William Henry Bragg Quotes

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

I had a great chemistry teacher and found it really interesting to learn how things are made up and how they work.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the experimental proof for the interdependence of the composition and properties of chemical compounds resulted in the theory that they are mutually related, so that like composition governs like properties, and conversely.

Chemistry is a class you take in high school or college, where you figure out two plus two is 10, or something.

Chemistry was always my weakest subject in high school and college.

I was glad I liked chemistry.

Chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings.

The discovery of various phenomena has led to a recognition of the fact that the chemical atom is an individual which again is itself made up of several units into a selfcontained whole.

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

About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.

Chemists have always been in the business of taking atoms and putting them together with other atoms with precisely defined connections.

Over the years, humans have managed to incorporate nearly every element, light and weighty, common and obscure, into our daily lives. And given how small atoms are and how many of them there are all around us, it's almost certain that your body has at least brushed against an atom of every single natural element on the periodic table.

During the course of my research, I had had occasion to examine not only simple compounds, salts and oxides, but also a great number of minerals.

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

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.

But I must confess I am jealous of the term atom; for though it is very easy to talk of atoms, it is very difficult to form a clear idea of their nature, especially when compounded bodies are under consideration.

The magnitude of the atomic weight determines the character of the element, just as the magnitude of the molecule determines the character of a compound body.

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.

Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth - nothing apart from their so-called attributes.

Moreover, the abundance of chemical compounds and their importance in daily life hindered the chemist from investigating the question, in what does the individuality of the atoms of different elements consist.

You have to look at how chemistry develops.

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.

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.

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.