Let us build better boats: an answer to Jeffrey Seeman’s “Moving beyond insularity in the history, philosophy, and sociology of chemistry”

Abstract

In his recent Editorial Article, Seeman (2017) calls for the promotion of collaborative work among different disciplines, focusing on the case of the interaction between chemistry, the history of chemistry and the philosophy of chemistry. From a general viewpoint, it is difficult to disagree with this claim; moreover, the interest of scientists in the history and the philosophy of science is always welcome. However, the devil is in the details: there are several points that, we think, must be discussed more carefully with the aim of arriving at far-reaching conclusions. Who is interested in isomerism and decoherence?Seeman's article reproduces four equations included in our paper "Isomerism and decoherence" (2016) in order to criticize works that he considers too technical to be understood by average readers. However, they are equations that can be read after a first undergraduate course of theoretical quantum mechanics (perhaps with the only exception of Eq. (2), which was taken from Hund's proposal but is conceptually explained immediately below). We appeal to them precisely to introduce the fundamentals of decoherence, assuming that the readers of Foundations of Chemistry do not need to know the formalism. For instance, Eq. (1) is the Hamiltonian of a system of many particles, sum of kinetic and potential energies, with the same form as a classical Hamiltonian. Seeman feels uncomfortable because, being interested in stereochemistry, he cannot read those equations. Of course, this situation is not a scientific limitation, but rather supports the thesis of the ontological autonomy of chemistry proposed by one of us (Lombardi and Labarca 2005; Lombardi 2014): chemistry can develop its knowledge about its own ontology with no need of legitimation coming from physics. In particular, stereochemistry is a highly articulated and successful body of technical knowledge independently of the difficulties of accounting for the disposition

Chirale Welten

“…Dieses Werk knüpft dabei an die bestehenden Erkenntnisse und Fragestellungen aus Philosophie und Historiografie der Chemie an, die seit den 1980er Jahren dieses noch relativ kleine Feld der chemiefokussierten Wissenschaftsforschung prägen. Insbesondere empirische sozialwissenschaftliche Beiträge und Perspektiven auf die chemischen Wissenschaften sind noch rar gestreut, auch wenn sich jüngstens um eine stärkere interdisziplinäre Einheit und Zusammenarbeit der chemiebezogenen Wissenschaftsforschung bemüht wird (Seeman, 2017;Fortin et al, 2018) und insbesondere der Ruf nach empirischen Interviewstudien und der Beobachtung von Praktiken der Chemie laut wird (Klein und Reinhardt, 2014).…”