I have been reading Roald Hoffmann’s ‘The same and not the same’ for the past couple of weeks, bought at the bargain price of 22 cents on amazon. It’s a very nice book centered on the philosophy of chemistry. This is the sort of stuff you can get away with when you win a Nobel prize. It is drawn from various separate publications, so sometimes goes off on a tangent or two, but overall it’s the type of book that makes you happy to be involved in science.
One great piece is where he is discussing the reviewing process, and how scientists who are forced to be rational the majority of the time, vent their frustrations under the anonymity of peer reviewing. One part of a review he received: ‘Hoffmann is very intelligent, but not intelligent enough to do anything positive’ and ‘The speculations in this paper are the sort of things that one expects to hear in social chemical gatherings over a glass of beer’. I often get stuck with pretentious physicists; I need to find some humorous referees.