20th-century Chemist Quotes

A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.

The greatest problem encountered by students in geology is the necessity for a complete reorganization of their concepts of space and time.

A crystal is like a class of children arranged for drill, but standing at ease, so that while the class as a whole has regularity both in time and space, each individual child is a little fidgety!

Kathleen Lonsdale

Funny, I'd forgotten that what comes to you when you take a psychedelic is not always a revelation of something new and startling; you're more liable to find yourself reminded of simple things you know and forgot you knew - seeing them freshly - old, basic truths that long ago became cliches, so you stopped paying attention to them.

The exact verbal definition of qualitative concepts is more often the province of philosophy than of physical science.

Scientific discovery rarely follows a smooth and orderly course. Like most natural processes it proceeds spasmodically, and important results frequently come only after long-drawn-out, exhausting, and apparently fruitless endeavor, sometimes even almost by what appears to be a lucky chance.

To many physical chemists in the 1920's and early 1930's, the organic chemist was a grubby artisan engaged in an unsystematic search for new compounds, a search which was strongly influenced by the profit motive.

Louis Plack Hammett

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

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

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.

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

We can put it down as one of the principles learned from the history of science that a theory is only overthrown by a better theory, never merely by contradictory facts.

James Bryant Conant

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

The history of science has something to offer to the humblest intelligence. It is a means of imparting a knowledge of scientific facts and principles to unschooled minds.

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

Herbert C. Brown

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

Dorothy Hodgkin

Knowledge is power, especially when it is hitched to a workhorse.

Orlando Aloysius Battista

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?

The achievement of the objective in itself cannot but thrill all chemists, who even before they know the details of the journey can apprehend from their own experience the joys and elations, the disappointments and false hopes, the obstacles overcome, the frustrations subdued, which they experienced who traversed a road to the goal.

Robert Burns Woodward

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.

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.

What does one have to do to be called a scientist? I decided that anyone who spent on science more than 10% of his waking, thinking time for a period of more than a year would be called a scientist, at least for that year.

Joseph Edward Mayer

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

Christopher Kelk Ingold

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

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)