Best 313 quotes in «chemistry quotes» category

As chemists, we must rename [our] scheme and insert the symbols Ba, La, Ce in place of Ra, Ac, Th. As nuclear chemists closely associated with physics, we cannot yet convince ourselves to make this leap, which contradicts all previous experience in nuclear physics.

As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.

As there are six kinds of metals, so I have also shown with reliable experiments... that there are also six kinds of half-metals: a new half-metal, namely Cobalt regulus in addition to Mercury, Bismuth, Zinc, and the reguluses of Antimony and Arsenic.

At my urgent request the Curie laboratory, in which radium was discovered a short time ago, was shown to me. The Curies themselves were away travelling. It was a cross between a stable and a potato-cellar, and, if I had not seen the worktable with the chemical apparatus, I would have thought it a practical joke. (Wilhelm Ostwald on seeing the Curie's laboratory facilities.)

Atoms are round balls of wood invented by Dr. Dalton. (Answer given by a pupil to a question on atomic theory, as reported by Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe.)

At the age of 48, my body had become a chemistry experiment that I was constantly changing the composition of the chemicals in it to find beneficial reactions.

At the moment I am occupied by an investigation with Kirchhoff which does not allow us to sleep. Kirchhoff has made a totally unexpected discovery, inasmuch as he has found out the cause for the dark lines in the solar spectrum and can produce these lines artificially intensified both in the solar spectrum and in the continuous spectrum of a flame, their position being identical with that of Fraunhofer’s lines. Hence the path is opened for the determination of the chemical composition of the Sun and the fixed stars.

A union of literary and scientific cultures – there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come ... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind.

Attraction isn't wrong. People can’t help who they are drawn to and they certainly can’t control affinity, as uncommon as it is. What is wrong is acting on inclination if it hurts someone else, namely a significant other.

Chemistry is great, but eventually your relationship moves out of the laboratory.

chemistry is you touching my arm and it setting fire to my mind.

Chemistry, for me, had stopped being such a source. It led to the heart of Matter, and Matter was our ally precisely because the Spirit, dear to Fascism, was our enemy; but, having reached the fourth year of Pure Chemistry, I could no longer ignore the fact that chemistry itself, or at least that which we were being administered, did not answer my questions. To prepare phenyl bromide according to Gatterman was amusing, even exhilarating, but not very different from following Artusi's recipes. Why in that particular way and not in another? After having been force fed in liceo the truths revealed by Fascist Doctrine, all revealed, unproven truths either bored me stiff or aroused my suspicion. Did chemistry theorems exist? No; therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans or magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West – Archimedes and Euclid.

Chemistry has energy and it's meant to be felt.

Before you treat a man with a condition, know that not all cures can heal all people. For the chemistry that works on one patient may not work for the next, because even medicine has its own conditions.

Brittany Ellis," Mrs. Peterson says, pointing to the table behind Colin. I unenthusiastically sit on the stool at my assigned place. "Alejandro Fuentes," Mrs. Peterson says, pointing to the stool next to me. Oh my God. Alex . . . my chemistry partner? For my entire senior year! No way, no how, SO not okay. I give Colin a "help me" look as I try to avoid a panic attack. I definitely should have stayed at home. In bed. Under the covers. Forget not being intimidated. "Call me Alex." Mrs. Peterson looks up from her class list and regards Alex above the glasses on her nose. ' Alex Fuentes," she says, before changing his name on her list. "Mr. Fuentes, take off that bandanna. I have a zero tolerance policy in my class. No gang-related accessories are allowed to enter this room. Unfortunately, Alex, your reputation precedes you. Dr. Aguirre backs my zero tolerance policy one hundred percent ... do I make myself clear?" Alex stares her down before sliding the bandanna off his head, exposing raven hair that matches his eyes. "It's to cover up the lice," Colin mutters to Darlene, but I hear him and Alex does, too. "Vete a la verga," Alex says to Colin, his hard eyes blazing. "Collate el hocico." "Whatever, dude," Colin says, then turns around. "He can't even speak English." "That's enough, Colin. Alex, sit down." Mrs. Peterson eyes the rest of the class. "That goes for the rest of you, as well. I can't control what you do outside of this room, but in my class I'm the boss." She turns back to Alex. "Do I make myself clear?" "Si, señora," Alex says, deliberately slow.

But Cecilia, having learned modern forms of snobbery at Cambridge, considered a man with a degree in chemistry incomplete as a human being.

But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules - the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called "primitive" societies - with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as a kind of incest taboo.

Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and WFNA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go up, when Dr. Milton Scheer(Uncle Milty) warned, "Hold it - the acid valve is leaking!" "Go ahead - fire anyway!" Paul ordered. I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started backing away gently, like so many cats with wet feet.

Chloroplasts bear chlorophyll; they give the green world its color, and they carry out the business of photosynthesis. Around the inside perimeter of each gigantic cell trailed a continuous loop of these bright green dots. They spun . . . they pulsed, pressed, and thronged . . . they shone, they swarmed in ever-shifting files around and around the edge of the cell; they wandered, they charged, they milled, raced . . . they flowed and trooped greenly . . . All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts . . . If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring’s center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish’s tail.

Dissection ... teaches us that the body of man is made up of certain kinds of material, so differing from each other in optical and other physical characters and so built up together as to give the body certain structural features. Chemical examination further teaches us that these kinds of material are composed of various chemical substances, a large number of which have this characteristic that they possess a considerable amount of potential energy capable of being set free, rendered actual, by oxidation or some other chemical change. Thus the body as a whole may, from a chemical point of view, be considered as a mass of various chemical substances, representing altogether a considerable capital of potential energy.

Ever since [that day], a small uncertainty had buzzed between us.It was a sense of chemistry that had been a little elusive, a little imprecise, until now.

Do you know what we do with liars in Chemistry? We kill them.

Dr. Morris soon recognized that the difference between successful and unsuccessful marriages can often be traced to how well couples are able to "bond" during the courtship period. By bonding he referred to the process by which a man and woman become cemented together emotionally. It describes the chemistry that permits two previous strangers to become intensely valuable to one another. It helps them weather the storms of life and remain committed in sickness and health, for richer or poorer, for better or worse, forsaking all others until they are parted in death. It is a phenomenal experience that almost defies description.

During this time (at high school) I discovered the Public Library... It was here that I found a source of knowledge and the means to acquire it by reading, a habit of learning which I still follow to this day. I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house. I soon graduated to biochemistry and tried to discover what gave flowers their distinctive colours. I made the (to me) astounding discovery that the pigments I extracted changed their colours when I changed the pH of the solution.

For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes—as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden. [Upon hearing the Periodic Table explained in a first-tern university lecture.]

Everything feels right with her. I can’t explain it. The world just stops. Everything freezes. It’s me. It’s her. It’s just us. Everything else, every molecule, including the oxygen we breathe, is only secondary to the chemistry we create. When we watch a movie it’s more than images strung together in the form of mindless entertainment. It’s an experience. An experience we share together from making the popcorn to watching the film to talking about it for days after. Chemistry. What more can I say? You either have it or you don’t.

I am now convinced that we have recently become possessed of experimental evidence of the discrete or grained nature of matter, which the atomic hypothesis sought in vain for hundreds and thousands of years. The isolation and counting of gaseous ions, on the one hand, which have crowned with success the long and brilliant researches of J.J. Thomson, and, on the other, agreement of the Brownian movement with the requirements of the kinetic hypothesis, established by many investigators and most conclusively by J. Perrin, justify the most cautious scientist in now speaking of the experimental proof of the atomic nature of matter, The atomic hypothesis is thus raised to the position of a scientifically well-founded theory, and can claim a place in a text-book intended for use as an introduction to the present state of our knowledge of General Chemistry.

Have you ever wondered, Dogger," I asked, "if wickedness is a chemical state?" "Indeed I have, Miss Flavia," he said. "I have sometimes thought of little else.

His attention felt more like an irrepressible gravitational pull than mere interest.

If these d'Herelle bodies were really genes, fundamentally like our chromosome genes, they would give us an utterly new angle from which to attack the gene problem. They are filterable, to some extent isolable, can be handled in test-tubes, and their properties, as shown by their effects on the bacteria, can then be studied after treatment. It would be very rash to call these bodies genes, and yet at present we must confess that there is no distinction known between the genes and them. Hence we can not categorically deny that perhaps we may be able to grind genes in a mortar and cook them in a beaker after all. Must we geneticists become bacteriologists, physiological chemists and physicists, simultaneously with being zoologists and botanists? Let us hope so.

I call supplementing with electrolytes and metals: The Electrical Chemistry of the Human

I dashed to the library at the first opportunity; I refer to the venerable library of the University of Turin's Chemical Institute, at that time, like Mecca, impenetrable to infidels and even hard to penetrate for such faithful as I. One had to think that the administration followed the wise principle according to which it is good to discourage the arts and sciences: only someone impelled by absolute necessity, or by an overwhelming passion, would willingly subject himself to the trials of abnegation that were demanded of him in order to consult the volumes. The library's schedule was brief and irrational, the lighting dim, the file cards in disorder; in the winter, no heat; no chairs but uncomfortable and noisy metal stools; and finally, the librarian was an incompetent, insolent boor of exceeding ugliness.

If the elements are the alphabets of chemistry, then the compounds are its plays, its poems, and its novels.

I get so breathless, when you call my name, I've often wondered, do you feel the same? There's a chemistry, energy, a synchronicity When we're all alone.

If you want to become a chemist, you will have to ruin your health. If you don't ruin your health studying, you won't accomplish anything these days in chemistry. {Liebig's advice to August Kekulé.}

If you go very deeper you will see that you are not in freedom you are in cage made by chemistry and science.

I got into magic because I got into alchemy. Which I got into because I was into chemistry, which I was learning about because I wanted to get better with botany, which I had taken up studying in an effort to grow some killer weed

I'll have to jump around like sodium in the rain.

I had once repeated the experiment to reassure myself that this was so, and it was. Ashes to ashes; starch to sugar. A little window into the Creation

I have learned over the years that many formally educated corrosion professionals are either engineers or chemists by training. While those two groups represent the largest two categories of backgrounds in the oilfield corrosion control industry, they are in the minority.

I know of enough cases in which a close and, as it seemed, indissoluble relationship was annulled by the casual arrival of a third party, and one of the pair, previously joined so beautifully, driven out into empty space.

I hope that in due time the chemists will justify their proceedings by some large generalisations deduced from the infinity of results which they have collected. For me I am left hopelessly behind and I will acknowledge to you that through my bad memory organic chemistry is to me a sealed book. Some of those here, Hofmann for instance, consider all this however as scaffolding, which will disappear when the structure is built. I hope the structure will be worthy of the labour. I should expect a better and a quicker result from the study of the powers of matter, but then I have a predilection that way and am probably prejudiced in judgment.

I looked for it [heavy hydrogen, deuterium] because I thought it should exist. I didn't know it would have industrial applications or be the basic for the most powerful weapon ever known [the nuclear bomb] ... I thought maybe my discovery might have the practical value of, say, neon in neon signs. [He was awarded the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering deuterium.]

I might paraphrase Churchill and say: never have I received so much for so little. [Exemplifying humility, upon accepting the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.]

I'm even going to electrolyze my urine. That'll make for a pleasant smell in the trailer. If I survive this, I'll tell people I was pissing rocket fuel.

In the vestibule of the Manchester Town Hall are placed two life-sized marble statues facing each other. One of these is that of John Dalton ... the other that of James Prescott Joule. ... Thus the honour is done to Manchester's two greatest sons—to Dalton, the founder of modern Chemistry and of the atomic theory, and the laws of chemical-combining proportions; to Joule, the founder of modern physics and the discoverer of the Law of Conservation of Energy. One gave to the world the final proof ... that in every kind of chemical change no loss of matter occurs; the other proved that in all the varied modes of physical change, no loss of energy takes place.

In deriving a body from the water type I intend to express that to this body, considered as an oxide, there corresponds a chloride, a bromide, a sulphide, a nitride, etc., susceptible of double compositions, or resulting from double decompositions, analogous to those presented by hydrochloric acid, hydrobromic acid, sulphuretted hydrogen, ammonia etc., or which give rise to the same compounds. The type is thus the unit of comparison for all the bodies which, like it, are susceptible of similar changes or result from similar changes.

In the last four days I have got the (results) given by Tantalum, Chromium, Manganese, Iron , Nickel, Cobalt and Copper ... The chief result is that ... the result for any metal (is) quite easy to guess from the results for the others. This shews that the insides of all the atoms are very much alike, and from these results it will be possible to find out something of what the insides are made up of.

In describing a protein it is now common to distinguish the primary, secondary and tertiary structures. The primary structure is simply the order, or sequence, of the amino-acid residues along the polypeptide chains. This was first determined by [Frederick] Sanger using chemical techniques for the protein insulin, and has since been elucidated for a number of peptides and, in part, for one or two other small proteins. The secondary structure is the type of folding, coiling or puckering adopted by the polypeptide chain: the a-helix structure and the pleated sheet are examples. Secondary structure has been assigned in broad outline to a number of librous proteins such as silk, keratin and collagen; but we are ignorant of the nature of the secondary structure of any globular protein. True, there is suggestive evidence, though as yet no proof, that a-helices occur in globular proteins, to an extent which is difficult to gauge quantitatively in any particular case. The tertiary structure is the way in which the folded or coiled polypeptide chains are disposed to form the protein molecule as a three-dimensional object, in space. The chemical and physical properties of a protein cannot be fully interpreted until all three levels of structure are understood, for these properties depend on the spatial relationships between the amino-acids, and these in turn depend on the tertiary and secondary structures as much as on the primary. Only X-ray diffraction methods seem capable, even in principle, of unravelling the tertiary and secondary structures. [Co-author with G. Bodo, H. M. Dintzis, R. G. Parrish, H. Wyckoff, and D. C. Phillips]

In modern society, it is not enough to be an engineer, a doctor, a chemist, a biologist, or a physicist, you must be all of them to understand why human health is failing on such a massive scale.