Michael Polanyi - Chemistry Quotes

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The recognition of certain basic impossibilities has laid the foundations of some major principles of physics and chemistry; similarly, recognition of the impossibility of understanding living things in terms of physics and chemistry, far from setting limits to our understanding of life, will guide it in the right direction. And even if the demonstration of this impossibility should prove of no great advantage in the pursuit of discovery, such a demonstration would help to draw a truer image of life and man than that given us by the present basic concepts of biology.

Michael Polanyi

An art which has fallen into disuse for the period of a generation is altogether lost.... It is pathetic to watch the endless efforts — equipped with microscopy and chemistry, with mathematics and electronics —to reproduce a single violin of the kind the half-literate Stradivarius turned out as a matter of routine more than two hundred years ago.

Michael Polanyi