Symphony in C

I am thoroughly enjoying Robert Hazen’s new book Symphony in C. Hazen, who is both geologist and musician, does a wonderful job extolling the wonders of Carbon in a book laid out as a symphony – yes, with four appropriate musical movements covering Earth, Air, Fire, Water! Scientifically, Hazen’s knowledge is both deep and wide. He’s co-written an excellent integrated science textbook aimed at non-science majors, now in its eighth edition. My students also read his book Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origin the last time I taught an origins-of-life class. (This time around we’re reading David Deamer’s First Life.) One of the joys of origin-of-life research is learning from different fields: biology, chemistry, geology, physics, not to mention some history and philosophy.

 

I’m not going to babble much more about his book other than to say that if you enjoy some of the excerpts below, I recommend his book in full.

 

Here’s an excerpt from his introduction to Movement III (Fire) on carbon and its connection to materials science.

 

To make stuff, you need atoms in diverse three-dimensional combination: chunky masses, flexible sheets, delicate filaments, and branching arrays. You need molecules in every conceivable size and shape: chains of atoms, rings of atoms, solid blocks of atoms, and hollow cylinders of atoms. Our society craves materials with every imaginable useful property: silky, resilient, transparent, sweet smelling, absorbent, colorful, insulating, abrasive, water resistant, opaque, sticky, biodegradable, UV protective, spicy, magnetic, inflammable, dense, brittle…

 

The ever-expanding catalog of society’s needs and desires creates incessant demand for equally varied atomic architectures. Each material must be meticulously engineered, carefully tailored to its specialized role at the atomic scale, for an underlying principle of chemical science is that the properties of any material depend on its atoms – its collection of elements and how those elements are bonded together.

 

No chemical element plays the combinatorial game of bonding to other atoms better than carbon, whose chemistry is so unfathomably rich that scientists who spend their lives studying carbon have been given their own special collective noun: “organic chemists”…

 

Just reading that makes me want to be an organic chemist with a focus in materials science! But here’s a second excerpt which I find appropriate at this juncture since my G-Chem class is delving into the Periodic Table right now and we’ll soon get into chemical bonding and some of the uniqueness of carbon.

 

… Most of the elements in the periodic table adopt this kind of strategy, either giving away electrons or snapping them up to win the bonding game… In this world of mutually beneficial electron bartering and usually friendly takeovers, carbon holds a unique place as Element 6, smack in the middle of the periodic table, halfway between magical 2 and 10. Like a weary swimmer on a lake, treading water equidistant between two shores… Should carbon go one way, seeking 4 more electrons to reach the magic number 10? Or should it head in the exact opposite direction, giving up 4 electrons to wind up at the magic number 2?

 

This ambiguity gives carbon a bonding advantage unknown to most other elements. Unlike one-trick sodium, which invariably gives up a single electron, or chlorine, which readily seizes that one extra electron in its struggle for atomic contentment, Element 6 enjoys many contrasting chemical roles – adding, subtracting, or sharing electrons in combinations that lead to vastly more varied chemical compounds than all of the other 100-plus elements combined. That’s why carbon can create both the hardest of all materials and the softest, the most vivid and varied colors and the blackest possible black, the most slippery lubricants and the stickiest glues.

 

While I warn my student about using anthromorphic language to describe chemical bonding and stability, for example in the Un(Happy)Atoms story, Hazen’s language here is a delight. Yes, I would quibble with him about technical details since my expertise is in chemical bonding, and neither sodium nor chlorine are one-trick ponies, by and large he gets things right in broad strokes and evocative language. Such reading excites me and I can’t wait to get back to my next class meeting!