Chemistry Quotes - page 15
I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness.
Lois Lowry
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.
Noam Chomsky
Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.
Albert Einstein
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.
Chris Langton
There is no science of sociology. Perhaps there will be, some day, when a rigorous physics gives a finished science of colloidal chemistry and that leads in turn to a complete knowledge of biology, and from there to a definitive psychology. After that we may begin to know something about sociology and politics. Sometime around the year 5000 A.D., maybe-if the human race does not commit suicide before then.
Robert A. Heinlein
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage-the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Ayn Rand
Why did the problem of air become visible..? Why were Priestley, Boyle and Black able to see the question clearly enough..? ...because they had new tools. The air pump designed by Otto von Guericke and Boyle (...in collaboration with his assistant Robert Hooke...) were essential to Priestley's lab in Leeds. ...In a way, the air pump had enabled the entire field of pneumatic chemistry in the seventeenth century... [T]he air pump allowed you to... create a vacuum, which behaved markedly differently... even though air and the absence of air were visually indistinguishable.
Joseph Priestley
Real-world data going back to the 1980s suggest that, although fewer women apply for jobs in fields such as maths, physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering, those who do apply are no less likely to be interviewed and no less likely to be offered the job. On the contrary, they are generally more likely to be.
Steve Stewart-Williams
One example of these kinds of statistics comes from Evolution: Possible or Impossible by James F. Coppedge [who] cites an article by Ulric Jelinek ... which claims that the odds are 1 in 10^243 against "two thousand atoms" (the size of one particular protein molecule) ending up in precisely that particular order "by accident." Where did Jelenik get that figure? From Pierre Lecompte du Nouy... who in turn got it from Charles-Eugene Guye, a physicist who died in 1942. Guye had merely calculated the odds of these atoms lining up by accident if "a volume" of atoms the size of the Earth were "shaken at the speed of light," failing to factor in laws of chemistry, which create preferences for the formation and behavior of molecules, and ignoring that there are millions if not billions of different possible proteins. This calculation comes to Coppedge third-hand, and is now outdated (it was calculated before 1942, even before the discovery of DNA).
Pierre Lecomte du Noüy
Meanwhile, fierce competition among global self-prop systems will have led to such drastic and rapid alterations in the Earth's climate, the composition of its atmosphere, the chemistry of its oceans, and so forth, that the effect on the biosphere will be devastating. ... We will argue that if the development of the technological world-system is allowed to proceed to its logical conclusion, then in all probability the Earth will be left a dead planet-a planet on which nothing will remain alive except, maybe, some of the simplest organisms-certain bacteria, algae, etc.-that are capable of surviving under extreme conditions.
Theodore Kaczynski
I think time will show that the new approach, emphasizing emergent "macro" control, is equally valid in all the physical sciences, and that the behavioral and cognitive disciplines are leading the way to a more valid framework for all science. Although the theoretic changes make little difference in physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and so on, they are crucial for the behavioral, social, and human sciences. They don't change the analytic, reductive methodology, just the interpretations and conclusions. There seems little to lose, and much to gain.
Roger Wolcott Sperry
Black's celebrated thesis ...gained for him not merely the degree of Doctor of Medicine, but also brought his name before every "philosopher" in Europe and America as that of a man who had made a discovery of more fundamental influence on the progress of Chemistry than any which had previously been described.
Joseph Black
Black realized that when chalk or marble was heated, a gas which he called fixed air was released. He was able to collect the gas, which we know as carbon dioxide, and to study its properties. He was also able to show that carbon dioxide was a normal constituent of the air because quicklime was changed into ordinary chalk, albeit tardily, by exposure to air. This was the first atmospheric gas to be isolated and described. The discovery heralded the dawn of a new era in chemical investigation, and so Black is often given the title-Father of Pneumatic Chemistry.
Joseph Black
"That's how me and Dilla always worked, we had a crazy chemistry. We would just sit there cracking jokes, you know, smoking, he got the headphones on. He'd come up with a beat in like 10 minutes, take the headphones off, the beat's banging through the speakers. Load it up, make sure the mic's on, show me where to press play, where to stop at, he'd press record and go upstairs, I'd lay the verse, he'd come back down like done and done. Load the next one up, he'd talk on the phone, I'd lay another song. That's just how we worked." ~ Phat Kat (on recording the Dedication to the Suckers EP in one night)
J Dilla
