as a boy, learning about the men who advanced the world's knowledge of chemistry was as important as -- and a substantial part of -- learning about chemical theory itself.

Thus, even as a boy, Sacks immersed himself in the world of the senses, rather than simply read books.  His instincts as a youth prefigured his approach to the practice of neurology as an adult, where he insisted on as much contact with the patient as possible -- learning about patients as living human beings, rather than simply running their symptoms through a prescribed differential diagnosis.

Oliver Sacks lost his enthusiasm for chemistry at the age of 14.  In this book, he wonders why.  In part, he feels, it was chemistry itself that had changed.  Quantum physics gave chemical elements, compounds, and reactions a ghostly quality.  What's happened to cause and effect when a hydrogen atom may change its state of excitation at any moment, totally unpredictably, and when one can predict behavior at the atomic level only statistically?

He also suspects, sadly, that loss of his once burning enthusiasm for chemistry was a predictable accompaniment of growing up.

Was it, perhaps, ... that I was growing up, and that "growing up" makes one forget the lyrical, mystical perceptions  of childhood, the glory and the freshness of which Wordsworth wrote, so that they fade into the light of common day?

However that loss occurred, to be replaced by an interest in medicine, during the years when his peers were playing soccer and cricket, Oliver developed a profound fascination with the world of chemistry, and with the way in which scientific knowledge is advanced.  His recovered enthusiasm, as an adult author, proves contagious.