Molecular Beauty

My wife and I were on our way to Columbus, Ohio. After I settled on the airplane, I took out a manuscript I was working on—typical for the peripatetic obsessive chemist. Eva glanced over and asked, “What are you working on?” I said: “Oh, on this beautiful molecule.” “What is it that makes some molecules look beautiful to you?” she asked. I told her, at some length, with pictures. And her question prompted this essay. What follows is an empirical inquiry into what one subculture of scientists, chemists, call beauty. Without thinking much about it, there are molecules that an individual chemist, or the community as a whole, consider to be the objects of aesthetic admiration. Let’s explore what such molecules are, and why they are said to be beautiful. In the written discourse of scientists, in their prime and ritual form of communication, the periodical article, they’ve by and large eschewed emotional descriptors. Even ones as innocent as those indicating pleasure. So it is not easy to find overt written assertions such as “Look at this beautiful molecule X made.” One has to scan the journals for the work of the occasional courageous stylist, listen to the oral discourse of lectures, seminars, the give-and-take of a research group meeting, or look at the peripheral written record of letters of tenure evaluation, eulogies or award nominations. There, where the rhetorical setting seems to demand it, the scientist relaxes. And praises the beautiful molecule. By virtue of not being comfortable in the official literature—in the journal article, the textbook or monograph—aesthetic judgments in chemistry, largely oral, acquire the character of folk literature. To the extent that the modern-day subculture of chemists has not rationally explored the definition of beauty, these informal, subjective evaluations of aesthetic value may be inconsistent, even contradictory. They are subfield (organic chemistry, physical chemistry) dependent, much like the dialects, rituals or costumes of tribal groups. In fact the enterprise of excavating what beauty means in chemistry seems to me to have much of the nature of an anthropological investigation.