In the highest sense of the word, all great scientists are great teachers: we live by the lessons they have taught. But by no means all great scientist are great teachers in the more prosaic sense of the term. Linus Pauling was a glorious exception. He taught superbly at all levels. As a lecturer he was peerless, whether the audience were professional or lay, young or old, friendly or unfriendly. In many ways he was an actor manque: the oddly cadenced speech, the mastery of the vivid phrase, the extravagant gesture, the dramatic pause, and the mesmerizing ability to pull numbers out of a hat and to conjure up images of atoms in space. As an author he covered an immense range, Structure of Line Spectra, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, The Nature of the Chemical Bond, General Chemistry, College Chemistry, The Architecture of Molecules, No More War, Vitamin C and the Common Cold, How to Live Longer and Feel Better. With his occasional contributions to the alternate press of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960's he even wrote for the flower-child-in-the-street.
He was a great friend of chemical education. As he wrote to Isaac Asimov: "I always read the Journal of Chemical Education." And so he did as Bill Kiefer, Tom Lippincott, and Joe Lagowski can attest. In particular, transgressors against his rather canonical views of electronegativity were firmly dealt with. Tom Lippincott once sent him a paper to referee which questioned whether, in 1927, Heider and London were aware of the significance of electron spin. "They certainly were", replied Pauling, "I happened to be there at the time." He was a frequent speaker in DivCHED symposia and, like his great contemporary Glenn Seaborg, he willingly and graciously allowed himself to be "used" for the cause of chemical education. In days when it is often assumed that teaching, research, and public service are somehow incompatible it is salutary to remember how magnificently Linus Pauling served all three.
The articles that follow pay tribute to some facets of his genius. The poem "Cafe Monologue" by Martin Grayson (a PhD chemist and former editor of the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia) was written a few days after Pauling's death in August 1994. Robert J. Paradowski wrote his 1972 PhD thesis on The Structural Chemistry of Linus Pauling and as a result was invited to become the official biographer. In "The Biographical Quest: Some Personal Reflections of a Pauling Biographer on the Art and Science of Scientific Biography" he addresses some of the pleasures and challenges of Boswellizing Pauling. Paradowski's multivolume work-in-progress bodes well to prove fully worthy of its subject. Four biographies are already in print and a comparative review of all these will be published in a future issue of the Journal. Electronegativity is a semi-quantitative concept that Pauling used with characteristic flair and insight but, contrary to popular opinion, did not invent. As William B. Jensen shows in Part I (of three) of his "Electronegativity from Avogadro to Pauling", the term electronegativity has a long and fascinating evolutionary history, the end of which is by no means in sight. "Letters to F. J. Allen: An Informal Portrait of Linus Pauling" is based on a series of letters exchanged over a period of 46 years and it attempts to show the private side of a quintessential, and in a sense de jure, public figure. Particularly in his later years Pauling gave many interviews--probably too many--but his answers were always pointed and remarkably consistent. The interview he gave to Laurie and George Kauffman on April 1, 1994, was one of his last. It shows the lion in winter surveying his kingdom, guarding his turf, and giving one last characteristic roar against the injustices and inequities of this world. The rest is silence.
|
Citation
