Image and Reality

“Alan Rocke’s Image and Reality does so many things vividly and convincingly: it shows how visual images led chemistry step by step to the reality of the microscopic world; how simple portrayals of the logic of substitution and combination were reified; brings to our attention the imaginative, neglected work of Williamson and Kopp; and takes a critical look at Kekule’s daydream. And it beautifully delineates the essential place the imagination has in science. A rewarding, lively picture of chemistry in formation.”

“The realm of atoms and molecules has long been a battlefield among scientists: what role should mental images and visual tools play in charting the unseen? In this richly textured and closely argued study, Alan Rocke brings the nineteenth-century debates alive. From August Kekulé’s famous dream-like visions of molecular structures to Hermann Kopp’s fanciful depictions of travels within the molecular world, Rocke argues for the importance of mental imagery in nudging cutting-edge science along.”

“Alan Rocke’s scholarship has fashioned our historical view of the development of chemistry in the nineteenth century. In Image and Reality, he turns to that century’s most significant achievement in chemical theory, the determination of atomic and molecular arrangement. The great challenge facing chemists in this endeavor was the conundrum of moving from the world of laboratory chemical materials and reactions to the microworld of chemical atomic and molecular reality. Rocke painstakingly depicts how chemists grappled with and overcame this challenge through the creative use of their visual imaginations. Deploying great historical erudition and sensitivity, philosophical sophistication, and immense scientific and technical knowledge, Rocke has produced the authoritative account of this great achievement and an exciting, path breaking study of the creative imagination in science.”

“Image and Reality is a masterful and authoritative study by one of the profession’s most distinguished historians of chemistry.  Alan Rocke draws on his earlier work and on new sources to demonstrate the role of mental images in the thought processes that created structural chemistry in the nineteenth century. His analysis of chemists’ wit, imagination, and ‘Eureka’ moments of discovery richly informs this detailed history which extends from Alexander Williamson to August Kekulé and Hermann Kopp.”

“In Image and Reality, Rocke covers Kekulé’s work, varied life and personality, and locates the chemist’s thinking in the context of developing ideas about chemical bonding and molecular structure. . . . Rocke’s thesis is that ‘human minds work far more visually, and less purely linguistically, than we realize.’ At every turning point, he suggests, early chemists used their imagination to visualize the constitution of the micro-world, leading the way in visual thinking. . . . Such visualization of the micro-world is now commonplace. Yet the role of visual thinking in the scientific mind is not universally accepted. ‘For scientists, mental images may seem downright embarrassing,’ suggests Rocke. But for Kekulé, as this subtle and penetrating study shows, dream images translated into chemical reality.”

"Exciting and wide-ranging. The writing is so easy and natural that even a non-specialist can read it with delight and understanding. It inspired me."

“Highly recommended.”

“Rocke has produced a striking reinterpretation of the development of structure theory centered on the work of August Kekulé.”