Quotes about chemistry
page 2

“Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life? Even deserts can be irrigated and top soil can be replaced. We cannot complain of a lack of land, for there are twenty-five million square miles of tillable land, of which we are using less than seven million. We have amazing knowledge of vitamins, nutrition, the chemistry of food, and the versatility of atoms. There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will. The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. Just as nonviolence exposed the ugliness of racial injustice, so must the infection and sickness of poverty be exposed and healed - not only its symptoms but its basic causes. This, too, will be a fierce struggle, but we must not be afraid to pursue the remedy no matter how formidable the task.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

Life, Hunger, Food, Knowledge

“Before the Industrial Revolution all techniques in use were supported by very narrow epistemic bases. That is to say, the people who invented them did not have much of a clue as to why and how they worked. The pre-1750 world produced, and produced well. It made many path-breaking inventions. But it was a world of engineering without mechanics, iron-making without metallurgy, farming without soil science, mining without geology, water-power without hydraulics, dye-making without organic chemistry, and medical practice without microbiology and immunology. The main point to keep in mind here is that such a lack of an epistemic base does not necessarily preclude the development of new techniques through trial and error and simple serendipity. But it makes the subsequent wave of micro-inventions that adapt and improve the technique and create the sustained productivity growth much slower and more costly. If one knows why some device works, it becomes easier to manipulate and debug it, to adapt to new uses and changing circumstances. Above all, one knows what will not work and thus reduce the costs of research and experimentation.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Joel Mokyr, " The knowledge society: Theoretical and historical underpinnings http://ehealthstrategies.comnehealthstrategies.comnxxx.ehealthstrategies.com/files/unitednations_mokyr.pdf." AdHoc Expert Group on Knowledge Systems, United Nations, NY. 2003.

People, World, Error, Support

“…The subjects we study at school can be divided roughly into two groups—the sciences and the arts. The sciences include mathematics, geography, chemistry, physics, and so on. Among the arts are drawing, painting, modelling, needlework, drama, music, literature. The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, Education, School, Art

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

"An Expedition to the Pole", Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

Life, God, Children, Idea

“Physics, chemistry, astrophysics are obviously the ideal field for the tidy mind …in the biological and geological sciences the tidy mind often goes astray and the passive, unmathematical approach may me more suitable.
…The sciences that deal with natural process, geology or geography, or with life, zoology or botany, have an immensely more complicated task than physics or chemistry.
… A particular danger, I believe, lies in an oversimplified use of mathematical or statistical methods of investigation, in which obviously erroneous results may be obtained by a selection of only a few of many relevant factors to be considered.”

Claud William Wright (1917–2010) British paleontologist

From "Order and Disorder in Nature", 1958 Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, 69, 2, 77-82.

Life, Mathematics, Nature, Science

“Everyone thinks chemistry and alchemy are so similar, but they’re really not. They’re not even related. They just happen to live in the same house.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 44, “The Burning Glass” (p. 328)

Thinking, Housing

“I was cast opposite multiple heroes and as luck would have it, the chemistry worked with most.”

Hema Malini (1948) Indian actress, dancer and politician

In page=1977
MOTHER MAIDEN MISTRESS

“Corruption does not so much rot the masses: it poisons Congress. Credit-Mobilier and money rings are not housed under thatched roofs: they flaunt at the Capitol. As usual in chemistry, the scum floats uppermost.”

Wendell Phillips (1811–1884) American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator and lawyer

1880s, The Scholar in a Republic (1881)

Money, Housing

“The ribosome does amazing chemistry, but I’m not a chemist…I’ve just learnt enough to work on my problem.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

Appreciate science for what it is: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Problem

“It is a pretty structure isn’t it? It makes you think of something solid, stable, well-linked. In fact it happens also in chemistry as in architecture that “beautiful” edifices, that is, symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals of the arches of bridges.”

Primo Levi book The Periodic Table

On the structure of alloxan, in "Nitrogen".
The Periodic Table (1975)

Beauty, Thinking

“The extension of Black's method by the physicist Lavoisier led to the downfall of the purely qualitative theory of phlogiston, and gave to chemistry the true methods of investigation, and its first great quantitative law—the law of conservation of matter.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

J. R. Partington, Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)

Law

“The origin of life happened in significantly less than 500 million years. …Six days was once a popular hypothesis. …A process that happens quickly is a process that is in some sense likely… this evidence suggests that the origin of life was in some sense easy, in some sense sitting in the laws of physics and chemistry.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Life, Law, Sense

“I want to see the gardens and palace of the Alcazar where the Moorish Kings used to live. It is as perfect an architecture as the Egyptian, Greek or Gothic and just as beautiful, maybe more beautiful and it is well built for it looks as new as if it had just been done. We have to thanks these Moors for our greatest sciences, they did the big work for us, they started them, Algebra, Chemistry, Astronomy. They are our masters.”

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) American painter

Thomas Eakins, in Vistas de España, Mary Elizabeth Boone, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 77.

Beauty, Science, Perfection

“I was a borderline computer science major before I came into interaction design; I’m really interested in physics and chemistry. This class was a way to throw design back into science and mathematics and help a community that is helping to give back to us.”

Akshay Agrawal (1998) Serial Social Entrepreneur

About working with MIT and JPL on an Ocean Eddy Simulation Visualization tool https://web.archive.org/web/20180518011711/https://designmattersatartcenter.org/proj/seeing-the-unseen/

Way, Communication, Mathematics, Science

“I had a trumpet, but I didn't want to be a trumpet player. I wanted to be some type of athlete or in some type of scholarly activity, be a chemist or something—I had my little chemistry set, and I like playing with it.”

Wynton Marsalis (1961) American jazz musician

Attributed

“All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 227

Law

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Sections I–II, p. 11–12
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter II. The Science of Justice (Continued)

Universe, Reality, Men, Pleasure

“The conservation of matter in a chemical change is represented in a balanced chemical equation for that process. The study of the relationships between the numbers of reactant and product molecules is called stoichiometry. Stoichiometry is fundamental to all aspects of chemistry.”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 2 : Chemical Formulas, Equations, and Reaction Yields

Study, Change

“I realized after I'd been at MIT for a while that I had never even known the semantics of the word "engineering". You see, all my relatives and contacts were medical doctors or biology and chemistry professors. In fact, I'm almost the "black sheep" in the family for not being an MD or Ph. D. because everybody was doing that sort of thing. There was no contact at all with engineering. I didn't even know what the word meant…”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1984), p. 11; Response to the question Were there any engineering courses offered and did you take them?

Family

“The only part I understand is what went into the creation of the strip. What readers take away from it is up to them. Once the strip is published, readers bring their own experiences to it, and the work takes on a life of its own. Everyone responds differently to different parts. I just tried to write honestly, and I tried to make this little world fun to look at, so people would take the time to read it. That was the full extent of my concern. You mix a bunch of ingredients, and once in a great while, chemistry happens. I can't explain why the strip caught on the way it did, and I don't think I could ever duplicate it. A lot of things have to go right all at once.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Interview with John Campanelli of The Plain Dealer http://www.cleveland.com/living/index.ssf/2010/02/bill_watterson_creator_of_belo.html

Life, People, World, Way

“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 (1891–1976) Hungarian-British polymath

Life's irreducible structure (1968)

Life, Understanding, Help, Drawing

“Ben Stein: What do think is the possibility that intelligent design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics, or in evolution?
Richard Dawkins: Well, it could come about in the following way: it could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto, perhaps, this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it's possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of our chemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer, and that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable, process. It couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That's the point.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed ()

Life, Way, Intelligence, Thinking

“I was actually just blessed to be surrounded by so many wonderful veterans and people that I had great chemistry with and that were just open to me.”

Aaliyah (1979–2001) American singer, actress and model

CBS interview (2000)

People

“I had very happy high school years; I was not a very diligent student, but I had good achievements – I was a winner of biology and chemistry national competition, which gave me a lot of points when I decided to take the entrance examination for medicine, not being completely convinced of the medical profession, since there was never a doctor in my family.”

Marek Sanak (1958) Polish scientist

Kobos, Andrzej (2012). Po drogach uczonych. 5. Polska Akademia Umiejętności. pp. 317–335. ISBN 978-83-7676-127-5.

School, Family, Happiness

“Like all great churches, that are not mere store-houses of theology, Chartres expressed, besides whatever else it meant, an emotion, the deepest man ever felt,— the struggle of his own littleness to grasp the infinite. You may, if you like, figure in it a mathematic formula of infinity,— the broken arch, our finite idea of space; the spire, pointing, with its converging lines, to Unity beyond space; the sleepless, restless thrust of the vaults, telling the unsatisfied, incomplete, overstrained effort of man to rival the energy, intelligence and purpose of God. Thomas Aquinas and the schoolmen tried to put it in words, but their church is another chapter. In act, all man's work ends there;— mathematics, physics, chemistry, dynamics, optics, every sort of machinery science may invent,— to this favor come at last, as religion and philosophy did before science was born.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

God, Religion, Intelligence, Mathematics

“He that could teach mathematics well, would not be a bad teacher in any of the rest [physics, chemistry, biology, psychology] unless by the accident of total inaptitude for experimental illustration; while the mere experimentalist is likely to fall into the error of missing the essential condition of science as reasoned truth; not to speak of the danger of making the instruction an affair of sensation, glitter, or pyrotechnic show.”

Alexander Bain (1818–1903) Scottish philosopher and educationalist

Source: Education as a Science, 1898, p. 298.

Truth, Error, Mathematics, Teachers

“I was once hired to develop a Windows-based chemistry library for a company that builds reactors that burn toxic metal waste into harmless substances (really).”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

1993/11
About himself

“Our knowledge of physics only takes us back so far. Before this instant of cosmic time, all the laws of physics or chemistry are as evanescent as rings of smoke.”

Joseph Silk (1942) British-American astronomer

The Infinite Cosmos, Page 3

Law, Knowledge, Time

“I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Letter to Sir Humphry Davy (15 July 1800)
Letters

“Indeed, most bright, intellectually curious college students suffer through Econ 101, are happy to pass, and then wave goodbye to the subject forever. Economics is filed away with calculus and chemistry—rigorous subjects that required a lot of memorization and have little to do with anything that will come later in life. And, of course, a lot of bright students avoid the course in the first place. This is a shame on two levels.
First, many intellectually curious people are missing a subject that is provocative, powerful, and highly relevant to almost every aspect of our lives.…Second, many of our brightest citizens are economically illiterate.”

Charles Wheelan (1966) American politician

Introduction
Naked Economics (rev. and updated ed., 2010)

Life, People, Suffering, Happiness

“To investigate the essence of a natural phenomenon, three conditions are necessary: We must first study and know the phenomenon itself, from all sides; we must then determine in what relation it stands to other natural phenomena; and lastly, when we have ascertained all these relations, we have to solve the problem of measuring these relations and the laws of mutual dependence—that is, of expressing them in numbers. In the first period of chemistry, all the powers of men's minds were devoted to acquiring a knowledge of the properties of bodies; it was necessary to discover, observe, and ascertain their peculiarities. This is the alchemistical period. The second period embraces the determination of the mutual relations or connections of these properties; this is the period of phlogistic chemistry. In the third period, in which we now are, we ascertain by weight and measure and express in numbers the degree in which the properties of bodies are mutually dependent. The inductive sciences begin with the substance itself, then come just ideas, and lastly, mathematics are called in, and with the aid of numbers, complete the work.”

Justus von Liebig (1803–1873) German chemist

Familiar Letters on Chemistry, Tr. Blythe, 4th ed., London, 1859, p. 60 as quoted by John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=xqwQAAAAYAAJ (1903).

Men, Law, Mathematics, Idea

“There are already people who are world class in India, for example C. N. R. Rao (who has worked mainly in solid-state and structural chemistry). He is an example of how you can do first rate international work within India. So I would say to Indians — you have it within you to do this”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

in India
Venki’ makes light of India link- Winner says not to treat science like cricket; league of misses grows

People, World

“Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed!”

Primo Levi book The Periodic Table

"Iron"
The Periodic Table (1975)

Faith, Error, Idea, Understanding

“Here, then: a revolution [in science and chemistry] has taken place in an important part of human knowledge since your departure from Europe… I will consider this revolution to be well advanced and even completely accomplished if you range yourself with us. …After having brought you up to date on what is happening in chemistry, it would be well to speak to you about our political revolution. We regard it as done and without any possibility of return to the old order.”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

Letter to Benjamin Franklin (Feb 2, 1790) as quoted by I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (1985)

Departure, Knowledge, Science, Parting

“Cary [Grant] would arrive on the set and everybody's morale immediately lifted. The crew were crazy about him and so was I. But, curiously, I never felt the male-female chemistry that you sometimes experience on a set. I could have been talking to my best girl-friend.”

Laraine Day (1920–2007) American actress

The Independent, Obituaries, Laraine Day, November 13, 2007.

Girl

“To suppose that chemistry and poetry are incompatible (as I am sure Prof Donnan would not do!), or that biology is inconsistent with a religious outlook on the world (I don not say with theology!) is to misunderstand entirely what the human mind, by contemplation and experiment, has achieved. By extreme specialization at intervals, by overloading the machine to its limit, discoveries and progress are made: but their bearing is best seen by letting the engine idle and giving oneself time to look around. The chemist and the poet are both right, the biologist and the saint: and each must pull up now and then to find whither he is going and to adjust his spectacles.”

Archibald Hill (1886–1977) English physiologist and biophysicist

The Ethical Dilemma of Science and Other Writings https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=zaE1AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (1960, Cap 1. Scepticism and Faith, p. 41)

World, Time

“One great mystery is why sexual reproduction became dominant for higher life-forms. Optimization theory says it should be otherwise.
Take a fish or lizard, ideally suited to her environment, with just the right internal chemistry, agility, camouflage—whatever it takes to be healthy, fecund, and successful in her world. Despite all this, she cannot pass on her perfect characteristics. After sex, her offspring will be jumbles, getting only half of their program from her and half their re-sorted genes somewhere else.
Sex inevitably ruins perfection. Parthenogenesis would seem to work better—at least theoretically. In simple, static environments, well-adapted lizards who produce duplicate daughters are known to have advantages over those using sex.
Yet, few complex animals are known to perform self-cloning. And those species exist in ancient, stable deserts, always in close company with a related sexual species.
Sex has flourished because environments are seldom static. Climate, competition, parasites—all make for shifting conditions. What was ideal in one generation may be fatal the next. With variability, your offspring get a fighting chance. Even in desperate times, one or more of them may have what it takes to meet new challenges and thrive.
Each style has its advantages, then. Cloning offers stability and preservation of excellence. Sex gives adaptability to changing times. In nature it is usually one or the other. Only lowly creatures such as aphids have the option of switching back and forth.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Introduction to Chapter 8 (pp. 123-124)
Glory Season (1993)

Life, World, Sex, Optimism

“There is a narrowness of action, though not of intent, which characterizes university departments, and scientific publications and scientists in general: if it is too popular, it is somehow vulgar and wrong. You can't really speak to those people across the street. I live next to the chemists at MIT, but I never see them. I hardly know who they are, yet between physics and chemistry it is hard to know who should study what molecule. I myself am guilty. We form communities not based on the problems of science, but on quite other things. This is part of the general split between the intelligent member of the public and the scientist who speaks in narrow focus. But the great theoretical problems which I believe the world expects will somehow be solved by science, problems close to deep philosophical issues are the very problems that find the least expertise, the least degree of organization, the least institutional support in the scientific institutions of America or indeed of the world.”

Philip Morrison (1915–2005) American astrophysicist

On specialization, Nothing is Too Wonderful to be True (1995)

People, World, Intelligence, Communication

“The most powerful influence exercised by the Arabs on general natural physics was that directed to the advances of chemistry; a science for which this race created a new era.(…) Besides making laudatory mention of that which we owe to the natural science of the Arabs in both the terrestrial and celestial spheres, we must likewise allude to their contributions in separate paths of intellectual development to the general mass of mathematical science.”

Alexander von Humboldt book Kosmos

Cosmos, H.G. Bohn, 1860, v2, p.589,595.
Kosmos (1845 - 1847)

Exercises, Mathematics, Nature, Science

“With the hubris common to physicists, I have always felt that I have known what good science is — it is theory cast in terms of mechanisms that describe how parts of the universe behave. With sometimes immense historical delay, these mechanisms always move towards being grounded in the larger mechanistic view of the universe. Theories always propose a view of how the universe is. They can never be effectively argued to be true, but only be brought before the bar of empirical evidence. All the modern concern for contextualism, hermeneutics and the social determination of meaning has its point, but is a mere footnote to the massive evidence for this view of science. The overwhelming success within this framework of modern biology over the last half century has provided another major confirmation, if one is needed. Someday we will get another striking confirmation from cognitive science. Though it can be argued that we are well on our way, we still have an immense distance to go. Arguments are no match for the evidence that cognitive science does not control its subject the way physics, chemistry and now biology do.”

Allen Newell (1927–1992) American cognitive scientist

Draft of an introduction to the Mind Matters Symposium http://diva.library.cmu.edu/Newell/mindmatters.html, 26 May 1992, Carnegie Mellon University Archives http://diva.library.cmu.edu/Newell/biography.html

Way, Universe, Science, Success

“Biology is the scientific study of life - in principle, anyway. In practice, biology is the scientific study of life on Earth based on carbon-chain chemistry. There is nothing in its charter that restricts biology to carbon-based life; it is simply that this is the only kind of life that has been available to study. Thus, theoretical biology has long faced the fundamental obstacle that it is impossible to derive general principles from single examples… Without other examples, it is difficult to distinguish essential properties of life - properties that would be shared by any living system - from properties that may be incidental to life in principle, but which happen to be universal to life on Earth due solely to a combination of local historical accident and common genetic descent.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Source: Artificial Life (1989), p.2

Life, Study, Universe

“Human communities are ecosystems. Ecosystems are biological, chemical and physical systems. The physics, chemistry and biology of complex self-organizing systems can tell us much that is useful about human communities: about the conditions necessary for the existence of human communities, about the properties human communities 'inherit' because they are special cases of more general kinds of systems, particularly ecosystems.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 159

Communication

“As mineralogy constitutes a part of chemistry, it is clear that this arrangement [of minerals] must derive its principles from chemistry. The most perfect mode of arrangement would certainly be to allow bodies to follow each other according to the order of their electro-chemical properties, from the most electro-negative, oxygen, to the most electro-positive, potassium; and to place every compound body according to its most electro-positive ingredient.”

Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848) Swedish chemist

Jöns Jacob Berzelius, An Attempt to Establish a Pure Scientific System of Mineralogy (1814), trans. J. Black, 48.

Parting, Perfection

“The nature of the chemical bond is the problem at the heart of all chemistry.”

Bryce Crawford (1914–2011) American chemist (1914-2011)

New Chemistry‎ (1957) by the editors of Scientific American, p. 65

Nature, Problem, Heart

“Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn't just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it's just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn't want to go there in the first place. I can't control what happens in my brain, so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now, much less Montana next summer? It's all this activity in the brain and you don't know what's you as a person and what's some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Question, Summer, Personality

“A geologist should be well versed in chemistry, natural philosophy, mineralogy, zoology, comparative anatomy, botany; in short, in every science relating to organic and inorganic nature. …But the brief duration of human life, and our limited powers, are so far from permitting us to aspire to such extensive acquisitions, that excellence even in one department is within the reach of few, and those individuals most effectually promote the general progress, who concentrate their thoughts on a limited portion of the field of inquiry.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.1, p. 3
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Life, Nature, Science

“Systems science and technology constitute one aspect of systems thinking, but the humanities and arts make up the other. The fact that design plays such a large part in the systemic treatment of problems makes it apparent that art has a major role in it as well. Ethics and aesthetics are integral aspects of evaluating systems… the systems approach involves the pursuit of truth (science) and its effective use (technology), plenty (economics), the good (ethics and morality), and beauty and fun (aesthetics). To compare systems methodology with that of any of the so-called ‘hard’ disciplines—for example, physics—is to misunderstand the nature of systems. The worry is not that the systems approach is not scientific in the sense which physics or chemistry or biology is, but that some try to make it scientific in that sense. To the extent they succeed, they destroy it.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (1999). "Disciplines, the two cultures and the scianities". Systems Research and Behavioral Science. 16 (6), p. 537. Cited in: Sherryl Stalinski (2005) A Systems View of Social Systems, Culture and Communities. Saybrook Graduate School. p. 5.
1990s

Truth, Beauty, Art, Nature

“I was trying to prove that I was the Clash and it wasn't Mick (Jones). I learned that that was kind of dumb. I learned that it wasn't anybody, except maybe a great chemistry between us four, and I really learned it was over the day we sacked Topper, and not the day we sacked Mick. There was quite some time between them. We played a whole tour between those times. But it was the day we sacked Tops.”

Joe Strummer (1952–2002) British musician, singer, actor and songwriter

Strummer on Man, God, Law and the Clash (31 January 1988)

Learning, Time

“…when I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished – for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.”

K. Barry Sharpless (1941) American chemist

Nobel lecture, 2001

Way, Imagination, Fish, Sea

“My first essay at making a steam engine was when I was fifteen. I then made a real working; steam-engine, 1 3/4 diameter cylinder, and 8 in. stroke, which not only could act, but really did some useful work; for I made it grind the oil colours which my father required for his painting. Steam engine models, now so common, were exceedingly scarce in those days, and very difficult to be had; and as the demand for them arose, I found it both delightful and profitable to make them; as well as sectional models of steam engines, which I introduced for the purpose of exhibiting the movements of all the parts, both exterior and interior. With the results of the sale of such models I was enabled to pay the price of tickets of admission to the lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry delivered in the University of Edinburgh. About the same time (1826) I was so happy as to be employed by Professor Leslie in making models and portions of apparatus required by him for his lectures and philosophical investigations, and I had also the inestimable good fortune to secure his friendship. His admirably clear manner of communicating a knowledge of the fundamental principles of mechanical science rendered my intercourse with him of the utmost importance to myself. A hearty, cheerful, earnest desire to toil in his service, caused him to take pleasure in instructing me by occasional explanations of what might otherwise have remained obscure.”

James Nasmyth (1808–1890) Scottish mechanical engineer and inventor

James Nasmyth in: Industrial Biography: Iron-workers and Tool-makers https://books.google.nl/books?id=ZMJLAAAAMAAJ, Ticknor and Fields, 1864. p. 337

Friendship, Pleasure, Communication, Nature

“Saying the Bible is not a book about science is like saying a cookbook is not a book about chemistry.”

Robert J. Marks II (1950) American electrical engineering researcher and intelligent design advocate

Pursuance of truth requires consideration of a creator. If you define science to exclude the possibility of a creator, it isn’t a pursuance of truth. <br class="br">The universe as accepted by science in terms of size and age is not big enough or old enough to explain evolution. <br class="br"> Q&A: ‘Expelled’s’ Robert Marks, From an interview with Jerry Pierce, 2008-01-28, 2008-02-18 http://www.sbtexan.com/default.asp?action=article&aid=5534&issue=2/4/2008,

Books, Science

“Chemistry is the science of matter and the changes it can undergo. The world of chemistry therefore embraces everything material around us—the stones we stand on, the food we eat, the flesh we are made of, and the silicon we build into computers. There is nothing material beyond the reach of chemistry, be it living or dead, vegetable or mineral, on Earth or in a distant star.”

Peter Atkins (1940) British chemist

Peter Atkins and Loretta Jones, Chemical Principles: The Quest for Insight, 4th ed. (2008)

World, Food, Star, Distant

“The science of chemistry rests on two well-established principles: the conservation of matter and the conservation of energy.”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 1 : The Atom in Modern Chemistry

Science

“We have seen that the formation and maintenance of self-organizing systems are compatible with the laws of physical chemistry.”

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) physical chemist

Part 2; Cited in: Evgenii Rudnyi (2013).
Thermodynamics of Evolution (1972)

Law

“I was sort of a hellraiser with a bunch of friends, most of whom were squeaking by with C's and D's while I was getting an A-average and should have been doing better. I did a lot of things on my own. I liked to make things with my hands. There was a lot of woodworking, model building, and model railroading. I collected stamps, and did various things in chemistry. I used to make things that exploded, and all that sort of thing. So I evidently got quite a good background in science. I always had a knack for that sort of thing. The hospital had a subscription to Scientific American and Science.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

So things came every week and I consumed them...
Response to the question: Did you outstrip the offerings of the school, say in the sciences and mathematics?
An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1984)

Science

“As a rabbi I am often called upon to determine the kashrut of various food products and institutions. I am appalled by the number of chemicals that are added to our food, and long for the days when one did not need a degree in chemistry in order to understand what one was eating. From my perspective, I'm tempted to brand all food additives as treif, and hail as glatt kosher only those fruits and vegetables that are organically grown.”

Bonnie Koppell American rabbi

Source: Vegetarianism, p. 38

Food, Understanding

“There is reason, however, to think that the author would have rendered it much more interesting, and have carried it to si higher degree of perfection, had he lived in an age more enlightened and better informed in regard to the mathematics and natural philosophy. Since the death of that mathematician, indeed, the arts and sciences have been so much improved, that what in his time might have been entitled to the character of mediocrity, would not at present be supportable. How many new discoveries in every part of philosophy? How many new phenomena observed, some of which have even given birth to the most fertile branches of the sciences? We shall mention only electricity, an inexhaustible source of profound reflection, and of experiments highly amusing. Chemistry also is a science, the most common and slightest principles of which were quite unknown to Ozanam. In short, we need not hesitate to pronounce that Ozanam's work contains a multitude of subjects treated of with an air of credulity, and so much prolixity, that it appears as if the author, or rather his continuators, had no other object in view than that of multiplying the volumes.
To render this work, then, more worthy of the enlightened agt in which we live, it was necessary to make numerous corrections and considerable additions. A task which we have endeavoured to discharge with all diligence”

Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1799) French mathematician

Source: Preface to Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. (1803), p. vi; As cited in: Tobias George Smollett. The Critical Review: Or, Annals of Literature http://books.google.com/books?id=T8APAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA412, Volume 38, (1803), p. 412

Death, Age, Art, Mathematics

“We can no more have exact religious thinking without theology, than exact mensuration and astronomy without mathematics, or exact iron-making without chemistry”

John Hall (1829–1898) Presbyterian pastor from Northern Ireland in New York, died 1898

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 580.

Mathematics, Thinking

“I would advise you not to expect too much happiness, even from the fulfillment of all your wishes. The moment you have distinguished yourself you become an object of envy and malice; men whom you believed to be lovers of knowledge you will then find to be lovers only of fame, and haters of all knowledge that has not come from themselves. You will find that a life of science has in it no superiority to any other, unless it is pursued from a higher principle than the mere ambition of notoriety, and that demagogue or a philosopher differ only in the objects of their selfishness. As you will now have experienced how unsatisfying even the pursuit of knowledge is when insulated from higher objects, I hope, if you have not been fortunate enough to begin the study earlier, that you will devote yourself to the most extraordinary of all subjects, one which infinitely surpasses the mechanism of the heavens or the chemistry of the material world, the revelation of your duty and the destiny of man as contained in The Bible — a book which occupied the best hours of the manhood of Newton, of Locke, and of Euler.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

In a 1830 letter to James David Forbes, as found in Life and letters of James David Forbes, p. 40.

Life, Men, Books, World

“There can be danger in stretching the body if it’s not done properly. The same is true with the imagination and the chemistry which may give the imagination elasticity, but the soul gives a direction.”

Eugene J. Martin (1938–2005) American artist

Annotated Drawings by Eugene J. Martin: 1977-1978

Soul, Imagination

“The philosopher Comte has made the statement that chemistry is a non-mathematical science. He also told us that astronomy had reached a stage when further progress was impossible. These remarks”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)
Context: The philosopher Comte has made the statement that chemistry is a non-mathematical science. He also told us that astronomy had reached a stage when further progress was impossible. These remarks, coming after Dalton's atomic theory, and just before Guldberg and Waage were to lay the foundations of chemical dynamics, Kirchhoff to discover the reversal of lines in the solar spectrum, serve but to emphasize the folly of having "recourse to farfetched and abstracted Ratiocination," and should teach us to be "very far from the litigious humour of loving to wrangle about words or terms or notions as empty".

Mathematics, Science

“The spiritual process is just to create the right kind of chemistry, where you are naturally peaceful, naturally joyous.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Encounter the Enlightened (2001)
Context: The spiritual process is just to create the right kind of chemistry, where you are naturally peaceful, naturally joyous. When you are joyous by your very own nature, when you don't have to do anything to be happy, then the very dimension of your life, the very way you perceive and express yourself in the world will change. The very way you experience your life will change.

Peace, Nature

“I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving beast. For me, that week in Chicago was far worse than the worst bad acid trip I'd even heard rumors about. It permanently altered my brain chemistry…”

Hunter S. Thompson book Fear and Loathing in America

Comment on the protest activity at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, as quoted in "The Doctor Is In" by Curtis Wilkie, in The Boston Globe Magazine (7 February 1988), p. 16
As quoted in the editors note by Douglas Brinkley, in Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist (2000), p. xvi ISBN 0747553459
1980s
Variant: I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a cold-blooded revolutionary.

“You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, 1992
Context: There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. It's a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology. It's not that scientists are more honest people. It's just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow.

Lie, Falseness

“Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun's heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That's a scientific fact. The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process? What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn't the sun's energy. We just saw what the sun's energy did. It has to be something else. What is it?”

Robert M. Pirsig book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals

Lila (1991)
Context: The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems run down like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only 'runs up,' converting low energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep 'running up' faster and faster. Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive? If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other minerals. It's a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor we use and no matter what process we use we can't turn these compounds back into a chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun's heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That's a scientific fact. The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process? What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn't the sun's energy. We just saw what the sun's energy did. It has to be something else. What is it?

Way, Question, Nature, Sun

“The strife was stilled, order and unity were restored, as soon as Avogadro's great idea was seen in its true light, and the concept of the molecule was introduced into chemistry. A formula which had required pages of reasoning from a purely chemical standpoint to establish, and that insecurely, was fixed by a single numerical result.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)
Context: As an instance of the remarkably far-reaching effect which a single mathematico-physical concept has had upon the development of chemical theory, one has but to recall the state of chemistry just before the revival of Avogadro's law by Cannizzaro, to be impressed by its confusion. Relying solely upon their "chemical instinct," the leaders of the various schools of chemical thought had developed each his own theoretical system.... a host of... conceptions strove for supremacy. The strife was stilled, order and unity were restored, as soon as Avogadro's great idea was seen in its true light, and the concept of the molecule was introduced into chemistry. A formula which had required pages of reasoning from a purely chemical standpoint to establish, and that insecurely, was fixed by a single numerical result.

Idea, Light

“To those who have any intimate acquaintance with the laws of chemistry and physics the suggestion that the spiritual world could be ruled by laws of allied character is as preposterous as the suggestion that a nation could be ruled by laws like the laws of grammar.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929)
Context: To those who have any intimate acquaintance with the laws of chemistry and physics the suggestion that the spiritual world could be ruled by laws of allied character is as preposterous as the suggestion that a nation could be ruled by laws like the laws of grammar.<!--V, p.54

World, Law

“Just think of the differences today. A young person gets interested in chemistry and is given a chemical set. But it doesn't contain potassium cyanide. It doesn't even contain copper sulfate or anything else interesting because all the interesting chemicals are considered dangerous substances.”

Linus Pauling (1901–1994) American scientist

Linus Pauling In His Own Words (1995) by Barbara Marinacci, p. 29.
1990s
Context: Just think of the differences today. A young person gets interested in chemistry and is given a chemical set. But it doesn't contain potassium cyanide. It doesn't even contain copper sulfate or anything else interesting because all the interesting chemicals are considered dangerous substances. Therefore, these budding young chemists don't get a chance to do anything engrossing with their chemistry sets. As I look back, I think it is pretty remarkable that Mr. Ziegler, this friend of the family, would have so easily turned over one-third of an ounce of potassium cyanide to me, an eleven-year-old boy.

Thinking, Personality

“The treatises written in Greek… in Alexandria, are the earliest known books on chemistry.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

A Short History of Chemistry (1937)
Context: In Alexandria two streams of knowledge met and fused together... The ancient Egyptian industrial arts of metallurgy, dyeing and glass-making... and... the philosophical speculations of ancient Greece, now tinged with ancient mysticism, and partly transformed into that curious fruit of the tree of knowledge which we call Gnosticism.... the result was the "divine" or "sacred" art (... also means sulphur) of making gold of silver.... during the first four centuries a considerable body of knowledge came into existence. The treatises written in Greek... in Alexandria, are the earliest known books on chemistry.... The treatises also contain much of an allegorical nature... sometimes described as "obscure mysticism."... the Neoplatonism which was especially studied in Alexandria... is not so negligible as has sometimes been supposed.... The study of astrology was connected with that of chemistry in the form of an association of the metals with the planets on a supposed basis of "sympathy". This goes back to early Chaldean sources but was developed by the Neoplatonists.

Books

“The study of astrology was connected with that of chemistry in the form of an association of the metals with the planets”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Study

“The discovery of radioactivity created a momentary chaos in chemistry and physics; but it soon led to a fuller interpretation of the old ideas.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Appendix VI : A few principal rituals – Liber Reguli.
Magick Book IV : Liber ABA, Part III : Magick in Theory and Practice (1929)
Context: The discovery of radioactivity created a momentary chaos in chemistry and physics; but it soon led to a fuller interpretation of the old ideas. It dispersed many difficulties, harmonized many discords, and — yea, more! It shewed the substance of Universe as a simplicity of Light and Life, manners to compose atoms, themselves capable of deeper self-realization through fresh complexities and organizations, each with its own peculiar powers and pleasures, each pursuing its path through the world where all things are possible.

Idea

“Every practice, every film session, every game will help our chemistry.”

LeBron James (1984) American basketball player

Game, Help

“The devil may write textbooks of chemistry, for every few years the whole thing changes.”

Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848) Swedish chemist

Jöns Jakob Berzelius (1779–1848). Nature 162, 210 (1948) doi:10.1038/162210b0

Change

“Religion is essentially pre-scientific. It will pass away. It represents a certain stage of mental development. It has been tinkered with and tinkered with until it is about ready for the scrap heap. The more men know of chemistry and physics and evolution and natural law, the less use they have for supernaturalism. No true scientist can pray. Prayer is unscientific. No evolutionist can believe in the divine origin of anything.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"The Source of Religion", International Socialist Review, Vol. 16, Iss. 12, Jun. 1916

Nature, Religion, Law, Men

“The entire recent history of biology shows that we are, to a remarkable degree, the results of the interactions of an extremely complex array of molecules; and the aspect of biology that was once considered its holy of holies, the nature of the genetic material, has now been fundamentally understood in terms of the chemistry of its constituent nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, and their operational agents, the proteins.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Introduction (p. 7)
The Dragons of Eden (1977)

History, Nature

“It is clear, however, that the distinguishing mark of the whole development of theoretical chemistry and physics is the elimination of the anthropomorphic elements, especially specific sense-impressions, from the concepts. This process is called by Prof. M. Planck the objectification of the physical system.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction Note: Max Planck, "Acht Vorlesungen iiber theoretische Physik" (1910)
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)

Sense

“We are… bound to attach the greatest importance to the preliminary step taken by Lavoisier, who is even more justly called the father of modern chemistry than Kepler is called the father of modern astronomy. The exact claims of Lavoisier to this important place in the history of chemistry have been variously stated: …since his time, and greatly through his labours, the quantitative method has been established as the ultimate test of chemical facts; the principle of this method being the rule that in all changes of combination and reaction, the total weight of the various ingredients—be they elementary bodies or compounds—remains unchanged. The science of chemistry was thus established upon an exact, a mathematical basis. By means of this method Lavoisier, utilising and analysing the results gained by himself and others before him, notably those of Priestley, Cavendish, and Black, succeeded in destroying the older theory of combustion, the so-called phlogistic theory.”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=xqwQAAAAYAAJ (1903)

Time, History, Mathematics, Science

“With each new discovery of chemistry, physics, biology, the anthropological sciences, of the practical application of sound principles, dogma collapses. It is a part of that old edifice of religion which crumbles and falls in ruins.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

1900s, God Does Not Exist (1904)

Science, Religion, Parting

“Mental states such as loneliness, compulsion, anguish, attachment, pain, and faith are not just "all in the head" but in the brain as well. Brain, mind, and body are a continuum. Our thoughts—intention, fear, images, suggestion, expectation— alter the brain's chemistry. And it works both ways; thoughts can be altered by changing the brain's chemistry with drugs, nutrients, oxygen. The brain is hopelessly complex.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Six, Liberating Knowledge: News from the Frontiers of Science

Pain, Faith, Loneliness, Way

“For some reason we have a certain chemistry — or whatever. Let's see what happens. We have a long way to go. But I'm in no rush... So, I just want to say that we are going to be heading out to the DMZ and it's something I planned long ago but had the idea yesterday to maybe say hello, just shake hands quickly and say hello.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

press conference, Blue House, Seoul, South Korea, quoted in * 2019-06-30

Trump: Kim and I "have a certain chemistry"

CNN

https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-dmz-kim-live-intl-hnk/h_8b23e071903b007d8ff1934be8457d2c
2010s, 2019, June

Way, Idea