Primo Levi Quotes

Knowing without seeing is at the heart of chemistry.

There's nothing colder than chemistry.

Chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings.

I do not know if I am mistaken, but it seems that one can obtain more truths, important to Humanity, from Chemistry than from any other Science.

I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

I was also interested in formulating the path of chemical reactions.

But the nature of my main work in chemistry can be better represented by more than 280 English publications, of which roughly 200 concern the theory of chemical reactions and related subjects.

Molecules A and B meet, marry, and beget the species. This takes place in one-millionth of a billionth of a second. This is a fundamental process in nature, and the world was looking for a way to be able to see the process. But many brilliant people said it couldn't be done.

If you had to sum up chemistry in one sentence, it might be this: Atoms need to have full shells of electrons to feel satisfied, and different elements steal, shed, or borrow different numbers of electrons to achieve a full shell.

I do not want chemistry to degenerate into a religion; I do not want the chemist to believe in the existence of atoms as the Christian believes in the existence of Christ in the communion wafer.

We all teach ... the chemistry of Lavoisier and Gay-Lussac.

You've got a chemistry class; I want a piece of your mind; You don't know what you started when you mixed it up with mine.

Chemistry is yet, indeed, a mere embryon. Its principles are contested; experiments seem contradictory; their subjects are so minute as to escape our senses; and their result too fallacious to satisfy the mind. It is probably an age too soon to propose the establishment of a system.

Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry.

By recognizing that the chemical atom is composed of single separable electric quanta, humanity has taken a great step forward in the investigation of the natural world.

Elements which are similar as regards their chemical properties have atomic weights which are either of nearly the same value (eg. Pt, Ir, Os) or which increase regularly (eg. K, Ru, Cs).

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.

Molecular chemistry, the chemistry of the covalent bond, is concerned with uncovering and mastering the rules that govern the structures, properties and transformations of molecular species.

With this in mind, for some twenty years I have set myself as my particular task the experimental investigation of the connexion between change in the structure and change in the spectra of chemical atoms.

My special fascination has been to understand better the world of chemistry and its complexities.

I started my scientific work by putting forward a hypothesis on the arrangement of atoms in nitrogen-containing molecules.

As early as 1912, we worked on the problem of the hydrogenation of organic substances with the aid of highly compressed hydrogen.

As soon as we touch the complex processes that go on in a living thing, be it plant or animal, we are at once forced to use the methods of this science [Chemistry / Physics]. No longer will the microscope, the kymograph, the scalpel avail for the complete solution of the problem…. the investigator must associate himself with those who have labored in fields where molecules and atoms, rather than multicellular tissues or even unicellular organisms, are the units of study.