Frederick Soddy Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

As scientific men we have all, no doubt, felt that our fellow men have become more and more satisfying as fish have taken up their work which has been put often to base uses, which must lead to disaster. But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance. On our plane knowledge and ignorance are the immemorial adversaries.
Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilisation. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime.

Frederick Soddy
Our knowledge of Nature is always of necessity partial, and is bounded in all directions by certain inevitable but too often forgotten limitations connected, for example, with the briefness of human life and the physical impossibility of pursuing investigations except under conditions where the life of the investigator can be maintained.

Frederick Soddy
Yet the atom, for all that, is not Nature's unit, but ours.

Frederick Soddy
Forces are not conserved, they have no physical existence, but they still survive even in scientific parlance, mainly because of the poverty of the language, which hardly allows effects to be expressed, without some causal inference.

Frederick Soddy
The atoms are to the chemist and physicist what bricks are to the architect - the units supplied ready-made to a certain limited number of standard specifications and dimensions capable of an endless variety of combinations and arrangements, each with its own peculiarities and external relationships.

Frederick Soddy
With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of life.

Frederick Soddy
Before you can apply knowledge you must discover it.

Frederick Soddy
As science advances and most of the more accessible fields of knowledge have been gleaned of their harvest, the need for more and more powerful and elaborate appliances and more and more costly materials ever grows.

Frederick Soddy
Four circles to the kissing come, The smaller are the benter. The bend is just the inverse of The distance from the centre. Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb There's now no need for rule of thumb. Since zero bend's a dead straight line And concave bends have minus sign, The sum of squares of all four bends Is half the square of their sum.

Frederick Soddy
One of the main duties of science is the correlation of phenomena, apparently disconnected and even contradictory.

Frederick Soddy
Mere accumulations of knowledge, sifted, classified, and reduced to their final most concise expression in a series of text-books, are little more than the sepulchral monument of science.

Frederick Soddy
A single modern machine does the work of tens of thousands of labourers, releasing them from the benumbing and soul-destroying effect of unremittent physical labour.

Frederick Soddy
It is wonderful how accommodating a true theory is to new truth, apparently of a diametrically opposite character, and this not in any sense of mere ingenuity of explanation, but in a manner that arrests the investigator, and is his sign that he is on safe ground.

Frederick Soddy
Laboratories are necessary, and though an artist without a studio or an evangelist without a church might conceivably find under the blue dome of heaven a substitute, a scientific man without a laboratory is a misnomer.

Frederick Soddy
An ingenious theory of gravitation was put forward a century ago which, though not accepted, is very suggestive, and illustrates the difference between what science would consider a real cause and one that is fictitious, like the "force of gravity".

Frederick Soddy
The dropping of the Atomic Bomb is a very deep problem...Instead of commemorating Hiroshima we should celebrate...man's triumph over the problem [of transmutation], and not its first misuse by politicians and military authorities.

Frederick Soddy
There is something sublime about its aloofness from and its indifference to its external environment.

Frederick Soddy
There has been no discovery like it in the history of man. It puts into man's hands the key to using the fundamental energy of the universe.

Frederick Soddy
Mankind has always drawn from outside sources of energy. This island was the first to harness coal and steam. But our present sources stand in the ratio of a million to one, compared with any previous sources. The release of atomic energy will change the whole structure of society.

Frederick Soddy
Some of the beliefs and legends bequethed to us by Antquity are so universally and firmly established that we have become accustomed to consider them as being almost as ancient as humanity itself. Nevertheless we are tempted to inquire how far the fact that some of these beliefs and legends have so many features in common is due to chance, and wether the similarity between them may not point to the exestience of an ancient, totally unknown and unsuspected civilization of which all other traces have disappeared.

Frederick Soddy
[By controlling the atomic energy we could] virtually provide anyone who wanted it with a private sun of his own.

Frederick Soddy
It is curious to reflect, for example, upon the remarkable legend of the Philosopher's Stone, one of the oldest and most universal beliefs, the origin of which, however far back we penetrate into the records of the past, we do not probably trace its real source.

Frederick Soddy
The history of man is dominated by, and reflects, the amount of available energy

Frederick Soddy
The energy available for each individual man is his income, and the philosophy which can teach him to be content with penury should be capable of teaching him also the uses of wealth.

Frederick Soddy
The fact remains that, if the supply of energy failed, modern civilization would come to an end as abruptly as does the music of an organ deprived of wind. [But]...the still unrecognized 'energy problem'..awaits the future.

Frederick Soddy
Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.

Frederick Soddy
[The blame for the downfall of civilization] must rest on scientific men, equally with others, for being incapable of accepting the responsibility for the profound social upheavals which their own work primarily has brought about in human relationships.

Frederick Soddy