Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character, Vol. 123, No. 792 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1929.0094 (6 April 1929)
Context: The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.
“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.”
As quoted in American Journal of Physics, Vol. 14 | (1946), p. 248
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Frederick Soddy 3
chemist and physicist from England 1877–1956Related quotes
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966, p. 10.
Of Molecules and Men (1966)
J. R. Partington, Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)
“Physics is too difficult for physicists!”
This quote has many variants. An early version attributed to the Göttingen School appears in a book review by Heinrich Wieleitner in Isis, Volume 7, No. 4, December 1925, p. 597: Ach, die Physik! Die ist ja für die Physiker viel zu schwer! (Oh, physics! That's just too difficult for the physicists!).
Disputed
“Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.”
Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics (1991) by Edward Teller, Wendy Teller and Wilson Talley, Ch. 10, p. 150 footnote
[R. A. Mashelkar, Solid State Chemistry: Selected Papers of C N R Rao, http://books.google.com/books?id=8ZSfo_HUk7oC&pg=PA4, 28 February 1995, World Scientific, 978-981-279-589-2, 4]
in his Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2003/ginzburg-lecture.html, December 8, 2003, at Aula Magna, Stockholm University.
“That life is chemistry is true but boring, like saying that football is physics.”
Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 1 “Life” (p. 15)