467 Quotes About Chemistry

What do you call it when you end up right where you’re supposed to be?” Foster simply replies, “The perfect chemistry.

One may feel inclined to say that Thomson, the father, was awarded the Nobel Prize for having shown that electron is a particle, and Thomson, the son, for having shown that electron is a wave.

The dogma of the impossibility of determining the atomic constitution of substances, which until recently was advocated with such fervor by the most able chemists, is beginning to be abandoned and forgotten; and one can predict that the day is not far in the future when a sufficient collection of facts will permit determination of the internal architecture of molecules. A series of experiments directed toward such a goal is the object of this paper.

Planck...and Bohr...have invented systems containing electrons of which the motion produces no effect upon external charges...[N]ot only [is this] inconsistent with the accepted laws of electromagnetism, but I may add, is logically objectionable, for that state of motion which produces no physical effect whatsoever may better be called a state of rest.

Pauling was shocked by the freedom with which the X-ray crystallographers of the time, including particularly Astbury, played with the intimate chemical structure of their models. They seemed to think that if the atoms were arranged in the right order and about the right distance apart, that was all that mattered, that no further restrictions need to be put on them.

Svante Arrhenius, recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry (1903), was a declared atheist and the author of The Evolution of the Worlds and other works on cosmic physics.

We are at the dawn of a new era, the era of 'molecular biology' as I like to call it, and there is an urgency about the need for more intensive application of physics and chemistry, and specially of structure analysis, that is still not sufficiently appreciated.

Chemistry is the dirty part of physics.

In the progressive growth of astronomy, physics or mechanical science was developed, and when this had been, to a certain degree, successfully cultivated, it gave birth to the science of chemistry.