Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside.

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.

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.

Chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings.

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

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.

Chemistry is the science of atoms. Elaborating on Democritus' idea, chemists learn how atoms stick or don't stick together, thus forming molecules.

It's an electrical network, isn't it? It's molecules in space... and they're linked to each other electrically. Which is to say, one end of a soap molecule is attracted to a nearby water molecule electrically. The bubble is this network. The whole thing is inter-dependent.

And there must be simple substances, because there are compounds; for the compound is nothing but a collection or aggregatum of simples.

Chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone.

The principal reason it transforms is that water is a collection of molecules, H2O, every child learns that.And that bond has the property that as the bonds get stronger when you cool water, the ice expands.

Chemistry on film is like chemistry in real life, it's either there or it isn't.

I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule.

It's all about chemistry. Talent alone won't get it done.

The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches.

It has been recognized that hydrogen bonds restrain protein molecules to their native configurations, and I believe that as the methods of structural chemistry are further applied to physiological problems it will be found that the significance of the hydrogen bond for physiology is greater than that of any other single structural feature.

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

What chemists took from Dalton was not new experimental laws but a new way of practicing chemistry (he himself called it the 'new system of chemical philosophy'), and this proved so rapidly fruitful that only a few of the older chemists in France and Britain were able to resist it.

I do not know whether you are fond of chemical reading. There are some things in this science worth reading.

Chemistry is like an indefinable thing. When it comes to people playing your best friend or your parents or anything like that, there's always different kind of element to chemistry.

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.

Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects.