Overview

Orbitals and Optics is the seventh volume in a series of thirteen books, each covering a decade of Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry through a collection of original short stories. Between 1960 and 1969, chemistry mapped the fleeting and the complex. Scientists learned to read the age of ancient organic matter using carbon isotopes, traced the exact pathway plants use to capture carbon dioxide, and revealed the intricate three-dimensional folding of globular proteins. They gained absolute control over the architecture of industrial plastics, used X-rays to decipher the structures of vital biochemicals, and turned the synthesis of complex natural molecules into a rigorous, strategic discipline. They modelled chemical bonds through molecular orbitals, caught the transient ghosts of ultrafast reactions in the fraction of a second after a flash, described the reciprocal flows of systems pushed out of balance, and proved that molecules are flexible shapes that twist and bend to define their identity. In this seventh volume, ten prizes become ten works of literary fiction. A forensic chemist uses radioactive dating to expose a vintage wine counterfeiting ring. A carbon credit cooperative whose claims of long-term sequestration are undone by tracing the rapid return of carbon to the atmosphere. A research team whose hard-won protein structure is stolen not from a physical sample but from their raw diffraction data. A materials engineer investigates winter toy fractures caused by a silent shift in polymer catalysts. A doctor races against time to crystallise a fragile, decomposing toxin before an outbreak becomes a tragedy. A chemist synthesises a natural product from scratch to prove it is the wrong suspect in an industrial poisoning. A factory management team ignores a theoretical warning about reactive excited states, with devastating results. A saboteur uses ultrafast, transient chemical species to damage equipment without leaving a trace. A smuggling operation exploits near-equilibrium thermodynamics to move illegal cargo through packaging. Finally, a counterfeit perfume ingredient is exposed by the subtle, three-dimensional flexing of its molecular conformation. Every discovery is accurate. Every story is new. Together they make the 1960s not a chapter in a textbook but a living world, full of people for whom these ideas arrived not as settled knowledge but as sudden, disorienting, and irreversible light.

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