John Cornforth Quotes

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

Chemistry is a hard thing. I don't think you can force it, and it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have great chemistry outside of work. It's just something that sparks on screen or doesn't.

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.

There's nothing colder than chemistry.

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.

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.

Chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings.

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.

I think chemists always think they know more than they know, because nature has a lot of possible pathways it can try.

Knowing without seeing is at the heart of chemistry.

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

Much of my work in biology has been driven by my early training in chemistry. When studying a new chemical compound, the first and most important thing is to determine its detailed molecular structure.

Organic compounds exist in which a hydrogen atom, joined to the carbon, acquires acid properties as a result of the proximity of certain functional groupings.

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

As soon as we can wrest from Nature the secret of the internal structure of the compounds produced by her, chemical science can then even surpass Nature by producing compounds as variations of the natural ones, which the living cell is unable to construct.

Many transition states have a well-defined preferred geometrical requirement.

The distinction between the old and the new formulations consisting in the incorporation of the concept of the rate of chemical reactions is so great that it immediately asserted itself in the objective development of catalysis.

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

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.

The essential principles of the three-dimensional structure of organic molecules had been correctly formulated by the first Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Jacobus van't Hoff, as early as 1874.

In the lab, we're discovering that nature can do chemistry we never dreamed was possible.

Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.

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

I have been so electrically occupied of late that I feel as if hungry for a little chemistry: but then the conviction crosses my mind that these things hang together under one law & that the more haste we make onwards each in his own path the sooner we shall arrive, and meet each other, at that state of knowledge of natural causes from which all varieties of effects may be understood & enjoyed.