Nineteenth-century chemists were faced with a particular problem: how to
depict the atoms and molecules that are beyond the direct reach of our
bodily senses. In visualizing this microworld, these scientists were the
first to move beyond high-level philosophical speculations regarding the
unseen. In Image and Reality, Alan Rocke focuses on the community of
organic chemists in Germany to provide the basis for a fuller
understanding of the nature of scientific creativity.
Arguing that visual mental images regularly assisted many of these
scientists in thinking through old problems and new possibilities, Rocke
uses a variety of sources, including private correspondence, diagrams
and illustrations, scientific papers, and public statements, to
investigate their ability to not only imagine the invisibly tiny atoms
and molecules upon which they operated daily, but to build detailed and
empirically based pictures of how all of the atoms in complicated
molecules were interconnected. These portrayals of "chemical
structures," both as mental images and as paper tools, gradually became
an accepted part of science during these years and are now regarded as
one of the central defining features of chemistry. In telling this
fascinating story in a manner accessible to the lay reader, Rocke also
suggests that imagistic thinking is often at the heart of creative
thinking in all fields.
Image and Reality is the first book in the Synthesis series, a series
in the history of chemistry, broadly construed, edited by Angela N. H.
Creager, John E. Lesch, Stuart W. Leslie, Lawrence M. Principe, Alan
Rocke, E.C. Spary, and Audra J. Wolfe, in partnership with the Chemical
Heritage Foundation.