Polymer Chemistry Quotes

Polymer chemistry provides an excellent means of studying metathesis catalysts: miniscule catalyst loadings have the capacity to generate large amounts of polymeric material, the structure of which can provide a historical record of catalyst activity.

The science of semiconducting and metallic polymers is inherently interdisciplinary; it falls at the intersection of chemistry and physics.

All vinyl polymers may be regarded as built from monomeric units containing a tertiary carbon atom.

We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.

Polymer synthesis in the 1950s was dominated by Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta, whose discoveries of polymerization catalysts were of great importance for the development of the modem 'plastics' industry.

I was working with these very long-chain ... extended-chain polymers, where you had a lot of benzene rings in them. ... Transforming a polymer solution from a liquid to a fiber requires a process called spinning. ... We spun it and it spun beautifully. It [Kevlar] was very strong and very stiff-unlike anything we had made before. I knew that I had made a discovery. I didn't shout "Eureka!" but I was very excited, as was the whole laboratory excited, and management was excited, because we were looking for something new. Something different. And this was it.

In 1957, at the age of 18, I entered Kyoto University, which was known to be the most active institution in the research of polymer chemistry.

I've always loved plastics and rubber, and it's such a specifically unique material that you have to have the manufacturing abilities to make it.