The DUALITY OF The CHEMIST'S LANGUAGE

The chemist enjoys a richness of means of expression that is not to be found in all activities. When I say ‘enjoys’, of course, I do not imply that nature has been copiously generous and bountiful; the semantics of chemistry are as much a tribute to succeeding generations of chemists as is the theory and practice of the subject itself. To a great extent, I suppose, the nature of the subject demanded an exceedingly informative and definitive language, and progress would have been the slower without it. But few other activities, it seems to me, have been at such conscious and scholarly pains to provide and to cherish both vocabularies and notations for the recording and exposition of their aims and achievements. Musicians and mathematicians, for example, have both evolved highly specialized notations for the embodiment of their creative thought. Both notations are highly informative—in the Shannon sense; i.e. they are packed full of information and have very little redundancy. But neither vocation, it seems to me, is satisfactorily articulate in ordinary language; they are in much the same difficulty as the wine merchant, whose English can perhaps be enjoyed for its quaint whimsiness but not for its ability to convey a useful description to the palate.