IB Docs (2) Team Emotion & Chemistry
Introduction
Everyone knows what emotions are – or do they? Clearly words like angry, happy and sad describe emotional feelings but it is quite difficult to define exactly what is meant by ‘emotion’. For those who wish to delve deeper into what emotions are and how they affect our thinking and personality then the article to be found on the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy website is worth reading.
At first sight Chemistry and Science in general seem very much like logical processes where emotion plays little, if any, part. The general view of scientists is that they are dispassionate observers concerned only for the truth. Emotions can interfere with their judgement and bring bias into their analysis. This view is actually reinforced to some extent by the Internal Assessment criteria. Only two marks out of the twenty four available are given for Personal engagement where students are rewarded for showing clear evidence of significant independent thinking or creativity (note that there is no actual mention of 'emotion').
In my view emotion is intricately linked with Chemistry in two distinct ways. One is the creative process and the other is in the way we understand, value and analyse our subject.
The creative chemist
Although there are many written accounts I have not yet located a good video in which a chemist recounts the emotions involved in making a discovery. However it is not difficult to associate the solving of Fermat’s last theorem – a mathematical problem – with a similar type of feeling when discovering something new in Chemistry.
Written accounts in Chemistry include the discovery of the structure of benzene by Friedrich Kekulé (1829-1896). Kekulé was trained in architecture and after pondering on the structure of benzene for a long time claims that the answer appeared to him whilst dreaming of snakes catching their own tail and forming a ring. Many chemists claim that their breakthrough did not come while they were actually thinking about their work but as a flash of inspiration which occurred when they were otherwise occupied or thinking about something completely different.
The image shows Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931). In his famous quote,
“Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration”
Edison realised that the creative insight does not just appear out of nowhere. The background graft has to be put in first. Just collecting data and following the traditional ‘scientific method’ in the hope that it will lead to a startling insight on its own usually results in failure. One of the great examples of this is John Dalton (1766-1844). Dalton is famous as the father of atomic theory but for the greater part of his life he daily collected accurate and precise weather records which ultimately led him to no serious conclusions whatsoever about meteorology. Perhaps though they may have helped prepare the ground for him to make the leap towards his atomic theory. Somehow for a great discovery a creative spark is needed. The spark often comes when links are made between seemingly unrelated topics and it is often the emotions which catalyse this process.
The dispassionate chemist
Sometimes we just know (i.e. we have a gut feeling) that a chemical theory is correct or incorrect. It seems to be just common sense. What we really mean by this is that it fits in with our prejudices and view of the world. When evaluating a hypothesis or theory then we need to look carefully at our preformed opinions and discard them so that we can view the facts in a dispassionate manner. In fact even if we try we can probably never completely eradicate our bias (often we are unaware of it ourselves) but we can try to be as much aware of it as possible.
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