La chimica dagli inizi del Novecento ai giorni nostri

With a simple and evocative language, the book traces almost a century and a half of the history of chemistry, from the synthesis of indigo in 1882 to the present day. In the twentieth century, the history of chemistry often met that of physics and biology, with crucial episodes such as the birth of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and the deciphering of the genetic code in the 1960s. If in the last century, chemistry revolutionized many aspects of life daily, in the last three decades a profound transformation in 'doing science' has had a further very strong impact on society as a whole. The Internet, powerful computing capabilities and large chemical-physical instruments have created an unprecedented and formidable research environment, capable of facing many challenges of our time, from the genome project to the fight against cancer. The cognitive beauty and the applicative power of chemistry have been the basis of the recent birth of disciplines such as green chemistry and computational chemistry. The most impressive historical aspect of recent decades, however, has been the radical reformulation of classical research themes such as that of the investigation into the correlation between structure and function of proteins, where a molecular science is now at work to which chemists and physicists contribute. biologists and computer scientists.