POPULARIZING CHEMISTRY: HANDS-ON AND HANDS-OFF

Abstract

Linus Pauling said, “Chemistry is wonderful. I feel sorry for people who don’t know anything about chemistry. They are missing an important source of happiness ” (Gaither & Cavasos-Gaither 2002, p. 118). Most people do not feel that. What might be done, and what used to be done, to make chemistry popular? I had thought that ‘hands-on ’ might distinguish those active in chemistry from ‘hands-off ’ supporters, interested but not participating: but now I am not sure. I happen to sit on the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Committee for Pro-moting Chemistry to the Public. I have been a member of the society since I was a student reading chemistry forty-five years ago (before it was Royal), but was invited (I suppose) to join that committee in the hope that an histo-rian might advise on restoring the reputation of the science to where it was in the long-distant past. The traditional model of popularizing was that one took a little chemistry, diluted it, and added sugar to make it go down: but this has not worked. There is a famous book-review by a child: ‘this book told me more about elephants than I wanted to know’. That is how many people feel about being told what professors and academicians are up to: but with chemistry they may also feel alarm. They think of pollution, slow poi-soning, and weapons of mass destruction. I am (like that committee) puzzled about the nature of ‘the public ’ – no doubt they are and were really publics. Recently the ‘SciPer ’ project at Leeds and Sheffield has been sampling the science in popular periodicals, mostly from Britain, in the nineteenth century – and this has resulted in three books,1 in which chemistry duly features (though not very largely). So I hope now to share some uncertainties, hoping for clarification. There seem to be three questions that we can profitably have at the back of our minds: 1. Who is chemistry being popularized to, and perhaps why and where? 2. How was it done in some supposedly heroic better past?

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