Roald Hoffmann, a corecipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emeritus at Cornell University. Having survived World War II, he came to the U.S. in 1949. Besides his scientific achievements, Hoffmann is an accomplished author who has published a number of plays and collections of poems, essays and lectures.
Dr. Hoffmann delivered the Eugene Wigner Distinguished Lecture Feb. 9, 2016, on the topic “The Chemical Imagination at Work in Very Tight Places.” We asked him about the study of matter under high pressure, his experience as a Holocaust survivor and his work in the arts.
1. What can we gain from studying matter under high pressure?
Under high pressure, there could be chemical compounds formed that are not formed under normal conditions on Earth. If we can go back from there and retrieve them, they could be useful. An example is the synthesis of industrial diamonds under pressure from coal, from graphite. I’m a theoretician, and there is also a kind of intellectual depth that I gain from looking at something under extreme conditions. It’s a little bit akin to what philosophers do by forming paradoxes. That is, by exploring paradoxes, you get some understanding of the basic rules in the normal world. So if I can understand the behavior of matter under extreme conditions, like high pressure or high temperature—or low pressure, low temperature—if my methods for studying these things work under extreme conditions, I gain confidence that they will work under normal conditions. And sometimes, I explore limits. So the limits help me understand what is wrong with my theory. They, in a sense, stress my theory. And by stressing it, I get insight.
2. You are a published poet and playwright as well as a scientist. What is the connection between your work as a scientist and your work in the arts?
I think it’s very personal, in the first place. It all began in college for me with an inspiration by literature to write, but I didn’t do it until middle age. If one asked the question, “How have the two influenced each other,” I think poetry and writing in general have influenced my science. I learned the power of concision, of something said in a few words. I learned how to touch somebody emotionally. I write lots of papers. The average graduate student, who is the audience for my papers, I need to reach them. They are a remote reader, a remote learner. There is no way I can grab them by their neck and say, “This is what I meant, and not that.” They’re looking at my text. In those words, the most important thing I can communicate to grab them is that I care that you learn. And it’s the I–you that’s the emotional tie. It’s really hard to do that in a dry, third-person scientific text. But I learned something about the strategies even in that constrained medium. And it’s much, in some ways, against science that we have constrained that medium of scientific expression. There are good sides to that constraint, too. But even in that constrained medium of a scientific article, I think I’ve learned something from my poetry about how to touch the reader. And that’s very important.
From the science, I’ve gotten some metaphors for my poetry—some ideas to write poetry about. I’ll give you an example. I went to a seminar with someone talking about boundary conditions for some mathematical equation. The seminar was boring; I fell asleep. I woke up; the guy was still talking. I stopped listening, and I began to listen to the words. I began listening to the words rather than to their meaning in some way. And at some point he said, “Let us assume for this equation, free boundaries.” He was talking about some limits on the mathematical function, and he was going to set them free. The moment he said “free boundaries,” I wrote it down. There was a poetic phrase. Why? Because free and boundaries are a contrast; they’re opposite things. That’s the making of a poem. I found that in a scientific lecture.
3. You are also a Holocaust survivor. How did that experience affect your career?
I am. I’m a childhood survivor. I’m the last generation of Hitler’s gifts to America, and that has a lot to do with the story. Of course, there was incentive after surviving that; most of my family was killed, including my father and three of four grandparents, but my mother survived. We were Jewish. We were in a bad place—southeast Poland—during the war. I’m old enough to have been born before World War II. I was a childhood survivor.
There were certainly a lot of incentives to succeed, to make use of everything good about America—and education that could lead you to something, irrespective of your social class or your income, actually. I think there was more the immigrant experience, that you were an outsider. English was my sixth language when I came here. I didn’t know the language; I was ahead of the kids in math—that was coming from Europe; that is what was in the education system. But when you’re an outsider, what you do is you listen, and you try to figure out what it is that people say, what is the underlying motivation, or reasons, or truth. And in some ways that’s a little like science. I’m outside this nature that I have of molecules behaving in a certain way. A calcium near nitrogen; what is it going to do? I can’t touch it, I can’t ask it. I just watch from outside with my tools, with my senses. And I think that the fact that many immigrants—and that’s true today for Asian-Americans just as it was for the Jewish immigrants in my time after World War II, that many of them first become scientists, and then enter other aspects of society—has something to do with the immigrant experience, and just the nature of being on the outside and watching. So that’s an influence.
4. Why was it important to visit ORNL, meet with researchers here, and participate in the Wigner Lecture Series?
First of all, the national laboratories have played an important role in my life that people don’t know about. When I was at Columbia in college, from the summer between high school and college, I worked during my college years every summer in national laboratories. Not here, but two summers at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, and two at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is more parallel to Oak Ridge. Those summers gave me an introduction to research, and they were a great counterpart to boring chemistry courses in college. So I think I became a chemist because of an experience at a national laboratory, so I always have a fond place in my heart for national laboratories.
There is a particular situation here that interests me. It is now 60 years after those college days, essentially, and I’m still at it. The next molecule still gets me excited, and I’m in a research program with some people at Carnegie Institution of Washington who do their research here at ORNL using the Spallation Neutron Source, which is unparalleled in the world to get at the structures of matter under extreme pressure. I knew that they used, for instance, a certain kind of press to compress between two diamonds, matter to this extreme state of high pressure. But, you know, I had never seen it. It’s a whale of a difference to see this incredible piece of equipment, and to see the laboratories, and to see the ports of the spallation facility, too. I’m very glad I came down here to see it.