Kenichi Fukui Quotes

The detailed geometry of the coenzyme molecule as a whole is fascinating in its complexity.

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.

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.

Even in the world of molecules the civilising influence of modest restraints is a cause for rejoicing.

I tell my students to try to know molecules, so well that when they have some question involving molecules, they can ask themselves, What would I do if I were that molecule?

One day I discovered that one could get the barrier to internal rotation in ethane approximately right using this method. This was the beginning of my work on organic molecules.

People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.

It does not seem, however, that organic chemists were much worried about barriers to rotation in organic molecules in general at that time because there was no technique available to demonstrate the phenomenon experimentally.

It turns out all molecular and biological systems have speeds of the atoms move inside them; the fastest possible speeds are determined by their molecular vibrations, and this speed is about a kilometre per second.

The chemist, whose science is immediately concerned with the combinations of atoms, has rarely found it necessary to discuss their shapes, and gives them no particular forms in his diagrams. That does not mean that the shapes are unimportant, but rather that the older methods could not define them.

We can track and see the production of single molecules, trace them and see how they assemble into structures.

The more the relationships of the nitrogen-rich substances to the cell nucleus were recognized, the more the question of the arrangement of the nitrogen and carbon atoms in the molecule came to stand out.

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.

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.

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

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

Even when they are saturated in the sense of the older theory of valence, the elementary atoms still possess sufficient chemical affinity to bind other seemingly also saturated atoms and groups of atoms, under generation of clearly defined atomic bonds.

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.

The main thread of my work is structure property relations and materials. If you have certain atoms, why do they attract each other? Why do they make compounds? Why do they do what they do?

The problem is how do molecules react. Because if you want to transform a molecule into something useful or something you're interested in, it helps a lot to understand the structure. That means you can explore much more complicated systems, much more complicated reactions.

The visible and near-ultraviolet emission spectrum of the CH radical has been known ever since spectra of an ordinary Bunsen burner have been taken.

I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company. I tell my students to try to know molecules, so well that when they have some question involving molecules, they can ask themselves, What would I do if I were that molecule? I tell them, Try to feel like a molecule; and if you work hard, who knows? Some day you may get to feel like a big molecule!

Life is a relationship among molecules and not a property of any molecule.

Not every collision, not every punctilious trajectory by which billiard-ball complexes arrive at their calculable meeting places lead to reaction. ... Men (and women) are not as different from molecules as they think.

The most common and most important result of them is that the nature and size of the effect on corresponding series of different elements are largely an expression of the peculiarity of their atomic structure - or, at least, of the structure of the surface.