At fifteen, he fell in love with chemistry. The pattern language of atoms and orbitals made sense in a way that little else but music did. Balancing chemical equations felt like solving a Chinese puzzle box. The symmetries hidden in the columns of the periodic table had something of the Jupiter’s grandeur. And a person might even make a living with the stuff.
I´m about to start my
Chemistry term showing this text to my students, because it´s full of
Chemistryphilia, word that I´m inventing in opposition to Chemistryphobia,
which gives to the chemist work all evils, and it´s a decent job, even could be an
art, like Juncal used to say to Búfalo.
I think that ´balancing
chemical equations´ should have been translated by ´adjusting chemical
equations´.
To round off this cute image
of Chemistry, or this ´whitewash´as it´s said nowadays, we can add another
passage of this interesting novel that equates
Chemistry and Music in several times. Both of them have developed an own
language, for example.
Freshman
year exhilarated him. He sat in the auditorium alongside four hundred other
chemistry students while the lecturer scribbled down blackboards full of spirit
writing from the world inside this one. The labs—titrating, precipitating,
isolating—were like learning to play a wayward but splendid new instrument.
Matter was thick with infolded mysteries waiting to be discovered. Coming from
the lab, stinking of camphor, fish, malt, mint, musk, sperm, sweat, and urine,
Els smelled the heady scent of his own future.
