Posts from an inorganic chemistry enthusiast!
"Fritz Haber is often this scapegoat...Most of us are also teachers. We have to do better than the usual, traditional technical presentation of the ammonia synthesis, invoking it as a fine illustration of Le Chatelier's Principle. We have to talk also about Haber, the historical figure and the person. His choices and agony are a part of us."
"researchers do not act independently but rather as communities of scholars who constantly check and approve one another's work."
"[Paul Samuelson] Knowledge advances, funeral by funeral."
"Science is about what is, not what ought to be."
"Before I was ten, I understood that in the United States foreigners are not foreign."
"Nationalism has little to contribute today except further suffering."
"Ignore teasing."
"...before the 1880s, science played almost no role in the advances of technology...Chemistry was the first science to undergo a merger with technology, and the first technology affected was dyemaking."
"He [Heisenberg] complained that physics had ceased to develop; there was hardly anything interesting left to do."
"Bohr:Where we find a paradox, we find something of real interest."
"Bohr said that to be properly understood, one should not lecture in his native tongue."
"The lesson is that the correct theory applied to the wrong data is better than no theory applied to correct measurements."
"[Bohr] Opennes is the basic condition necessary for science."
" Johnny [von Neumann] was the Euclid of quantum mechanics."
"The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate...Hydrogen bombs will not produce themselves."
"Science historically had moved forward because of openness."
"I find the idea of civil disobedience in a democracy wrong."
"Fermi and I both lacked formal religious beliefs"
"I believe that if a mentally superhuman race ever develops, its members will resemble Johnny von Neumann."
"I had begun teaching Paul[his son] relativity theory when he was five or six...he understood the theory of relativity by the time he was twelve."
[about Plato's Republic]" I was shocked that a book advocating a centralized government administered from above, much on the lines of totalitarianism, was so highly recommended to young people."
