Chemists' Quotes (mostly)
The great, not so great, mediocre, and other comments that have been made about chemistry.
Of course, if you can offer great quotes from chemists, the comments section below awaits your suggestions...
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Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry.
Chance favors the prepared mind - Louis Pasteur (1822-95) French chemist and bacteriologist.
Chemistry... is like the maid occupied with daily civilisation; she is busy with fertilisers, medicines, glass, insecticides ... for she dispenses the recipes. — Jean Jacques Les Confessions d'un Chimiste Ordinaire (1981), 5.
Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize. Richard P. Feynmann
MIT Undergraduate Description of Chemistry
Chemistry is the study of the nanoworld, the world of atoms and molecules spanning dimensions from one to several thousand angstroms. Chemists study the architecture of this miniature universe, explore the changes which occur, unravel the principles which govern these chemical changes, and devise ways to create entirely new compounds and materials.
Richard Feynmann
A great true/false question? Organic chemistry is the study of organs; inorganic chemistry is the study of the insides of organs. — Max Shulman Barefoot Boy with Cheek (1943), 129
My favorite quote about chemistry:
I would... establish the conviction that Chemistry, as an independent science, offers one of the most powerful means towards the attainment of a higher mental cultivation; that the study of Chemistry is profitable, not only inasmuch as it promotes the material interests of mankind, but also because it furnishes us with insight into those wonders of creation which immediately surround us, and with which our existence, life, and development, are most closely connected.
Die Chemie ist der unreinliche Teil der Physik.
Chemistry is the dirty part of physics.
Peter Reiss
Without an acquaintance with chemistry, the statesman must remain a stranger to the true vital interests of the state, to the means of its organic development and improvement; ... The highest economic or material interests of a country, the increased and more profitable production of food for man and animals, ... are most closely linked with the advancement and diffusion of the natural sciences, especially of chemistry.
Familiar Letters on Chemistry (1859), 4th edn., 1.
We can distinguish three groups of scientific men. In the first and very small group we have the men who discover fundamental relations. Among these are van't Hoff, Arrhenius and Nernst. In the second group we have the men who do not make the great discovery but who see the importance and bearing of it, and who preach the gospel to the heathen. Ostwald stands absolutely at the head of this group. The last group contains the rest of us, the men who have to have things explained to us. Wilder Dwight Bancroft. Statement about scientists.
Jacobus Henricus Vant Hoff (1901 Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry) "Laws of Chemical Dynamics and Osmotic Pressures in solutions."
The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.
When asked the most important thing to learn from him, 2007 Nobel Prize winner Gerhard Ertl said:
Democritus (460 - 370 B. C. E)
I think you never should give up, you should always try to solve the problem as far as it is possible. And you must be patient. You must be patient. That's very important.
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
Chemistry laboratory work was my first challenge. ... I still carry the scars of my first discovery—that test-tubes are fragile. — Edward Teller
Edward Teller with Judith L. Shoolery, Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (2001), 42.
We may lay it down as an incontestible axiom, that, in all the operations of art and nature, nothing is created; an equal quantity of matter exists both before and after the experiment; the quality and quantity of the elements remain precisely the same; and nothing takes place beyond changes and modifications in the combination of these elements. Upon this principle the whole art of performing chemical experiments depends: We must always suppose an exact equality between the elements of the body examined and those of the products of its analysis.
— Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier Elements of Chemistry trans. Robert. Kerr, (1790, 5th Ed. 1802), Vol. 1, 226.
Acid Salts have the Power of Destroying the Blewness of the Infusion of our Wood [lignum nephreticum], and those Liquors indiscriminatly that abound with Sulphurous Salts, (under which I comprehend the Urinous and Volatile Salts of Animal Substances, and the Alcalisate or fixed Salts that are made by Incineration) have the virtue of Restoring it.
Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664), 212.
"I will have nothing to do with the bomb."
Meitner response to being asked to work at Los Alamos to develop the Manhattan Project
Lise Meitner
(7 Nov 1878 - 27 Oct 1968)
Here's a fun one for the CSI crowd.
I will now direct the attention of scientists to a previously unnoticed cause which brings about the metamorphosis and decomposition phenomena which are usually called decay, putrefaction, rotting, fermentation and moldering. This cause is the ability possessed by a body engaged in decomposition or combination, i.e. in chemical action, to give rise in a body in contact with it the same ability to undergo the same change which it experiences itself.
Annalen der Pharmacie 1839, 30, 262. Trans. W. H. Brock.
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. ~Wernher Von Braun
Marie Curie does have a few good things to say, but here is an homage to laboratory equipment and safety....
This means that we have here an entirely separate kind of chemistry for which the current tool we use is the electrometer, not the balance, and which we might well call the chemistry of the imponderable. — Marie Curie (11 Dec 1911) As quoted in Marie and Pierre Curie and the Discovery of Polonium and Radium, Nobel Lecture
When one studies strongly radioactive substances special precautions must be taken if one wishes to be able to take delicate measurements. The various objects used in a chemical laboratory and those used in a chemical laboratory, and those which serve for experiments in physics, become radioactive in a short time and act upon photographic plates through black paper. Dust, the air of the room, and one's clothes all become radioactive.
Notebook entry. In Eve Curie, Madame Curie: a Biography by Eve Curie (1937, 2007), 196.
She discussed the importance of proper lab technique, but it was a perfect example to discuss lab safety...
This site will always remain completely free and unbiased as it strives to offer educational content to serve its audience until the day it is corrupted by a substantial offer of money, goods or services.
Niels Bohr
“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
"What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others."
"We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections."
“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away”
Linus Pauling
Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument.
Sir Humphrey Davy
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture, and is in itself ennobling.
Henry Taube
Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations.
Sir Issac Newton
Sir Humphrey Davy
William Ramsey
Henry Taube
The country which is in advance of the rest of the world in chemistry will also be foremost in wealth and in general prosperity.
William Ramsay’s discoveries added an entirely new family of chemical elements to the periodic table – the noble gases.
The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved.
'Quantum Mechanics of Many-Electron Systems', Proceedings of the Royal Society (1929), A, 123, 714-733. Quoted in Steven M. Bachrach, Computational Organic Chemistry, Preface, xiii.
This is the best chemistry site on the internet except for all the other ones...
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