Chemistry is a Language

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Paul Lane.

Hi, Paul. Welcome to the show. How can we help?

I used to teach chemistry in college, and I used to use an analogy for chemistry because people really, really struggled with it. That chemistry is kind of a language. You have to spend a lot of time learning all the building blocks, like the letters and the words, and the way that the grammar works together to understand it. And I used to just use that analogy to help people understand how much time they needed to spend studying. But then it kind of became how I learned chemistry.

So what do you mean is thinking about this as a kind of a system with an internal logic was a really beneficial way of getting people into the field?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like it has its own rules, it has its own building blocks, and you can’t really understand even what a chemistry problem is asking. I mean, sometimes you’d read a problem to somebody and they’d say, what the heck is this thing trying to get me to do? And you have to spend a lot of time with the subject to understand how to maybe put the pieces together to answer a question.

So organic chemistry, I think, is the best example, especially because it has its own nomenclature. But you have to understand how electrons work together, how energy works together, before you can understand how one molecule would bond to another. But then when you understand that, you have to learn a bunch of reactions. And once you’ve kind of had all these building blocks together, someone can say, hey, I’ll give you these chemicals, and I want you to build this chemical over here. How do you put that together?

Can we think of chemistry as a language, I guess, is my question.

Oh, wow. That’s a bold question. Yeah, you mentioned the grammar of chemistry. The grammar. I’m turning that one over in my head right now. I mean, figuratively, sure. But literally, that’s the question. I mean, figuratively, lots of things can be a language. We can talk about the language of love, right? We can talk about the language of business. That is the back and forth, all the different components that make a business relationship work or a romantic relationship work. But yet, it’s not really a language. It’s not necessarily exclusively spoken and written, right?

Except with chemistry, you’ve got not just nomenclature. You’ve got a notation system, as you point out, is utterly, utterly impenetrable without somebody introducing you to it. I mean, you can’t really. If I go look at a foreign language that’s written in the Latin script, if I go look at Romanian, which I don’t know any Romanian, I could probably puzzle out, you know, one to two percent of the words because they’re similar to words I already know. But chemistry, if you’ve never been introduced to it, you’re just not going to do that, right?

That’s true. Right, right. I wouldn’t call it a language. I think that’s the position that I’ll take, Paul. I wouldn’t call chemistry a language, but I would argue that what you’re describing is, and here’s why, because it uses language in order to operate. A language isn’t composed of other languages. A language is itself, right? Chemistry is composed of equal parts math, the language that you’re using, English, French, Latin, what have you. And it’s composed of symbols, some of it where that behave like language and they have meaning, but they don’t actually operate in a semantic way. I mean, they operate in a semantic way, but not a syntactic way. So that’s my case.

It’s interesting. I really struggled with chemistry when I was in high school and thinking about it in terms of a language. I really wish I’d had conversational chemistry.

Oh, wow. Wow, what a nice idea. Yeah, but definitely vocabulary really helps in chemistry. That’d be kind of like more like philosophy, wouldn’t it? Conversational chemistry. I like that. I like that.

Yeah. When you think about learning a language, you know, humor is like the ultimate, or at least as far as I understand it, of language when you can understand language to that subtlety. And there’s a certain subtlety, like when I talk with a professor or somebody I’m working with on research, there’s a certain subtlety to which we communicate with each other and kind of understand what we’re saying. That’s the same as like if someone was very sarcastic. And it’s hard to pick up sarcasm, especially if you’re just learning the language. But there’s something really special to that.

Well, Paul, we have lots of chemists and other kinds of scientists who listen to us, and I’m sure we’ll hear from them. So we’ll continue the conversation. All right?

Great. Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, sure. Thanks. Thanks a lot.

All right. Bye.

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