A new holiday for 19 July is National Words With Friends Day, celebrating the launch of that online game in 2009. (I play it a lot!) My chemistry tie for today is primarily a reaction to the 1937 birthday (yesterday) of Roald Hoffman, famous in organic chemistry for studying how the geometry of molecules influences the progress of reactions. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981. Also born on 18 July, in 1635, was Robert Hooke, an English scientist who developed the microscope and also produced "Hooke's Law" that describes the mechanics of oscillating springs. Some molecular model kits use balls for atoms and springs for chemical bonds (because bonds are "stretchy"), so one of my photos (from 2017) shows some ball-and-spring models for formaldehyde (methanal) and benzene. The American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn was born in 1922, and his theory of "scientific revolutions" can easily be stretched to include the paradigm shifts within chemistry when old ideas about simple linear bonding had to be exploded to include rings and "molecular orbitals." Finally we can celebrate the birthday of astronaut and Senator John Glenn (1921-2016), who was helped into orbit in 1962 through the magic of hydrogen-oxygen combustion.
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