Learning the language of chemistry

Like many clichés, the comparison of chemistry to language is so often used because it works so well. We can put a finite set of ‘letters’ (atoms) together in innumerable permutations to make ‘words’ (molecules), each with its own meaning. And with words we can tell stories.

With some loosening of rigour, we can take this analogy further. The rearrangements of letters that take place in chemical reactions might be regarded as a kind of translation: English to German, say. There are rules governing those transformations, governed by grammatical constraints – for example, verbs that follow their subject in English are shunted to the end of the sentence in German. Students usually learn these rules by formal instruction – but an alternative approach is full immersion, where a student has to figure out how the translation works by intuition. Young children do this with astonishing facility; for those of us of a more mature vintage, it can be bewildering.