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4 Our “story” ends with two conferences: the conference of 1959 held at Boulder, Colorado , and the conference of 1970 held at Bethesda, Maryland. The former dealt with molecular quantum mechanics, and speakers talked about their subject within a totally new rationale compared with that of earlier conferences. It was the rationale formed by the realization that powerful computing machines were making their presence felt in no uncertain terms and that they were becoming an indispensable aspect of the future of quantum chemistry. If the 1959 Conference on Molecular Quantum Mechanics was heralding a new period of quantum chemistry, then the 1970 Conference on Computational Support for Theoretical Chemistry mapped the future of quantum chemistry in terms of the possibilities provided by computers, not simply as machines that would facilitate the calculational work of chemists but as instruments that would act as probes of amazing exactness, at times, even, substituting for the need for experiments . If what was reflected in the deliberations of the conference of 1959 was that computers were to become an indispensable tool for quantum chemists, then the discussions of the 1970 conference reflected a totally new social vista: the amazing development of hardware and software and the pivotal role of quantum chemistry in the development of computer technology as well as its mounting importance within chemistry. Post-war developments, however dramatic in their repercussions, were not limited to the impact calculating machines would have in the practice of quantum chemists. The emergence of two active European groups, one in Paris and one in Uppsala, widened appreciably the scope of quantum chemistry. The Newcomers: Quantum Chemistry’s Forays into New Realms Raymond Daudel and the 1948 Paris Conference It is certainly surprising to realize that quantum chemistry started in occupied France in 1943. This was the year in which Raymond Daudel (1920–2006) created the Centre de Chimie Théorique de France, initially a rather informal association that had the patronage of such highly respected figures of the French scientific establishment Quantum Chemistry qua Programming: Computers and the Cultures of Quantum Chemistry 188 Chapter 4 as the quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Louis de Broglie, the Nobel laureate couple Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, and the physician Antoine Lacassagne. This was also the year in which Daudel co-authored the textbook La chimie théorique et ses rapports avec la théorie corpusculaire moderne with the aim of informing French chemists about what quantum mechanics could do for chemistry (Poitier and Daudel 1943). The delayed emergence of quantum chemistry, as some authors refer to the emergence of the subdiscipline in France, has usually been accounted for by the devastating effect of the First World War and the subsequent isolation of French science, together with the dominant role of experimental organic chemistry in France, and finally the opposition of the physical chemist and Nobel laureate Jean Perrin to the quantum mechanical explanation of the chemical bond (Guéron and Magat 1971; CharpentierMorize 1997; Blondel-Mégrelis 2001).1 Why, then, did quantum chemistry appear during such uncongenial times? A clue to this apparent paradox might be the correlation of extreme and adverse conditions and the episodic vulnerability of the otherwise immutable structure of the hierarchical and closed French academic system (Pestre 1992). Extreme conditions call for drastic responses: The pioneers of quantum chemistry in France chose the difficult study of very big molecules. Raymond Daudel, a “half-physicist, half chemist,”2 was a student of the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris. He then became an assistant at the Faculté des Sciences de Paris, Sorbonne, and since the early 1940s was working at the Institut du Radium with Irène Joliot-Curie, who at the time was professor of chemistry at the Sorbonne. Next to them, in a building across the courtyard stood the Pavillon Pasteur of the same institute, created by Marie Curie in the aftermath of the First World War in order to explore the medical applications of radioactivity . Its director, the head of the “cancer people,”3 was Antoine Lacassagne, professor of medicine at the Collège de France. In fact, Irène Joliot-Curie and Lacassagne supervised Daudel’s doctorate on the chemical separation of radioelements formed by neutron bombardment, which was completed in 1944. Both Daudel and Lacassagne met often to discuss scientific topics not necessarily included in Daudel’s doctorate. When Lacassagne stumbled upon a paper by the German Otto Schmidt...

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