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John Desmond Bernal

John Desmond Bernal Quotes

Physicist

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Famous John Desmond Bernal Quotes

“In fact, we will have to give up taking things for granted, even the apparently simple things. We have to learn to understand nature and not merely to observe it and endure what it imposes on us. Stupidity, from being an amiable individual defect, has become a social crime.”

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Book:The origin of life
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“Pauling was shocked by the freedom with which the X-ray crystallographers of the time, including particularly Astbury, played with the intimate chemical structure of their models. They seemed to think that if the atoms were arranged in the right order and about the right distance apart, that was all that mattered, that no further restrictions need to be put on them.”

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Author:John Desmond Bernal
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“We academic scientists move within a certain sphere, we can go on being useless up to a point, in the confidence that sooner or later some use will be found for our studies. The mathematician, of course, prides himself on being totally useless, but usually turns out to be the most useful of the lot. He finds the solution but he is not interested in what the problem is: sooner or later, someone will find the problem to which his solution is the answer.”

UseProblemMovingScienceCertainTurnsCoursesFoundAnswersStudyPrideGoes OnSolutionsScientistUselessSpheresAcademicNot InterestedSooner Or LaterMathematician
Author:John Desmond Bernal
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“So many of the chemical reactions occurring in living systems have been shown to be catalytic processes occurring isothermally on the surface of specific proteins, referred to as enzymes, that it seems fairly safe to assume that all are of this nature and that the proteins are the necessary basis for carrying out the processes that we call life.”

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Author:John Desmond Bernal
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