Roald Hoffmann, science and art
“I am very proud that I survived a Nobel Prize”, says Roald Hoffmann, who received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Barcelona in 1992. Laureated with Kenichi Fukui for decoding the role of molecular orbitals in chemical reactions, Hoffmann (Zolotchiv, 1937) is also a transgressor of the frontiers of science, a passionate traveller of literature, poetry and humanities and the beauty of molecules.
“Curiosity should be part of people’s lives. Certainly, we should teach children to be curious about what it is that makes things work”, says Hoffmann, the son of a Polish family of Jewish origins, who experienced the barbarism of the war in Europe —he was hidden in an attic, and his father was killed by the Nazis— before migrating to the United States.
“I am very proud that I survived a Nobel Prize”, says Roald Hoffmann, who received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Barcelona in 1992. Laureated with Kenichi Fukui for decoding the role of molecular orbitals in chemical reactions, Hoffmann (Zolotchiv, 1937) is also a transgressor of the frontiers of science, a passionate traveller of literature, poetry and humanities and the beauty of molecules.
“Curiosity should be part of people’s lives. Certainly, we should teach children to be curious about what it is that makes things work”, says Hoffmann, the son of a Polish family of Jewish origins, who experienced the barbarism of the war in Europe —he was hidden in an attic, and his father was killed by the Nazis— before migrating to the United States.
The rigour in Hoffmann’s scientific literature is combined with the poetic sensitivity of his works, such as The metamict state (1987), Gaps and verges (1990), Memory Effects (1999), Catalista (2002) and Soliton (2022), or Oxygen, written together with Carl Djerassi. During this conversation, the painting Narcissus, by the master of the Italian Baroque period, Caravaggio, which illustrates the cover of his essay on science The same and not the same evokes the science of stereoisomerism, when molecules are like mirror reflexes.
Linked to Cornell University (United States), he has collaborated with Santiago Álvarez and Pere Alemany’s teams at the University of Barcelona, and he has recently given the conference “All the ways to have a bond” in the Aula Magna Enric Casassas at the Faculty of Chemistry, full of young students. In his last book, Men and molecules —a bilingual anthology of his poems—, he reminds us that men and women are not that different from molecules. “There is a difference: human beings have a choice. Molecules do not seem to have much of a choice”.
You were named after the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, and you are a great explorer of scientific knowledge and poetry, arts, literature and philosophy. These are worlds with different languages. Are they closer than we might think? How could we get these areas closer to each other?
Arts and science are in some ways close, there are things we can do to make them closer, and some things perhaps cannot be done. I think of the actions of human beings. You can try to build a house yourself or you can hire a builder to build a house. You will probably hire a builder because they have the tools and the expertise to do it. You could do it yourself and maybe there is some benefit in doing that. Certainly, it will have worked, you may have saved some money. There are qualities of both art and science that should be there in all human beings, but they may want specialists to do it. That is why I mentioned the builder. It is a good idea if human beings try to be creative in various ways and that is in part the essence of art. You should also be curious, but some things might be more beneficial when in hands of the experts. I think people would feel better if they injected a bit of curiosity into their lives and if they structured it in some way to create some creative activity. That does not mean that they should do it.
Curiosity may be as simple as when you look at a sculpture in Park Güell. When we went there, I told my wife that the sculpture “is a dragon”. And she said, “I think it is a lizard”. What is the difference between a dragon and a lizard? I can look it up. Do I have the time to look it up? Yes. It may also be interesting to find out what Gaudí thought he designed and what people call it now. There is a whole structure of interest around anything. I think neither of those things is art or science. But that curiosity for something which the Internet has enabled for many of us is just wonderful, and it should be part of people’s lives.
I would like to teach many things to both scientists and artists to think about. One is the mirror image. How is the mirror different? This is important in daily life: there is a whole science of stereochemistry around that (he shows Caravaggio’s Narcissus on the cover of his poetry book) in the mirror. Why is it different? Actually, Caravaggio has observed carefully, the mirror image is darker than the original. The artist has painted this darker than he has painted that. It’s actually something I look for when I see a scene, the reflection of an object. There is some reason, but also, at some point, I stop thinking about it and I say, “look at this knee painted by Caravaggio!”. How do I know that is a knee? And how do we as human beings recognize it is a knee? It is because we expect it at that point in the body. I am talking about both our science and curiosity. It is part of humanity.
How was this fascination for art, for humanities, in your case, received by the academia?
In my case, it is viewed as a little piece of color on a good chemist. That is all. There are so many things to wonder about. But my interest in the arts, I think, realistically speaking, would be not noticed by anyone unless I were a good chemist. I go to the trouble of sneaking in a little bit of the art into the chemical writing that I do. And maybe it is viewed as color, but maybe it is viewed as something else. Maybe it allows the scientists to value the art a little bit. If not as art, at least as a way to communicate, to teach. I am fortunate, but I have had to work to get into the art. I am interested in the artistic choices that people make. And I like to view them as artistic choices. I would like the scientists to realize that they are making artistic choices. They are making choices of ways of representing things to communicate better the facts but also in a more effective way. There is some psychological choice that is made.
Did you find a higher degree of freedom in the arts or in chemistry?
From an outside perspective, there seems to be more individual freedom in the arts. On the other hand, to me, I can do science of a certain level when I perceive a lot of individual freedom. In part, I structured my science so that I have looked at one molecule after another and I have, in some way, marched through different parts of chemistry, choosing to be interested in everything except for biological chemistry. Strangely enough, even though I admire the incredible choices of biological chemistry, some feel guilty about not working on things that are useful for humanity in terms of new drug design. But I have experienced it, and I think my many papers show evidence of that. And I also advocate a polyglot approach to understand scientific facts.
You have experienced the darkest and also the brightest sides of the human being. Is poetry a passport to survive barbarism?
No. First of all, the poetry was not there when I was younger, and I was surviving. I just lived. I think this urge to survive is very strong. If you have survived something, whatever it is, there is an interesting choice. People who have survived an accident, maybe an explosion, they have a choice to look at the dark part if they want to. The dark part might be reflected in Primo Levi’s committing suicide, whereas some people were thinking that he committed suicide because of a guilty feeling that he survived and others didn’t. That expression may itself be a sign of depression, and that depression may have nothing to do with survival. If you have known anyone who has been clinically depressed, if you have experienced it yourself, you are in a situation where you are the prisoner of some illness. And you react in a certain way.
I do not mean to go off on Primo Levi. He was feeling so depressed that maybe he decided to end his life. But he also had a choice to express joy or interest in life as a result of having survived, thanking either God or no one else in particular, depending on your religion. It is very interesting to see people who survived a mass killing and they thank God for having survived. It is bizarre. But that’s OK if they say that. Maybe it was chance. We do not know how to thank chance. In science, this is a little digression. There is a word, serendipity, finding it by chance. Today we can say, “that this is serendipitous, it happened, and I took advantage of that”. In another age, you would have said “by the grace of God” … that’s a different way of saying the same.
I’m not that far away from the things that happened when it began. It could have been, it was an act of survival. It was not an active act on my part, but from my parents, but we did survive. It could be that I would be either very sad about it, maybe like Levi, or I might be just happy about the fact that I survived. I might also commit myself to a life of action to make sure that such things do not happen again.
I have done little things and I did something together with someone here. Professor Pere Alemany helped me to teach some workshops in the Middle East in 2006. We brought together three small groups of people from Arab countries, Israel and Iran to teach them some chemistry. I had a theory, what is called in the United States the Marine Corps principle: if you take any group of people together and you give them an incentive for suffering enough together, they will bind as a group. That is what happens when you go into the army. They are friends forever. So we took these Arab and Israeli and Iranian students, and we gave them something which they could not get anywhere, an intensive course in chemistry. And we made them work so hard that they were angry at us but they were a team together.
Talking about chemistry, you received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981, aged only 44, a young scientist. Throughout these years, could you highlight any finding you think is revolutionary in the field of chemistry?
It was a long time ago. On a personal level, I am very proud that I survived a Nobel Prize. You ask yourself what to do next. Other people ask you. The next book that Toni Morrison wrote after she received a Nobel Prize was reviewed in a different way than she wrote the first. I am very happy that I survived. That doesn’t sound like survival. But I am here, and we have talked about chemistry, I talked about philosophy and poetry… But I survived in remaining a scientist. I did as much in chemistry after the Nobel Prize as I did before.
What could have I done? I could have become an administrator, or I could have been the president of this university. That is the usual way, becoming the heads of the institutions and such. I didn’t go that way and I’m proud of having done it.
You asked me another question. I think that getting the structure of molecules has become easy. I could also mention the finding of molecules such as those that are shaped like a football ball —fullerene, known as Buckminsterfullerene— which were not known at that time. There are networks of molecules, but things like that existed before, but now they have proven utility. There have been discoveries in biochemistry like the ones that have enabled the vaccines for COVID-19. But the whole discovery of the RNA world as an important biological molecule…
Certainly, electronic microscopy has enabled us to see molecules, and the techniques that I mentioned in my talk at the faculty —scanning, microscopy, etc.— are very new kinds of microscopies that have enabled us to see molecules. Maybe because of my age, I see the continuity more than the difference. I think you should ask a younger person how they see what is revolutionary. If I think about the way my office looks, the major difference aside from the deterioration of materials that are used is the computer on my desk. And the telephone, which we did not foresee even in general, nor in science fiction, literature and such, the packing of information a telephone could give us.
On top of that, human beings have gotten no better. And the world of Trump has enabled the evil spirit. I am sorry but it has enabled the misuse of the most wonderful tool that we have: the computer. The spreading of propaganda, falsehood, bullying people, and saying things from the supposed dark. And that same tool enables me to look up whether it’s a dragon or a lizard… And what Gaudí intended. And let’s not forget, that the architect who worked with him on that bench in Park Güell was Jujol, I can remember! (laughs).
Let’s talk about peace. In such hard times, you are one of the more than 200 Nobel laureates who signed a manifesto against the war in Ukraine.
But what you do not know is that I wrote that manifesto, which is a not-very well-hidden secret. I actually originated that and I wrote it. And the biggest problem is getting a bunch of egocentric people to agree and put two words together. Rick Roberts was very good at that, but I wrote it, and I had to do some research. Anyway, we put together a manifesto by Nobel laureates protesting. What could it be for? It certainly helps the spirit of the Ukrainian people, it does not do much other than that. Nothing very practical, these are terrible times.
Do you think the voice of scientists is strong enough for the current society?
It has little value. Science had value in World War II, it was valued on all sides, in the creation of weaponry and keeping it up. It was not listened to on the American side in the limit discussion that led to the dropping of the atomic bomb. It was a military decision. The immensity of that weapon exceeded any other weapon, it remained a concern for humanity. I think we are going to see, in time, the use of atomic weapons. I think it is more likely to be small states or people caught up in various passions which exceed the kind of rational balance, a balance which prevented the Russians and the Americans from using it, who came really close to doing it a couple of times, as we found out.
In general, I have my small doubts about the voice of scientists. Is the voice of scientists the voice for peace? It would seem so from the general ethical science, the knowledge that we share as freely as possible. But this isn’t about sharing freely. Free knowledge is a nice thing when the knowledge is of no value whatsoever. If the knowledge is worth billions of dollars., the scientists cannot just tell other people. They will keep secrets and protect information from sharing with other people. We invented the patent system in a great way. I have some reservations about scientists running the world, as if anyone would let us. A reservation that comes back to my interest in humanity is that I think scientists are just as likely to set rules and regulations that are too strict, that supposedly favour reason but would kill for reason. And that they need tempering of the humanities and the arts to create all that we all want to do. I am not sure I trust scientists either. Although they seem to be more rational people on various things.
In your conference at the UB, you told a young audience not to be impatient and push things to the limit. What would be your message so that young generations share this passion for knowledge, arts and poetry?
The message about pushing things to the limit makes within the context of what I said. It is also about wanting to push things to the limit but respecting humanity. These ideas about promoting this push are intellectual things. I recently read a biography of Marquis de Sade and I also read some of his original writings. A man who was insane at the end of his life, but he believed in pushing things to the limit. But that limit involved hurting people, and that is not a limit we want to go to.
I think that we need to encourage ourselves and young people the desire to know. That comment about the dragon is an example. The world is so open to knowledge and at the same time it is open to the abuse of that knowledge. I mentioned the way that the Internet is used, and you can see it in the time wasted on playing video games. There is nothing wrong with playing video games but when it becomes an obsession, it is a problem. I think we should encourage people to know how to use the tools the world has made available.
We need to temper knowledge with an appreciation for the human condition and for ethics. It ranges from considering the ethics that are involved in internet activities, to saying something bad about somebody. I think that the way to gain that knowledge of ethics and the human condition is not through textbooks of ethics but by reading novels. The novels are great instruments of how people communicate, and how you should or should not behave in certain situations. I think we also have to relax a little and to encourage all of us in taking part of something spiritual.
By ‘spiritual’ I do not mean religious, although it may take a religious form. It could also mean cleaning up your mother’s house if she allows you to. It may take the form of some volunteering; it may take pleasing yourself to go out and look at the night sky. That is a spiritual act because looking at the night sky without wondering about what the constellations are is also interesting. You get a feeling you are looking at it, but there are other people all around the world looking at the sky, and that feeling is a spiritual act. Sharing this action has nothing to do with religion but with taking time for contemplation and looking at nature. It does not hurt to know something about the planets. What I said in the talk was to know as well as to learn to do it with respect for human beings and to please yourself by entering the spiritual condition. It is sometimes complicated, but necessary.