The reader, at this point, will have realized for some time now that this is not a chemical treatise: my presumption does not reach so far—"ma voix est foible, et meme un peu profane." Nor is it an autobiography, save in the partial and symbolic limits in which every piece of writing is autobiographical, indeed every human work; but it is in some fashion a . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
. . . poetic endeavor . . .
Kirsten Wille, Poetic License
. . . whose aim it is to elucidate . . .
Irvin Goldman, Abductory Inference, Communication Theory and Subjective Science. . . the mysterious chemistry of the mind and . . .. . . of human woes, passions and felicities.
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius
Now our interest is in this human content.
Sigmund Freud, The Theme of the Three Caskets
And yet, do not those very endeavors speak for the fact that . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Moses of Michelangelo
. . . it happens also in chemistry as in . . .. . . the man-world that . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
Jack London, The Valley of the Moon
. . . attraction and relatedness . . .. . . play their . . .
Johann Goethe, Elective Affinities
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
. . . fateful roles
Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man's Soul
Permit me to clarify the situation by a metaphor.
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game
Now the molecules of inorganic matter . . .. . . as I have learned, . . .
Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography
Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset
. . . attach to each other at one point only, making long but stable chains. Organic molecules, by contrast, have a double bond: they attach to each other at two or even more points, making possible richer but also less stable combinations.
Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography
To continue:
Leo Tolstoy, ResurrectionThe hydrogen bond is only a twentieth as strong as the bonds that usually hold atoms together within a molecule. It is strong enough, even so, to hold the two strands . . .. . . to see reflected in . . .
Isaac Asimov, The Wellsprings of Life
. . . of DNA code . . .
Richard Preston, The Cobra Event: A Novel
. . . in place. Yet it is also weak enough to break and allow the two chains to separate on occasion . . .
Isaac Asimov, The Wellsprings of Life
At present I should have to put you off with dreadful technical terms which would still give you no idea of what is happening. One has to have these entities before one's eyes, and see how, although they appear to be lifeless, they are in fact perpetually ready to spring into activity; . . .
Johann Goethe, Elective Affinities
. . . but if . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
. . . to comprehend is the same as forming an image, we will never form an image of a happening whose scale is a millionth of a millimeter, whose rhythm is a millionth of a second, and whose protagonists are in their essence invisible. Every verbal description must be inadequate, and one will be as good as the next, so let us settle for the following description.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
Atoms attract one another, atoms repel one another.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
It needs little imagination . . .
Johann Goethe, Elective Affinities
Anna Katherine Green, The Woman in the Alcove
. . . the record of the friendship of Wagner and Nietzsche . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner
. . . a metaphor from which we may extract . . .
Johann Goethe, Elective Affinities
. . . a lesson that . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
. . . is neither remote nor metaphysical:
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
So long as each seemed to the other to be just a factor in his own egoistic . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner
. . . development, a . . .
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables. . . chemical alter ego . . .But from the moment that this . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
. . . their mutual attraction was stronger than their repulsion.
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner. . . anarchy of atoms, . . .by reason of Nietzsche's gradual realisation of what he was in himself, and his own illimitable self-esteem, his sense of his mission, his lust for power, his inability to suffer contradiction clashed with a similar complex of forces in Wagner, a breach between the two men was inevitable.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner
. . . this always unstable equilibrium became still more unstable
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner
"I am referring to the fact that people have complementary personality characteristics -- like atoms (individuals) in a molecule (a group of 2 or more persons)."
A humorous take on the two prevailing primordial soup origin of life theories, as described adjacent by Freedman: left: lightening strike origin of life; right: comet strike origin of life; each, in turn, striking a so-called "soup of organic molecules" and bringing about the first self-reproducing organism in the Darwinian-based evolution mechanism. |
Isaac Asimov, The Wellsprings of LifeThe Greeks were . . .Richard Wilbur, Excerpt from Lamarck Elaborated. . . the first . . .William Shakespeare, The Tempest—did you know—Guy de Maupassant, Fascination. . . who said . . .Richard Wilbur, Excerpt from Lamarck Elaborated. . . that all bodies are composed of indivisible andWill Durant, The Life of Greece
unchangeable atoms.Chemically, all life is one.Isaac Asimov, The Wellsprings of LifeThat life is chemistry is true but boring, like saying that football is physics.
Life, to a rough approximation, consists of the chemistry of three atoms, hydrogen,
carbon and oxygen, which between them make up ninety-eight percent of all
atoms in living beings. But it is the emergent properties of life—such as
heritability—not the constituent parts that are interesting.
Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters"Once upon a time, very long ago, . . .Isaac Asimov, The Wellsprings of Life. . . in the dark backward and abysm of time . . .William Shakespeare, The Tempest. . . perhaps two and a half billion years ago, under a deadly sun, in an
ammoniated ocean topped by a poisonous atmosphere, in the midst of a soup of
organic molecules, a nucleic acid molecule came accidentally into being that could
somehow bring about the existence of another like itself—"
And from that all else would follow!