
Not Counting Chemistry: How We Misread the History of 20th-Century Science - coderdude
http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/media/magazine/articles/26-1-not-counting-chemistry.aspx
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dalke
> World War II, which is usually discussed in terms of atomic bombs and V-2
> rockets; these contributions are summed up in the phrase “the physicists’
> war.”

I have two complaints about this complaint.

It overlooks the importance of radar and radar detection in WWII, and many of
the people in radar development were physicists.

Second, _WWI_ was "The Chemists' War." There's even a book by that name on the
topic. That war is known for the use of chemical weapon attacks, and guess who
made those weapons. I'll quote from summary on Amazon for Freemantle's book:

> Within months of the start of the First World War, Germany began to run out
> of the raw materials it needed to make explosives. As Germany faced imminent
> defeat, chemists such as Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch came to the rescue with
> Nobel Prize winning discoveries that overcame the shortages and enabled the
> country to continue in the war. Similarly, Britain could not have sustained
> its war effort for four years had it not been for chemists like Chaim
> Weizmann who was later to become the first president of the State of Israel.
> Michael Freemantle tells the stories of these and many other chemists and
> explains how their work underpinned and shaped what became known as The
> Chemists' War.

Thus, while coal hydrogenation helped Nazi Germany stay in the war, the Haber-
Bosch process made the ammonia needed to produce the explosives that helped
Kaiser Germany stay in the war.

Certainly chemists were important in WWII (as were mechanical engineers,
aviation engineers, metal working, and many other specialties). But the
appellation "the physicists’ war" also highlights the relative decrease in the
role of chemistry on the actual fighting, compared to WWI.

~~~
tcate
This is a very strange view of the war. The Haber-Bosch process was invented
before 35 years before WWII even started, and had been a staple of food and
weapons production by the time the previous World War had finished. Far from
helping the Nazis Fritz Haber died well before they even took power in
Germany. Also Carl Bosch didn't Germany overcome imminent defeat, he was an
anti-nazi who died in obscurity very early in the war.

Personally I don't think you can sum up World War 2 as anyone's war. It
spanned 6 years, 4 continents and engaged every area of science, politics and
economics.

~~~
Houshalter
He was talking about world war one, not two.

~~~
tcate
My mistake, I missed the subject change to World War I.

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entee
A lot of the things we associate with semiconductors is actually chemistry,
i.e. photoreactive resists, proper surface deposition of various layers of
metals.

Also usually referred to as a joke, but "Plastics." How many things around you
are absolutely dependent on fairly advanced plastics? How about all those
polymers, the nylons, the kevlars, the polyesters?

And molecular biology itself is the study of chemistry.

Chemistry gets overlooked because it's the backbone, the support for all of
these fields, like the doting mother who lets her children go forward and take
the spotlight, but without whom nothing would be possible.

~~~
alanwatts
Zooming in, doesn't chemistry become physics? Zooming in further, physics
becomes quantum physics?

~~~
entee
I don't think that abstraction is particularly useful because beyond extremely
simple systems, approaching things from physics becomes 1.) not possible
because we don't actually know enough and/or 2.) intractable because there are
too many variables/actors at play.

You can get insight from physics, but physics doesn't actually help you much
when it comes to actually making a molecule, or figuring out how to avoid
reacting with one part of a molecule while selectively modifying another.

In other words chemistry is to physics as computer science is to math. They're
related, you could say one is reducible to the other, but that's not a useful
construct in practice.

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sevensor
Incidentally, CHF has an awesome museum in Philly. I really don't think
there's any point in trying to dispute between chemistry and physics, or in
focusing exclusively on world-historic events. Chemistry is important and its
history is fascinating! That should be enough to justify a visit to the
museum.

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nkurz
The most incredible thing to me in this article was learning that whale oil
was once used to margarine!

    
    
      A second hydrogenation technology was used to make 
      margarine mainly from nondairy fats, a vital resource at a 
      time when dairy fat was precious. One remarkable and 
      little-known consequence of this technology was the 
      creation of a vast new 20th-century whaling industry. By 
      1914 whale oil was already being hydrogenated for margarine 
      by the emerging great margarine firms, but by the 1930s 
      this was its main use. The 1920s and 1930s saw a huge 
      expansion in whaling in the South Atlantic, using large 
      factory whaling ships. Whale oil was ultimately used to 
      make some 30% to 50% of all European margarine at this time.

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searine
The fascinating thing about chemistry's impact was that it was production that
drove discovery.

It was companies, not governments who asked the big questions. Conglomerates
such as Bayer and BASF drove the development of ammonia, dyes, antibiotics and
chemotherapy.

The only real exception was particle physics, which was entirely
academic/governmental.

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dnautics
one of my biggest gripes is how physcists always say that science for the
superconducting supercollider led to the superconducting MRI. This is totally
not correct. Commercial NMRs had superconducting coils long before
appropriations for the supercollider, and the oil industry long had its eyes
on NMR as a tool for quantitative analysis of petrochemical product.

