11 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Swedish inventor and entrepreneur who invented dynamite — holding 355 patents — accumulated an enormous fortune, and established the Nobel Prize with his will in response to a premature obituary that called him 'the merchant of death.'
Scientist referenced in the MISC1 context, associated with chemistry or biochemistry research.
German physicist and chemist who formulated the Hückel rule for aromaticity and developed the Hückel molecular orbital method — a foundational contribution to theoretical chemistry.
John D. Clark's 1972 informal history of liquid rocket propellant development — combining technical chemistry with first-person accounts of explosions, near-misses, and the darkly comic experience of working with substances designed to be maximally energetic and minimally stable.
John D. Clark's witty and authoritative account of the development of liquid rocket propellants from WWII through the space race — written by someone who was personally involved.
American chemist at Rice University — ranked among the top 10 most cited chemists in the world — specialist in nanotechnology and nanocars — known for his public challenges to origin of life researchers, arguing that the chemistry of abiogenesis remains fundamentally unsolved.
American chemist who spent his career developing liquid rocket propellants at Thiokol and NOTS — and whose Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants is considered the funniest and most readable book about a technically demanding subject ever written.
Italian-Jewish chemist and writer who survived Auschwitz and wrote the most analytically precise accounts of the Holocaust — using a scientist's precision to document the destruction of moral categories.
Polish-American Nobel Prize chemist (1981) at Cornell who also writes poetry and essays about the intersection of science and the humanities — exploring the aesthetic dimensions of chemistry and the humanistic dimensions of scientific practice.
American organic chemist who was the greatest practitioner of total synthesis in the 20th century — assembling complex natural molecules from scratch — and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1965.
British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA (particularly Photo 51) provided the crucial structural evidence that Watson and Crick used to build their double helix model — without receiving credit until after her death.