20th-century Chemist Quotes

Dorothy Hodgkin

Oliver Sacks

Harold Urey

Ilya Prigogine

Robert Burns Woodward

Albert Hofmann

Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves. Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

The field was essentially stuck, but following the well known scientific approach known as "sheer blind luck," we stumbled upon the protein that is the answer to the question: do water channels exist?

One or two atoms can convert a fuel to a poison, change a color, render an inedible substance edible, or replace a pungent odor with a fragrant one. That changing a single atom can have such consequences is the wonder of the chemical world.

The nature of the chemical bond is the problem at the heart of all chemistry.

In science, conjecture drives both experiment and theory for it is only by forming conjectures (hypotheses) that we can make the direction of our experiments and theories informed. If such and such is true, then I should be able to do this experiment and look for this particular result or I should be able to find this theoretical formulation. Conversely, experiment and theory drive conjecture. One makes a startling observation or has a sudden insight and begins to speculate on its significance and implications and to draw possible conclusions (conjecture).

The detailed geometry of the coenzyme molecule as a whole is fascinating in its complexity.

Dorothy Hodgkin

What one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous-that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego.

Scientists need to exchange ideas in an informal place.

Every discovery takes place in more than a scientific context.

Charles J. Pedersen

To feed applied science by starving basic science is like economising on the foundations of a building so that it may be built higher. It is only a matter of time before the whole edifice crumbles.

I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can

There is very little difference between men and women in space.

... when I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished – for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.

K. Barry Sharpless

Surprisingly, history is much more difficult than chemistry.

Frank Westheimer

Chemists think in the highly visual nanoscopic world of atoms and molecules, but they work in the tangible world of macroscopic laboratory apparatus. These two approaches to the chemical sciences cannot be divorced.

David W. Oxtoby

University of California at Berkley (UC Berkley) is one of the most outstanding universities, and the Chemistry Department there ranks first amongst the universities of the world in research performance. This department was established by G. N. Lewis, who is considered to be the father of modern chemistry.

The irreversibility [of time] is the mechanism that brings order out of chaos.

The natural sciences are sometimes said to have no concern with values, nor to seek morality and goodness, and therefore belong to an inferior order of things. Counter-claims are made that they are the only living and dynamic studies... Both contentions are wrong. Language, Literature and Philosophy express, reflect and contemplate the world. But it is a world in which men will never be content to stay at rest, and so these disciplines cannot be cut off from the great searching into the nature of things without being deprived of life-blood.

Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target.

Homer Burton Adkins

You ask whether I am going over to the history of science...no, I am not as old as that.

Christopher Kelk Ingold

I do not believe that the present flowering of science is due in the least to a real appreciation of the beauty and intellectual discipline of the subject. It is due simply to the fact that power, wealth and prestige can only be obtained by the correct application of science.

Anyone who wishes to grow over their lifetime needs criticism.

Chlorine is a poisonous gas. In case I should fall over unconscious in the following demonstration involving chlorine, please pick me up and carry me into the open air. Should this happen, the lecture for the day will be concluded.

The ingenuity and effective logic that enabled chemists to determine complex molecular structures from the number of isomers, the reactivity of the molecule and of its fragments, the freezing point, the empirical formula, the molecular weight, etc., is one of the outstanding triumphs of the human mind.

Henry Eyring (chemist)

TO MY WIFE—who made the writing of my previous book a pleasure and writing of the present one a necessity.

Herbert C. Brown