Project Outcomes – Part 2 – Themes
There are two kinds of themes I’m looking at. The first set of themes consists of the discussion themes from the workshops. While most know issues around nanotechnology were touched upon in all workshops, in each session, a core theme seemed to emerge in addition. These themes could be summed up as follows:
- how to communicate forces at the nanoscale through symbolic materials / practices
- the precautionary principle and communication to the public
- ‘thinking in other dimensions’
- human desire for perfection/control
- ‘humans should focus on the natural side’/what is nature?
- ‘nano is overrated’
- patenting/property
The other set of themes are the issues that I felt emerged from the workshops. These could be summed up as:
- what kind of influence did the materials have on the conversation-while-modelling e.g. did the hands-on activities enable different/new kinds of ideas?
- parallels of experimentation in workshops with scientific experimentation. I noticed that some participants came up with designs similar to the ones described in scientific publications they could not have known about (e.g. using Brownian Motion as part of a design rather than treating it as an obstacle). Could this method create a bridge between non-scientists and scientists in public engagements?
- the difference between the Mutable Matter ‘data’ and that of other public engagements with nanotechnology/new technologies in general. A lot of the data resembled that of other public engagements – similar themes (e.g. potential risks and benefits) were discussed. Some of the data that I could not find in other reports may have been edited out to meet policy-makers’ requirements. In the GM Nation? report some of these discussion themes were grouped and somewhat side-lined under the header ‘Non-material values’. Most other issues resembled questions that scientists and philosophers continue to ask such as. An example would be: what are we perceiving/what is really there and how does this affect our dealings with/design of nanotechnology.
- how can engagement with the topic be sustained?
Project Outcomes – Part 1 – Workshop structure & Modelling
From today, will start posting some of the outcomes from the Mutable Matter workshops. The workshops took place in Nottingham (2), Leeds (2), London, Milton Keynes (2) and Southampton.
I tried to recruit non-scientist participants, however, some participants had a background in science or a strong interest in it. Most participants were recruited from Open University alumni as well as Open University undergraduate courses and were between 26 – 65 years old.
But, first of all, what happened in the workshops?
A workshop was designed as a mixture of hands-on modelling and dialogue and was divided into four phases. In the first one, I showed participants ‘atoms’, or, rather, images of ‘atoms’ made with the help of a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM). For this phase, I showed examples where atoms appeared round and ordered in more or less recognisable formations. I then asked the participants whether they could imagine making something with these atoms if atoms did look like this. Provided they had the facilities to do this – what would they design? The participants were then invited to symbolically realise some of those designs with materials such as plasticine, magnets, ’slime’ and polystyrene balls.
For the second phase I, again, used STM & AFM images – this time using more ‘liquid’ looking ones to potentially question the first set of images. Again, I asked whether the participants could imagine designing something from what they saw.
The third phase focused on the forces and other conditions at the nanoscale and how they might contribute to a design and/or the imagination of this scale.
In the fourth phase, I introduced designs that scientists and graphic designers had come up with so they could be discussed or compared to the participants’ own designs.
Here are some examples of the kind of designs and stories that emerged in the workshops (mostly from the first phase). Some were intentionally humourous, but sparked off quite serious discussions.
1. A nano wound dressing that helps tissue to repair itself. One of two designs that related to nanotechnology’s use in medicine (the other one related to cancer detection).
2. A ‘designer atom’ (’Labyrinthium’) that changes its properties according to how the electrons (represented by the polystyrene balls) are distributed. This model (as well as the ‘Mexican atom’ model) led to a discussion of copyright, patenting and other property-related issues.
3. This is an example of questions that related to ‘what is already there’ on the nanoscale that we may or may not know about, may or may not integrate into ‘nanotechnology’. The model represents a two dimensional plant or ‘nano fossil’.
4. Here, a participant imagined how the nanoscale is already present in and impacting our scale. The participant’s chosen example was ‘interconnectivity between species communities’: how knowledge about how plants work together at different levels could help us ‘invent’ new plant communities and help promote certain species. A follow-up discussion branched off into different, but related directions: how ecosystems work, how ‘communication’ happens between parts of ecosystems, the creation of ‘chimeras’ through technology and how influential humans are on the environment.
5. This model represented communication between ‘primordial building blocks’. The discussion of this model revolved a lot around how to imagine and think oneself into what is going on at this scale including the temporal dimension of this scale (what has been going on for billions of years). There were similar examples of struggling with the imagining of this ’scale of life’.
Not all participants engaged in modelling. Different reasons were given for this. Amongst those were:
- accepting the method would signal complicity with the idea of nanotechnology which the participant was highly sceptical about
- already having made one’s mind up about the subject and not wanting or needing to further explore the subject
- ‘people do not learn anything from hands-on activities’
In these cases, discussions took place following the same phases, but without the modelling.
‘Star Maker’ Exhibition
I’ve just received an invitation to an exhibition which might be of interest to some readers. It is inspired by the novel ‘Star Maker’ by Olaf Stapledon.
The exhibition is on from 12 June 2009 – 12 July 2009.
The invitation did not say anything about place or time, but I assume it can be viewed at E:vent, 96 Teesdale Street, London, E2 6PU, between 12am – 6pm Friday to Sunday.
More information should be available here.
Hello from the Future – Will people drink Urameshi Soda?
Mutablematter is back and blogging. And has just returned from the Future, as my band-mates call Japan. So it was only fitting that we went to see the somewhat oxymoronic ‘Museum of the Future’ – the Miraikan. Basically, the Miraikan is a science museum, but rather than explaining the history of science and technology, it presents what is happening or being developed right now. The only chance we had to go was on a busy Sunday between soundcheck and gig. The train that took us to the museum very much resembled the London Docklands Light Railways – and even went through a Docklands-like landscape. Only a little more extreme, of course. Here is an example building close to the museum…
We wondered whether it has sliding doors and lifts you have to speak to. The museum itself was surprisingly tame. We expected it to be fully robot operated and more like an ethereal white gallery-like shrine to convergence. Instead we found ourselves in a very hands-on, very human-run space. In the permanent exhibition (‘Innovation and the Future’) we visited, you could touch robots, operate an atomic force microscope and flip the switches inside a deep sea diving bell.
The hall was also patrolled by a large team of enthusiastic staff who kept approaching visitors in order to help them shake off the initial bedazzlement by technology. I actually spent far too long chatting to one of the English-speaking staff that I ended up with very little time for the exhibits. So, please excuse my somewhat limited descriptions. We also missed the hands-on lab and robot demos – mostly, because they were booked out well in advance. Luckily, all exhibits displayed English translations, so browsing the exhibits was comparatively easy – I didn’t have to struggle for hours (days? years?) with my Japanese dictionary.
The most prominent features of the museum are the numerous ‘opinion areas’. The first one I came across bore the curious title ‘Sea of Fertility’. On closer inspection, it was not about artificial insemination, but about giving voice to your wishes about future technologies.
The next discussion area focused on future medicine. According to the website, ‘you can… become a part of “Promoting Medicine Together” by exchanging opinions at this area’.
The last area I visited was themed ‘The environment and me’ . I thought it was interesting that the explanation speaks, again, of togetherness – a desired unification of views. This particular space reminded of what, a decade ago, tended to be described as ‘technological sustainability’.
While one could argue that the Miraikan portrays new technologies in an overly positive manner – there is a strong sense that new technologies ARE the future and that people should work together to make them work for them (and the planet) – I felt that the exhibition was enriched by the discussion spaces. The fact that opinions could be written freely and without pre-formulated sentences to tick gave visitors an opportunity to see quite a breadth of other visitors’ opinions. I could not find out whether all comments make it into the display and how the displays were edited. What I did find was that the museum staff seemed very keen on asking everybody for their opinion or whether anybody had any further questions. Many of the staff seemed to be science students – I spoke to a biology PhD student. Visitors were also encouraged to make suggestions about the museum. When I asked about the discussion exhibits (who reads the opinions – do policy makers and scientists also take a look at them? or is it just for other museum visitors?), I was given some paper in a folder to write to the museum. I also left my e-mail, so I’m hoping I hear back from them. Some readers may have alarm bells ringing about the friendly buzz of ‘we care about your opinion’ . I can empathise with this opinion, but when I was in the space of the Miraikan, I felt the value of exchanging thoughts with fellow visitors, even if it is just on anonymous note cards. What I also found interesting was that the museum worker I spoke to emphasised that they felt the questions on display are very limited – so they are collecting what people would like to ask or see in the displays (the exhibitions seem to undergo periodic re-design).
Before we had to head back to manic Shibuya, we had a quick snack at the cafe. I braved the Miraikan’s theme concoction, ‘Urameshi Soda’ (is it named after the manga character or does it have to do something with the Japanese word for ‘envious’?). As far as I could make out is was melon flavoured soda with strawberry sauce and some kind of jelly. Obviously the popular choice of the future… because we will have self-repairing teeth and bodies!
Mutable Matter goes East
Source: Miraikan
I have taken my first ‘proper’ annual leave in five years to go on a two-week tour with my band in Japan. Brian May themed jokes from my supervisors abound. Why am I writing about this on my blog? Because I am hoping to see Tokyo’s Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in between gigs and soundchecks (fingers crossed!). I became aware of this museum through my research on nanotechnology. The particular parts that interest me about the museum is the ‘Designing the Future’ exhibit as well as the ‘community’ areas that give visitors an opportunity to listen to other people’s opinions and voice their own. The museum is also famous for its vivid displays on robots and artificial intelligence – I’ve even heard rumours that they have got robot guides! Currently, one of the Miraikan’s two special exhibitions is based upon the science behind the new Terminator film. The museum also offers hands-on experimental workshops as well as intriguing films about space elevators and our connection to the universe!
Events – Society, Technology and the City
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image source: AAM arts list
There are some more events coming up which may be of interest to some readers: the first one is Futuresonic a popular ‘art, music and ideas festival’ under the banner of ’society, technology and the city’. I’ve always wanted to go or participate in this festival since it started five years ago, but have never managed to so far. Futuresonic is part conference, part exposure to different kinds of artistic interpretations of the theme, and you can join activities from ‘biotagging Manchester’ to touching the stars. The focus is heavily on Climate Change and environment-technology interactions with artworks such as Eva Meyer-Keller’s ‘Handmade’ or Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Sculptures.
The programme is too manifold to describe, after all, they boast ‘300 artists and 100 events across 30 venues’, but you can download a festival brochure here to experience the full information overload!
German-speakers (although some lectures are also in English) might be interested in the latest event by the Chaos Computer Club e.V. – ‘SIGINT’. According to their website, SigInt
stands for ‘eavesdropping activities of the secret service (signals intelligence), but also for an event which interrupts a routine programme/process (signal interrupt)’. The themes for the three days are: the somewhat expected Control and Surveillance and Bugs, Pranks and Insecurities; and the boldly titled The Future of Everything. Lectures have delightfully idiosyncratic titles such as ‘There is no spoon? Then go and print one out – How the internet, open source and fabbing are making everyone a maker’, ‘ Dancing: Direct Action in Disguise – New Strategies for Street Protest’ or ‘Yes we can! Yes we will! – Free Software for a new society’.
If you know of any other interesting events, please leave some links and descriptions in the comments! :)
CFP Open Tech 2009 – Work on stuff that matters
I have just received an announcement for 2009’s Open Tech Conference. It is a very informal conference, as the organisers emphasise – a platform for people to chat to each other about ‘technology, democracy and community’. They are currently looking less for papers than talks, panels and other communicative ’stuff’. I went last year and it was indeed fascinating to hear about the different projects people are involved in. This year, their motto is ‘work on stuff that matters’ which, needless to say, goes very well with the theme of this blog! ;)
So, if you are working on ’something that matters’ that you think other people should hear about, please register on their site to give a presentation – or to attend to chat or physically network with others!
‘Mixed Drinks for Modern Times’ – The Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada
Greetings from the road! Last week, I attended the AAG conference in Las Vegas where I talked about Mutable Matter. Originally I had planned to do some more fieldwork in the area, but the fieldtrip to the Nevada test site was cancelled and some other meetings did not happen either, so I just went to the Atomic Testing Museum around the corner (from a Las Vegas perspective, that is) from the Convention Center. I have to say it was probably the best museum I have ever visited. Not only was the exhibition material very involving and through-provoking, but the staff was also extremely enthusiastic about the subject matter and seemed to have close ties to the test site either through family or profession. Through their explanations and anecdotes, which they liberally offered, I gained a much more personal insight into this part of Nevada’s history. I was even offered to speak to physicists on site and to read around the topic in the museum library.
Aside from short films from different decades explaining the physics and the issues around atomic bombs, there were also lots of short film clips with interviews of soldiers, engineers and military officials which helped to outline the different positions on the subject.
It was interesting to hear and see through them, how much Nevada embraced the test site when it was moved there. According to one of the interviewees, the motto was: ‘We need to help with the testing in order to protect democracy’. The craving for legitimacy through being entrusted with such an important military project (that would also bring different people to the area) appeared to be either intentionally or unintentionally satirised in events such as ‘Miss Atomic Bomb’ or in consumer products such as atom-themed Christmas ornaments, ‘La Bomba Grande’ wine and books such as ‘Atomic Cocktails – Mixed Drinks for Modern Times’, which were also documented in the displays.
The exhibition also gave access to a wealth of public education material from different periods.
One of the older films demonstrated the workings of an atom bomb with mere ping pong balls and mouse traps! I think it was the same film that also assigned the atom four personalities: warrior (destroyer, war), engineer (provider, gives energy), healer (diagnoses, medicine) and research worker (helps understanding, ‘pure science’).
The ‘Ground Zero’ theatre, a showcase of the ‘warrior’ aspect, which I first thought would be inappropriately corny, actually felt like a fittingly disturbing illustration of the schizophrenia around the tests (to create something so frightening in the name of peace). It reminded me more than just a little of the last scene of John Adams’ ‘Doctor Atomic’ opera. Afterwards, several examples were given how destructive the bomb can be with whole islands being blow into the atmosphere to its effects on whole populations and environments. It was also interesting to read how underground tests work and what effects they have on the rock and wider environment around them. The exhibits about the geology of the areas were very surprising in their documentation of volcanic activity in the area, earthquakes and ground water effects. Even more surprising was the exhibit about the native American tribes that lived in the area and were moved from the site.
There were many things that happened on the test site that I did not know about – amongst other things, a so called ‘experimental farm’ where, for 15 years, researchers studied the impact of radioactive fallout on the human food chain, or ‘Operation BREN’, an ‘unusual experiment’ to help Japanese people to understand the health effects of the Atomic Bomb. The site seems to still host a number of other activities such as providing a testing ground for NASA’s moon rovers as well as providing a testing ground for cleaning up hazardous spills and other kinds of environmental remediation. Some even more bizarre stuff was done around the space theme, but also some more sober training occurs for emergency teams. And, of course, the test site must always be prepared for further testing ‘at the direction of the president’. Hmh…
Interactives in the exhibition, apart from the interactive short film selections included hands-on geiger counter probing and computer simulations for nuclear waste disposal and even bomb testing (according to the staff, ‘kids enjoy this most’). In the latter exhibit you (or your kids) actually have to assemble a simplified version of a bomb, detonate it and collect/interpret the resulting data. Next to this exhibit was also a case with souvenir project pins, stickers, metal cowboy cut-out for various subcritical experiments from 1997-99 adding to a surreal finish. Similar items, the infamous bomb keyrings, for instance, could be purchased in the museum shop.
What I liked about the museum was that it critically engaged on an adult level, even – or maybe especially when – it used ordinary techniques such as interactives to engage with such a controversial subject matter. For instance, you had to explain to yourself why you felt queasy about you or some kids assembling a bomb in the virtual – and how you imagine the people involved in the running of the test site would feel about it. I have often left museums extremely frustrated, but this one I left with lots to think about. I also enjoyed the wealth of information around the topic that went of into so many different unexpected directions (down to related developments in photography) that were essential for the understanding of the many dimensions of the project (technical, social, environmental, political etc.). In relation to my project it provoked a lot of thoughts about what kind of risks we have to take (or don’t have to take?) or are willing to accept for the development of new technologies. So much for now as a first impression. You can visit the Atomic Testing Museum via the net at www.atomictestingmuseum.org where a lot of their material is publicly accessible.
Btw the evening after the museum visit, I ended up in a cinema in downtown where ‘The Watchmen’ was shown. Somewhat unexpectedly, the film also featured a nuclear bomb threat, rounding off a very unsettling day.
Memory, music and magnetism: Circuit-bending art-science
Source: The Guardian
‘In every human being there will surely be, as we have said, tremendous chords of wave patterns sounding out their notes.’
For the Ada Lovelace Blogging Event I am writing about Daphne Oram who helped laying the foundations for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Not only was she the first (known) woman to write the first piece of software for creating electronic music but she also proceeded to build her own electronic instrument. Many electronic musicians today – both male and female – look up to the achievements of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop of which Oram was, depending on which source you most believe in, its initiator, co-founder or first director.
First of all, I have to admit that until about a couple of months ago, I had not even heard about Daphne Oram. Through conversations with fellow synthesizer enthusiasts ( = geeks) I was more familiar with the name and work of Delia Derbyshire. However, I kept on coming across Oram’s picture (the iconic one with ‘the’ glasses) on different electronic musicians’ sites, so I eventually looked her up on the net. The fact that not actually that much information – and especially not music(!) – seemed to circulate about her made me even more curious. During some research in academic music journals I found out that she had published a book in 1972 called ‘An individual note – of music, sound and electronics’. I could not resist having a look at it at the British Library. There, I found out that the title of the book was a prime example of British understatement. Oram’s writings about music are, as Doreen Massey would probably put it, ‘totally bonkers’, they were also one of the most enjoyable reads I have had in a long time!
So why have I chosen to write about her? There are two reasons. The first one is that I am a female experimental musician who loves analogue electronic music equipment – the wackier the better – and getting together with fellow musicians and ‘tekkies’ to mess around with it. Since my first encounter with a proper ‘synth’, the EMS Synthi with its strange suitcase design, metal plugs and fascinating knobs, and follow-up encounters with theremins, stylophones and filtered acoustic instruments, I wondered what other possible sounds lie hidden between materials and currents. When I was somewhere between the ages of 11-13, I made a god-awful attempt at building my first instrument with a piece of wood, nails, kite string and a pick-up, which, according to my music teacher who amplified it for me, sounded ‘very Chinese’. Strangely, I never noticed that I never encountered other ‘girls’ who did this kind of stuff until I moved to London where I kept on finding myself in ‘girl talk’ about suboctaves, the unsurpassable warmth and beauty of ‘analogue groove machines’ or even rescuing old, underappreciated synthesizers from people’s garages via the Freecycle network. The thought about female role-models in electronic music just surfaced while talking with a friend about the blogging event. So who were my role-models? I don’t think I ever had any. But, right now, I am feeling that Daphne Oram’s infectious enthusiasm for experimenting with electronics and music is inducing a desire to carry out bigger design projects for soundcarriers and might do so in other people. Unfortunately, for me, this will have to wait until the end of my PhD. Then I can happily end up in A&E after the electric knitting-needle-o-phone prototype test went horribly wrong.
The blog author’s first ‘proper’ electronic music encounter was with the EMS AKS Synthi. Source: EMS
The second reason is that, to my surprise, Daphne Oram seemed to be struggling with a lot of the same themes that I am struggling with in my work at the moment: matter and ethics, art-science divisions/collaborations and the relation of these ‘musings’ to the everyday. I am deliberately using the word ‘musings’ as Oram very much advocates this word in the form of the Italian meaning of ‘musare’ – to sniff the air to catch a scent. She uses it as a kind of leitmotif throughout her book and encourages the reader to ’sniff[...] the air in all directions’, unafraid of error and ridicule: ‘I suspect’, she writes, ‘we may really enjoy, most of all, the pitfalls we fall into… when our noses are held for too high in the air!’ Refreshingly, Oram indulges in her own musings on an unabashedly cosmic scale. Even if you do not agree with her, you will find yourself in the fascinating universe of a woman who understands herself and the world through electronic explorations of music – or should it be musical explorations of electronics?
While reading the book, I gained the sense that Oram is, like me in my PhD work, working on the boundary of what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead calls the ‘bifurcation of nature’ – the division of the world into two worlds. On the one had you have the sensory environment we perceive (which by some is not really seen as nature, but ‘mental reactions’ which create those ‘secondary qualities’ according to Whitehead) and ‘molecules, electrons and ether on the other side’ (as Whitehead wrote in 1920). For Oram, art and science seem to represent these two sides. In her book, she tries to bring these sides together in what she calls a ‘celetal mode of thinking’. Andra McCartney describes this ‘celetal mode’ as a way of bringing ‘art and science together in balance’. Art seems to help us see ‘new aspects of reality’ and may be able to intervene when science negatively impacts on society.
In the first chapter, Oram laments the limited scope of art-science collaborations she has witnessed so far, with only artists using science materials and methods, but only in a limited area. Scientists rather adopt artistic strategies, and the artists who are interested in science are seldom musicians (she names some examples such as a 1837 article in the American Journal of Science entitled ‘The Production of Galvanic Music’ and a number of fellow composers).
When it comes to music as an art form, Oram suggests that it could be used to make a kind of ‘matter music’. If the natural frequencies of elements are transposed, you could, for instance make a ‘Hydrogen Scale’ (B E F# G G G# G# A if I re-read my notes correctly). Incidentally, during my first Mutable Matter workshop, the topic of music was also hit upon in this manner. It made me very happy to encounter the ‘universe as music’ again in Oram’s work. To hear her speak of humans as assemblages of ‘chemical musical chords’ made me wish that I had had the opportunity to do a Mutable Matter session with her and her fellow workshop colleagues. However, Oram is not intending to turn people into ‘simple material things’ or walking musical scores. Humans are not ‘just a fundamental, two harmonics and fifteen suppressed overtones’, she writes. However, she believes in a form of material decision-making which is connected to this image of an ‘elemental human’. A baby, for her, is a product of decisions that neither the parents nor the baby make. Matter has the final say in how is going to turn out.
Another theme she picks up on and which has also appeared in a few of the workshops is our perception of the world and what other perceptions, e.g. sensing in more or less than three or four dimensions would be possible. What is the world after all? After getting very metaphysical, Oram then proposes something more practical: that music can be used as a testing ground for techno-scientific developments that are likely to have a profound impact on society in the future.
‘In our arts, I think we should reflect and examine the social organisations of today and of the future. The arts should act as an analogy of the possible social and technological systems, so that we can preview and criticize these systems without needing to use the human race as guinea pigs…’
Oram’s example here is serial music which, she believes, allows audiences a glimpse at what it would be like to live with machinisation. I guess that her ideas about the function and impact of music could easily be dismissed as naive, but I find them inspiring none the less.
Other than using music and art as a testing ground for the impact of technologies, Oram talks about designing technology to help us ‘chang[e] the methods of technology’. One example is the humanisation of artificial intelligences. While she warns that ‘the more a machine is humanized the more subtle a weapon it can become’, she made a successful attempt at building a ‘machine-with humanising factors’, as she described it: Oramics. Oramics used drawings on film strips that were converted by the machine into music. It seemed as if Oram tried to design a more intuitive composition technique as opposed to the more abstract notations that are used around the world. Apparently, she admitted that her machine was actually quite difficult and laborious to operate, because you had to feel yourself into the way the machine made sense of your scribbles, but I bet it is equally fun to operate! On that note (no pun intended) – I should better get back to writing my thesis! Enjoy Ada Lovelace Day!
Brief musings on ‘elemental relations’
Source: Royal Society of Chemistry/Murray Robertson
Originally, I had just wanted to write a quick project update before setting off to my first conference, but then I stumbled upon something that I think would be a more fitting contribution to the blog. This ‘something’ was an image from an online exhibition called ‘Visual Elements’ which is part of the Royal Society of Chemistry website. The artist Murray Robertson visualises each of the elements of the periodic table through associations that surround them.
Chemist David Watson writes in his introduction to this new kind of periodic table:
‘The icons used to represent each element are just the surface representation of something that is ultimately unknowable in its entirety. However, the surfaces of these symbols have an arcane aspect which makes us want to look deeper, to experience the element as a living symbol rather than a list of numbers: such as boiling point , atomic radius, first ionisation potential, valency, charge density.’
He also talks about the background of the project: the wish to tell stories through these images and thus make these elements less like something that just scientists engage with behind closed doors.
The illustration for the noble gas neon, which I had come across during my web search, reminded me of the last Mutable Matter workshop where a participant talked about neon being something ‘scientific’, but also ‘kitsch’ at the same time. But most of all, the images and Watson’s introduction made me wonder what Primo Levi would have thought about them.
Levi was Jewish-Italian chemist and writer who survived the Holocaust. In the seventies he wrote a book called ‘The Periodic Table’ in which he talks about his life through matter – a sort of chemical autobiography. The degree to which Levi bonded with the materials he worked with for most of his life and to which he associated them with key moments or people in his life, is astonishing – at least for a non-chemist like me! I am not entirely sure whether Levi also thinks of non-chemists when he writes that ‘every element says something to someone (something different to each)…’ Do you or I have an element we feel drawn to? It is interesting to think about this.
Levi actually makes one exception: carbon. He believes that it is so omni-present that it is very difficult to bond with it, or, as he expresses it, it is ‘not specific, in the same way that Adam is not specific as an ancestor’. Surprisingly, Levi admits a strong empathy with carbon.
‘To carbon, the element of life, my first literary dream was turned, insistently dreamed in an hour and a place when my life was not worth much: yes, I wanted to tell the story of an atom of carbon.’
Levi then talks about how, at the time when he thought about the carbon atom as a ‘character’, scientists were not able to ‘see’ atoms and how, to him, it existed despite experimental proof. Thus, having worked his way from argon to vanadium, he proceeds to the last chapter of his book – the semi-fictional journey of his carbon.
