Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Frederick Soddy
Frederick Soddy Quotes
27 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Yet the atom, for all that, is not Nature's unit, but ours.
Frederick Soddy
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Before you can apply knowledge you must discover it.
Frederick Soddy
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
One of the main duties of science is the correlation of phenomena, apparently disconnected and even contradictory.
Frederick Soddy
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
There is something sublime about its aloofness from and its indifference to its external environment.
Frederick Soddy
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
[By controlling the atomic energy we could] virtually provide anyone who wanted it with a private sun of his own.
Frederick Soddy
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
The history of man is dominated by, and reflects, the amount of available energy
Frederick Soddy
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
1
2
Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Frederick Soddy
Creative Commons
Born:
September 2, 1877
Died:
September 22, 1956
(aged 79)
Bio:
Frederick Soddy was an English radiochemist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions.
Known for:
Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt (1926)
The interpretation of radium (1909)
Science and life (1920)
Matter and energy (1912)
Frederick Soddy on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
British Physicist Quotes
Physicist Quotes
19th-century Physicist Quotes
Related People
Ernest Rutherford
British Physicist
William Ramsay
Scottish Chemist
Kazimierz Fajans
American Scientist
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes