Chris Petersen has many words on Linus Pauling. More than 865,000 of them, in fact.
Enough for a blog and two books. Petersen, an Oregon State University archivist, published his second book on the Nobel Prize-winning scientist, titled “The Many Worlds of Linus Pauling,” in January.
The book highlights several lesser-known chapters in the life of Pauling, an OSU alumnus, who is best known for his work on the nature of chemical bonds and the structure of proteins. In addition, both Pauling and his wife, Ava Helen, were prominent peace activists.
Pauling announced the donation of his personal papers to OSU in 1986, but it was not until after his death in 1994 that OSU received the bulk of his collection. Special Collections at OSU was originally created to house the papers, which measured 4,400 feet when stacked — roughly 0.8 miles in length.
Between 2008 and 2021, Petersen ran the Linus Pauling Blog at the Special Collections and Archives Research Center.
The blog started out as a way to promote a US Postal stamp about Pauling but evolved to include a team of two students who dedicated 20 hours of work per week toward research and writing weekly blog posts.
“By the end of the project we had published 865,000 words, I think, over 13 years,” Petersen said. “And again, a lot of it is original research that hadn’t been done by anyone else, these different stories that we were able to tell.”
Shortly after the blog wrapped up in 2021, Petersen was contacted by World Scientific Publishing about turning the Pauling Blog into a book.
For his first book, Petersen focused on “novel contributions” to the historical record. Titled “Visions of Linus Pauling” and published in 2023, Petersen called this selection the “greatest hits.”
“Many Worlds of Linus Pauling,” which was published in January, is in a way the extended cuts of Petersen’s first book on Pauling. It focuses on four areas of Pauling’s life through a geographical lens: growing up in Oregon, as an administrator at the California Institute of Technology, his time after leaving Caltech and his travels around the world.
Aside from the idea of places, the title also draws from the “many worlds” theory in physics, which posits that for every event, “an alternative world also splits off in that moment where a different outcome of that event takes place,” Petersen said.
“It gets you to thinking about questions of chance and fate and different moments that determine somebody’s trajectory — and for Pauling there’s lots that are really interesting and the book touches on this,” Petersen said.
For Petersen himself, timing and luck led to his passion for Pauling research.
Petersen was an undergraduate at OSU, studying history and sociology, when he began a job in Special Collections working on the newly received Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers.
“I was there in ‘96, and I was given responsibility to work on small pieces of this collection. That’s kind of how we were working on it, you know, piecemeal, lots of different people,” Petersen said.
Nearing his graduation in the summer of 1999, Petersen was hired as a temp and then full time to help with the celebrations of Pauling’s 100th birthday in 2001.
“I was kind of just at the right place, right time, and it’s worked really well for me,” Petersen said.
For interested readers, “Many Worlds of Linus Pauling” is available for checkout through the Valley Library or for purchase online.
