Quotes About Chemistry

What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous.

Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary drugstore—and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life.

Scheele independently discovered eight elements—chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen—but received credit for none of them in his lifetime. He had an unfortunate habit of tasting every substance he worked with, as a way of familiarizing himself with its properties, and eventually the practice caught up with him.

Of every 200 atoms in your body, 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen, and just 19 are carbon32.fn3

The next time you spray on Chanel No. 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster.

By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn't exist.

The confusion over the aluminum/aluminium spelling arose because of some uncharacteristic indecisiveness on Davy's part. When he first isolated the element in 1808, he called it alumium. For some reason he thought better of that and changed it to aluminum four years later. Americans dutifully adopted the new term, but many British users disliked aluminum, pointing out that it disrupted the -ium pattern established by sodium, calcium, and strontium, so they added a vowel and syllable.

The basic working arrangement of atoms is the molecule (from the Latin for "little mass").

The Murchison meteorite was found to be 4.5 billion years old, and it was studded with amino acids—seventy-four types in all, eight of which are involved in the formation of earthly proteins.

The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil.

As Davies puts it, "If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?

Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary drugstore—and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you

if you make monomers wet they don't turn into polymers—except when creating life on the Earth.

The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.

Mendeleyev was said to have modelled the table on the card game solitaire.

The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.

Not incidentally, lead's symbol is Pb, for the Latin plumbum, the source word for our modern plumbing.) The Romans also flavored their wine with lead, which may be part of the reason they are not the

DNA is, as it were, especially unalive. It is "among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world

The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium28, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.

dihydrogen oxide

Was das Leben sonst auch sein mag, auf der Ebene der Chemie ist es erstaunlich profan: Kohlenstoff, Wasserstoff, Sauerstoff und Stickstoff, ein wenig Calcium, ein Schuss Schwefel, eine kleine Prise von ein paar anderen ganz gewöhnlichen Elementen - nichts, was man nicht in jeder normalen Apotheke finden würde -, das ist alles, was man braucht. Das einzig Besondere an den Atomen, die Sie bilden, besteht darin, dass sie Sie bilden. Und das ist natürlich das Wunder des Lebens.

COMPLICATED molecules. About a fifth of our body weight is made up of them. In simplest terms, a protein is a chain of amino acids. About a million different proteins have been identified so far, and nobody knows how many more are to be found. They are all made from just twenty amino acids

The most expensive of all was verdigris, which was made by hanging copper strips over a vat of horse dung and vinegar and then scraping off the oxidized copper that resulted. It is the same process that turns copper domes and statues green – just quicker and more commercial – and it made 'the delicatest Grass-green in the world', as one eighteenth-century admirer enthused. A room painted in verdigris always produced an appreciative 'ah' in visitors.

Tunney has all the makings of a hero – he was clean living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-looking – but, like Lou Gehrig, he lacked the chemistry that stirred affection.