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Roald Hoffmann: On Science and Writing

Nobel Prize winner will discuss the role of writing in the sciences

Roald Hoffmann is a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who enjoys writing about oxygen as much as he enjoys studying its behavior.

"It seems obvious to me to use words as best as I can in teaching myself and my coworkers," wrote Hoffmann in an autobiographical statement for the Nobel Prize website. "Some call that research. Or to instruct others in what I've learned myself, in ever-widening circles of audience. Some call that teaching.

"The words are important in science, as much as we might deny it, as much as we might claim that they just represent some underlying material reality."

Hoffmann will discuss how words and science intersect in a talk March 9 in Von Canon Hall in the Bryan Center on Duke's West Campus. The talk will explore the role of writing and rhetoric in science. His visit is sponsored by the University Writing Program.

A Cornell University professor who received an honorary degree from Duke last spring, Hoffmann was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Japanese scientist Kenichi Fukui for their studies of chemical reactions. Hoffmann's work focuses on the electronic structure of stable and unstable molecules and of transition states in reactions.

In addition to his research, Hoffmann said he is fascinated by the intersection of science and art.

"It seems equally obvious to me that I should marshal words to try to write poetry. I write poetry to penetrate the world around me, and to comprehend my reactions to it," he wrote.

In addition to his nonfiction science writing, Hoffmann has composed poems about chemists and about chemical elements. He co-wrote a play, "Oxygen," that questions the meaning of scientific discovery and has been performed around the world. He has written several books of scientific essays for a general audience, some in collaboration with artists and religious scholars. And he produced a PBS series that taught basic precepts of chemistry.

"Around the time of the Industrial Revolution -- perhaps in reaction to it, perhaps for other reasons -- science and its language left poetry," Hoffmann wrote. "Nature and the personal became the main playground of the poet. That's too bad for both scientists and poets, but it leaves lots of open ground for those of us who can move between the two."