Roald Hoffmann Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

The chemical article is an artistic creation.... It is not a laboratory notebook, and one knows that that notebook in turn is only a partially reliable guide to what took place. It is a more or less (one wishes more) carefully constructed, man- or woman-made text... If one is lucky, it creates an emotional or aesthetic response in its readers.

Roald Hoffmann
I had written three pages on how insects are such good chemists, citing the silkworm sex attractant, and the bombardier beetle, spraying out hot hydrogen peroxide when threatened.

Roald Hoffmann
My second law, your second law, ordains that local order, structure in space and time, be crafted in ever-so-losing contention with proximal disorder in this neat but getting messier universe.

Roald Hoffmann
There was no question that the reaction but transient colors were seen in the slurry of sodium methoxide in dichloromethane and we got a whole lot of products for which we can't sort out the kinetics the next slide will show the most important part very rapidly within two minutes and I forgot to say on further warming we get in fact the keytone.

Roald Hoffmann
The overall effect of science is inexorably democratizing, in the deepest sense of the word — by making available to a wider range of people the necessities and comforts that in a previous age were reserved for a privileged elite.

Roald Hoffmann
It's a wild dance floor there at the molecular level.

Roald Hoffmann
Atoms are nice, atoms are fundamental, but they're not chemistry. Chemistry is about molecules, the fixed but transformable way in which atoms get together for a while.

Roald Hoffmann
Chemistry, the molecular way of knowing the natural and unnatural, is a remarkable science, prodigal in the way it has changed our world.

Roald Hoffmann
Men (and women) are not as different from molecules as they think.

Roald Hoffmann
Even in two "hard natural science" fields as close to each other as chemistry and physics, even there there are concepts in chemistry which are not reducible to physics. Or if they are reduced they lose much that is interesting in them.

Roald Hoffmann
Chemistry is positioned between the simple world of atoms and the complex nature of biological molecules and real materials.

Roald Hoffmann