Public Lecture Announcement!
Presentation | Wednesday, August 2 | 4:00-5:30 p.m. |106 Stanley Hall
Location: University of California, Berkeley
Speaker: Roald Hoffmann
Sponsor: Berkeley Global Science Institute, College of Chemistry
CHEMISTRY’S ESSENTIAL TENSIONS: THREE VIEWS OF A SCIENCE IN CULTURE
In this generously illustrated lecture several views of chemistry will be presented, stressing its artistic and psychological dimension: First of all, chemistry is, as it has always been, the art, craft, business of substances and their transformations. It is now also the science of microscopic molecules, both simple and complex. And then there are people’s perceptions of chemistry - the ambivalence about benefit and harm that figures in these perceptions may be viewed as a problem, but it is also a life-giving tension. For it is the way we feel about people too. The underlying psychological tensions of chemistry will be explored, as will the strong element of creation or synthesis in chemistry, which brings chemistry close to the arts.