The Beauty of MIMs

The various ways to represent MIMs on paper have often been a portrayal of beauty in their own right. In Sect. 3, we tried to engage the beauty of printed molecular representations. There remain many other ways to perceive the beauty of molecular objects, some of them particularly unique to MIMs, but things get messier when we depart from concrete illustrations and images and venture into even more subjective territory. Roald Hoffman, pioneer of molecular aesthetics, has approached beauty in chemistry from the perspective that beauty is built out of individual pleasure around an object or idea [126]. The aesthetic experience of molecular structures is therefore inexorably tied together with our subjective biases. Synthetically derived molecules are retroactively beautified out of a psychological need to associate pleasure with hard work. We find reasons to label a molecule beautiful and experiments elegant, because we invested work, time, and failure to achieve them. Nevertheless, these notions of beauty are common to the experiences of 

Pedersen s account demonstrates that molecular beauty is not just an interesting topic for discussion it can have a profound impact on scientific research. Here we discuss aspects of beauty in MIMs that can be independent of their printed representations. In other words, this section is about where chemists find pleasure in their research into MIMs. 

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