Peter Atkins Quotes

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Taking care of yourself means finding a balance that works for you, then having the discipline to maintain that balance.

If the elements are the alphabets of chemistry, then the compounds are its plays, its poems, and its novels.

The emergence of consciousness, like the unfolding of a leaf, relies upon restraint.

We are children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.

Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. - Plato

With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die. - Abraham Lincoln

The lesson to me is that you can focus on something going well, or something beautiful, or something interesting -- even amidst terrible times.

When one door closes, another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.

Something else," he told Atkins. He stood with his nose an inch away from the sergeant's, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his coat. "What does Lucifer mean?" "Light Bearer." "And what is the stuff of the universe?" "Energy." "What is energy's commonest form?" "Light." "I know." And with that, the detective walked away, listing slowly through the squad room and down the stairs. He didn't come back.

Whereas chemistry reaches down into physics for its explanations (and through physics further down into mathematics for its quantitative formulation), it reaches upwards into biology for many of its most extraordinary applications. That

Focusing on what matters means saying no to things that don’t matter. Otherwise, your life becomes cluttered with distractions.

Life, at root, is molecular bumbling.

The trick is people who are most productive tend to say no to things that are unimportant to them and focus on what they believe matters.

All change...arises from an underlying collapse into chaos...what may appear to us to be motive and purpose is in fact ultimately motiveless, purposeless decay.

Proceeding when there are obvious issues is a dumb thing to do. Even if it’s inconvenient or painful, I’ve learned, I’m better off doing nothing when the only available choice has glaring issues.

When asked by Rod Liddle in the documentary The Trouble with Atheism "Give me your views on the existence, or otherwise, of God",Peter Atkins replied "Well it's fairly straightforward: there isn't one. And there's no evidence for one, no reason to believe that there is one, and so I don't believe that there is one. And I think that it is rather foolish that people do think that there is one.

I’ve found you can choose to let all the things that go wrong in life depress you. Or, you can accept that things will go wrong, try to laugh, and then look at what you can do. There’s a Japanese proverb that gets right to the point: We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

The chemist Peter Atkins correctly observed, “Natural selection was a revolution and a stepping-stone to fame; so was relativity, and so was quantum theory. The sheer thrill of discovery is the spur to greater effort. All young scientists aspire to revolution.” The same can’t be said for theologians (Martin Luther is a rare exception), who either bear their heresies in silence or aspire only to trivial reinterpretations of church doctrine.

Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion? ...Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can.

1. Create space. 2. Try not to worry. 3. Don't do really dumb things. 4. Build character and make friends. 5. Care for yourself and others. 6. Laugh. 7. Do what you love. 8. Embrace change. 9. Learn from experience. 10. Have dreams and work towards them. 11. Epilogue. 12. Afterword - the world beyond us. 13. Acknowledgements.

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In other words, just because something happened once doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen again in the same way.

Life, at root, is molecular bumbling.

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with. -- Mark Twain

Four basic principle 1. Do what you think is right 2. Don’t follow other people blindly 3. Be honest and keep your word 4. Admit your mistakes

denial – is common. Most of us ignore reality in some facet of our lives. It’s often easier to believe things will somehow solve themselves,

As Winston Churchill said: Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

This matters. Real friends - people you trust, respect, laugh with, and can rely on - are a vitally important part of life. No matter how much wealth or fame you accumulate, if you don’t have true friends it’s unlikely you’ll be happy. Sadly I know too many people who have achieved their material goals, but have no friends. As the expression goes: greed is a hole you can never fill

To allow yourself time to think, there are many non- technological tricks to managing information. All of them require you to make choices to focus your energy. I like to set aside blocks of time for specific activities - even to read or chat.

see also positrons; virtual particles Aristotle, 172–73 Atkins, Peter, 191 baryons, 76 Big Bang, xvii, 95, 107, 150, 173, 189 CMBR left from, see cosmic microwave background radiation dating of, 3, 15–16, 77, 87 density of protons and neutrons in,

Of course, activity by itself doesn’t equal accomplishment, and certainly not success -- being busy just means being busy. I know many people who work super hard to fill up the spaces in their lives, so they won’t have to think. A wise colleague calls this “numbing out”. They may accomplish their goals, but they’re unlikely to be fulfilled or do truly creative work. I know other people who fill their free time with meaningless activities. They’re also busy, but they neither achieve much, nor are they satisfied.

How many movies have you seen where the hero or heroine quits a job they hate to pursue their life dreams? These movies wouldn’t be made, and they wouldn’t resonate with so many people, if they didn’t contain an important desire that most people deny themselves.

Laugh. We’re all going to be dead anyway some day. So while you should try your hardest to make the most of your life, when something funny happens, when you make a mistake, or even (and perhaps especially) when bad things happen, it’s easier if you can laugh about yourself and the world.

I try to put things into two buckets: one I can do something about and one I can’t. The things I can’t do anything about, I try to ignore. There’s no use, for example, being jealous of other people’s success or good luck; it won’t make me any happier. Nor is there any upside in worrying about a bad situation in which I find myself. There is, however, a lot to be gained from considering how I can move to a better place.

When we encounter tiny groups of atoms, interesting questions and special rules come into play. Take water, for instance: what is the smallest possible ice cube? It has been discovered that you need at least 275 water molecules in a cluster before it can show ice-like properties, with about 475 molecules before it becomes truly ice. That is a cube with about eight H2O molecules along each edge. The importance of this kind of knowledge is that it helps us model the process of cloud formation in the atmosphere as well as understand how liquids freeze.

Know yourself. To be happy, you need to pay attention to who you are, what you want, and how you feel, versus staying busy just doing ’stuff,’or doing what other people want or expect you to do. This requires both self awareness and introspection: if you pay attention to how you feel, what you like and what you want (as well as what makes you feel sad, angry, fearful and confused), the world is likely to look quite different. Many people are afraid of being introspective because they feel vulnerable. But without a willingness to open up, you won’t understand yourself and you can’t ultimately be truly happy.

One of the most powerful tools for discovering structure is ‘X-ray diffraction’ or, because it is always applied to crystals of the substance of interest, ‘X-ray crystallography’. The technique has been a gushing fountain of Nobel prizes, starting with Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays (awarded in 1901, the first physics prize), then William and his son Laurence Bragg in 1915, Peter Debye in 1936, and continuing with Dorothy Hodgkin (1964), and culminating with Maurice Wilkins (but not Rosalind Franklin) in 1962, which provided the foundation of James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s formulation of the double-helix structure of DNA, with all its huge implications for understanding inheritance, tackling disease, and capturing criminals (a prize shared with Wilkins in 1962). If there is one technique that is responsible for blending biology into chemistry, then this is it. Another striking feature of this list is that the prize has been awarded in all three scientific categories: chemistry, physics, and physiology and medicine, such is the range of the technique and the illumination it has brought.

Perhaps nowhere is modern chemistry more important than in the development of new drugs to fight disease, ameliorate pain, and enhance the experience of life. Genomics, the identification of genes and their complex interplay in governing the production of proteins, is central to current and future advances in pharmacogenomics, the study of how genetic information modifies an individual's response to drugs and offering the prospect of personalized medicine, where a cocktail of drugs is tailored to an individual's genetic composition. Even more elaborate than genomics is proteomics, the study of an organism's entire complement of proteins, the entities that lie at the workface of life and where most drugs act. Here computational chemistry is in essential alliance with medical chemistry, for if a protein implicated in a disease can be identified, and it is desired to terminate its action, then computer modelling of possible molecules that can invade and block its active site is the first step in rational drug discovery. This too is another route to the efficiencies and effectiveness of personalized medicine.

Thermodynamics, like much of the rest of science, takes terms with an everyday meaning and sharpens them—some would say, hijacks them—so that they take on an exact and unambiguous meaning. We shall see that happening throughout this introduction to thermodynamics. It starts as soon as we enter its doors. The part of the universe that is at the centre of attention in thermodynamics is called the system. A system may be a block of iron, a beaker of water, an engine, a human body. It may even be a circumscribed part of each of those entities. The rest of the universe is called the surroundings. The surroundings are where we stand to make observations on the system and infer its properties. Quite often, the actual surroundings consist of a water bath maintained at constant temperature, but that is a more controllable approximation to the true surroundings, the rest of the world. The system and its surroundings jointly make up the universe. Whereas for us the universe is everything, for a less profligate thermodynamicist it might consist of a beaker of water (the system) immersed in a water bath (the surroundings).

This makes a mockery of real science, and its consequences are invariably ridiculous. Quite a few otherwise intelligent men and women take it as an established principle that we can know as true only what can be verified by empirical methods of experimentation and observation. This is, for one thing, a notoriously self-refuting claim, inasmuch as it cannot itself be demonstrated to be true by any application of empirical method. More to the point, though, it is transparent nonsense: most of the things we know to be true, often quite indubitably, do not fall within the realm of what can be tested by empirical methods; they are by their nature episodic, experiential, local, personal, intuitive, or purely logical. The sciences concern certain facts as organized by certain theories, and certain theories as constrained by certain facts; they accumulate evidence and enucleate hypotheses within very strictly limited paradigms; but they do not provide proofs of where reality begins or ends, or of what the dimensions of truth are. They cannot even establish their own working premises—the real existence of the phenomenal world, the power of the human intellect accurately to reflect that reality, the perfect lawfulness of nature, its interpretability, its mathematical regularity, and so forth—and should not seek to do so, but should confine themselves to the truths to which their methods give them access. They should also recognize what the boundaries of the scientific rescript are. There are, in fact, truths of reason that are far surer than even the most amply supported findings of empirical science because such truths are not, as those findings must always be, susceptible of later theoretical revision; and then there are truths of mathematics that are subject to proof in the most proper sense and so are more irrefutable still. And there is no one single discourse of truth as such, no single path to the knowledge of reality, no single method that can exhaustively define what knowledge is, no useful answers whose range has not been limited in advance by the kind of questions that prompted them. The failure to realize this can lead only to delusions of the kind expressed in, for example, G. G. Simpson’s self-parodying assertion that all attempts to define the meaning of life or the nature of humanity made before 1859 are now entirely worthless, or in Peter Atkins’s ebulliently absurd claims that modern science can “deal with every aspect of existence” and that it has in fact “never encountered a barrier.” Not only do sentiments of this sort verge upon the deranged, they are nothing less than violent assaults upon the true dignity of science (which lies entirely in its severely self-limiting rigor).

Metal atoms are bound together by metallic bonding. That is not just a tautology. The clue to its nature is the fact that all the metals lie towards the left-hand side of the Periodic Table where, as we have seen, the atoms of the elements have only a few electrons in their outermost cloud layers and which are readily lost. To envisage metallic bonding, think of all these outermost electrons as slipping off the parent atom and congregating in a sea that pervades the whole slab of atoms. The cations that are left behind lie in this sea and interact favourably with it. As a result, all the cations are bound together in a solid mass. That mass is malleable because, like an actual sea, it can respond readily to a shift in the positions of the cations in the mass when they are struck by a hammer. The electrons also allow the metal to be drawn out into a wire, by responding immediately to the relocation of the cations. As the electrons in the sea are not pinned down to particular atoms, they are mobile and can migrate through the solid in response to an electric field. Metals are lustrous because the electrons of the sea can respond to the shaking caused by the electric field of an incident ray of light, and that oscillation of the sea in turn generates light that we perceive as reflection. When we gaze into the metal coating of a mirror, we are watching the waves in the metal’s electron sea.

In broad terms, the Second Law asserts that things get worse. A bit more specifically, it acknowledges that matter and energy tend to disperse in disorder. Left to itself, matter crumbles and energy spreads. The chaotic motion of molecules of a gas results in them spreading through the container the gas occupies. The vigorous jostling of atoms in a hot lump of metal jostles the atoms in its cooler surroundings, the energy spreads away, and the metal cools. That’s all there is to natural change: spreading in disorder. The astonishing thing, though, is that this natural spreading can result in the emergence of exquisite form. If the spreading is captured in an engine, then bricks may be hoisted to build a cathedral. If the spreading occurs in a seed, then molecules may be hoisted to build an orchid. If the spreading occurs in your body, then random electrical and molecular currents in your brain may be organized into an opinion. The spreading of matter and energy is the root of all change. Wherever change occurs, be it corrosion, corruption, growth, decay, flowering, artistic creation, exquisite creation, understanding, reproduction, cancer, fun, accident, quiet or boisterous enjoyment, travel, or just simple pointless motion it is an outward manifestation of this inner spring, the purposeless spreading of matter and energy in ever greater disorder. Like it or not, purposeless decay into disorder is the spring of all change, even when that change is exquisite or results in seemingly purposeful action.

A number of people I know claim to be great multi-taskers. The brain, however, doesn’t work that way; instead it focuses on one activity at a time. If you switch back and forth between multiple tasks, your brain works more slowly than it would if you focused on each activity for a period of time. Albert Einstein said: It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

I once had a smart boss who told me if I wanted to do my best work, I needed to do fewer things, and really focus on what mattered. That was great advice. Many people confuse want to with have to. In other words, just because someone else wants you to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it. You can’t get more time, so how you spend the time you have is critical. Focusing on what matters means saying no to things that don’t matter. Otherwise, your life becomes cluttered with distractions.

You need to understand your values and your priorities.

If you can get paid to do what you perceive as play, you have a great job.

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. - Thomas Jefferson

As Benjamin Franklin wrote: “You may delay, but time will not”.

activity by itself doesn’t equal accomplishment, and certainly not success

If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep. -Dale Carnegie

If you live your life authentically, keep your word, admit mistakes, and admit what you don’t know, you’ll find people will trust you more over time, and you’ll become wiser too.

They’re incredibly well prepared in their fields -- they become masters of their domains by practicing for many years, day after day. They spend time deeply focused on solving a key problem or key set of problems, no matter the obstacles. They allow themselves to step away from the problem(s) on which they’re focused, so that insights can come to them in activities such as walking, or looking out on a beautiful scene. To get great insights absolutely requires hard work, but it also requires space. This is the case because the human mind is not a linear machine. If you don’t put in the required effort, you won’t be capable of generating good ideas; you won’t understand the subject matter. But if you don’t give yourself space from the problems on which you are working, you likely will be so worn

When I was growing up, someone told me to live as if I was going to die in ten years and had no immediate financial needs. That’s great advice. If you can do that, you'll be happier and more successful.

Ideally, you want a job you’d do even if you weren’t paid to do it. That’s not an economic reality for most of us, but it’s the right goal to shoot for. If you can get paid to do what you perceive as play, you have a great job.

If you focus on what other people expect of you, you may impress your friends, family and colleagues, but it’s unlikely you’ll be satisfied with yourself over the long term.

Remember: take small steps. They work. Big steps often don’t. Over time, small steps add up, and you end up in a different place.

Albert Einstein said: It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer. Most of us do the opposite -- with predictable results.

Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. - Plato

But this is because these ideas were not new anyway: the claim that the universe created itself alone — contrary to all logic or evidence — is not uncommon among atheist thinkers who are trapped in the corner of the Big Bang. Peter Atkins151 — a well-known popularizer of atheist science — wrote in his book Creation Revisited that “space-time generates its own dust in the process of its self-assembly,”152 and if you can’t understand what this sentence means, don’t worry; there are well-founded suspicions that neither does Mr. Atkins. In fact, this proposition was selected to accompany the definition of “nonsense” in some dictionaries.

Without chorophyll, the world would be a damp warm rock instead of the softly green haven of life that we know, for chlorphyll holds its magnesium eye to the sun and captures the energy of sunlight, in the first step of photosynthesis. For reasons we shall explore, magnesium has exactly the right features to make this process possible. Had the kingdom lacked this element, chlorophyll;’s eye would have been blind, phtosynthesis would not take place, and life as we know it would not exist.

A lot of apparently ’successful’ people believe they should delay enjoying life until later. First they work incredibly hard to get into the ’right’ schools; then they work even harder to get a coveted job; and then they work harder still for years to get to a certain position, or make a certain amount of money. The net of this whole adventure is that frequently it’s not until late in life, when a person’s health may be going, and a lot of their life is behind them, that they stop to think about what they want. And, by then, there may not be much they can do about it. They can't recover the time. And many people don’t even stop to think.

Oliver Wendell Holmes noted: Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

Warren Buffett refers to Rose Blumkin, a woman who escaped the Nazis before immigrating to America and founding Nebraska Furniture Mart, as having the ultimate standard for friendship. Ms. Blumkin apparently said she had a hard time making friends. She would ask herself: if the Nazis were to return, would a particular person hide her?

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with.

have little doubt you’ll feel better if you have chosen to give something back. Our time on earth is limited, but you can extend your influence by helping

We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

so

None of these quotes are by me. Except this one. (All the others are by noted chemist and atheist Peter Atkins - or, as I like to call him, The Other Peter Atkins. I don't know how they got here. I'd say it was evidence of God's sense of humor, but I don't want to offend The Other Peter Atkins.)

Further Reading Atwood, Kathryn. Women Heroes of World War II (Chicago Review Press, 2011). Copeland, Jack. Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Code-Breaking Computers (Oxford University Press, 2010). Cragon, Harvey. From Fish to Colossus: How the German Lorenz Cipher was Broken at Bletchley Park (Cragon Books, 2003). Edsel, Robert. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (Hachette Book Group, 2009). Eisner, Peter. The Freedom Line (William Morrow, 2004). Helm, Sarah. A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (Hachette UK Book Group, 2005). Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma (Random House UK, 2014). Mazzeo, Tilar. The Hotel on Place Vendôme: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris (HarperCollins, 2015). Mulley, Clare. The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (St. Martin’s Press, 2012). O’Keefe, David. One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe (Knopf Canada, 2013). Pearson, Judith. The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Ronald, Susan. Hitler’s Art Thief (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). Rosbottom, Ronald. When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation 1940–1944 (Hachette Book Group, 2014). Sebba, Anne. Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation (St. Martin’s Press, 2016). Stevenson, William. Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (Arcade Publishing, 2007). Vaughan, Hal. Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War (Random House, Inc., 2011). Witherington Cornioley, Pearl; edited by Atwood, Kathryn. Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent (Chicago Review Press, 2015). From the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee/Target Intelligence Committee (TICOM) Archives. NW32823—Demonstration of Kesselring’s “Fish Train” (TICOM/M-5, July 8, 1945).

the biggest mistake women make is they assume they can change men.

Through Boltzmann's eyes we can n ow see that in every case the direction of spontaneous change, the 'arrow of time', is the direction in which disorder is increasing. The universe is simply crumbling, but such is the interconnectedness of events that the crumbling generates local artefacts of great complexity, such as you and me.

Assuming your basic life needs are being met, you can choose to be happy if you want -- even when you make mistakes, or are in the middle of some pretty awful circumstances. If, however, you’re the sort of person who chooses to be unhappy, or filled with anxiety, chances are you’ll probably succeed with that as well. In thinking about this, I keep Mark Twain in mind: The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

That collapse gives an impulse to what we think of as the vacuum that surrounds the atom, and the impulse generates a pulse of light, a photon. The colour of the photon depends on the energy released in the collapse, with high-energy collapse giving a pulse of ultraviolet radiation and lower energy pulses giving visible light.

Character is like a tree, and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. - Abraham Lincoln

Progress depends on action.

I’ve met lots of smart people who work very hard. I’ve met substantially fewer who are also authentic and have integrity. I try to spend my time with the second group. And, generally, I’ve found that those people are happy and have more real friends.

Know yourself. To be happy, you need to pay attention to who you are, what you want, and how you feel, versus staying busy just doing ’stuff,’ or doing what other people want or expect you to do. This requires both self awareness and introspection: if you pay attention to how you feel, what you like and what you want (as well as what makes you feel sad, angry, fearful and confused), the world is likely to look quite different. Many people are afraid of being introspective because they feel vulnerable. But without a willingness to open up, you won’t understand yourself and you can’t ultimately be truly happy.

Observe. It’s incredibly hard to have a dispassionate view of the world, even if you try your hardest. Humans are emotional animals, and we all come at the world with our own point of view based on our experience. It’s impossible in many ways to get outside that frame of reference, although with diverse experience, a lot of reading, honest self-reflection on your failures, and some thinking, it’s possible to stretch our perspective. Data and patterns matter, and you should pay close attention to them. But they’re not enough to deeply understand the world, since history doesn’t repeat itself exactly. Judgment and wisdom matter a great deal. To acquire them, and to be creative, it’s important to slow down enough at times to notice what is going on around you.

If I’d had more time I would have written a shorter letter

The question is: who or what moves the created order `forward', to its destiny, God, or a surrogate? On a theology which takes into account both the `horizontal' and the `vertical' structuring of relations, we are free to treat evolution with a little more detachment. Evolution may be the way by which the Spirit perfects the creation by relating it to God the Father through the Son; but equally, it may not. It is well known that, as Basil Willey said, deism represents a kind of cosmic toryism: what is, is right; and in that respect, Darwinism as represented by such triumphalists as Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins is a form of modern rationalist deism. But if the Spirit is the Spirit of God the Son who was crucified, creation may move towards its perfection as much through the enablement of, or merely acts of love for, the severely handicapped - to take one example - as by the evolution of so-called higher forms of being. It must be remembered here that those who have turned Darwinism into an ideology - the ideology of the escalator - have far departed from the work of Darwin himself, who saw evolution more in terms of a tree, with branches going out in many directions, rather than an ascending series. If the Spirit is the Spirit of him who raised Jesus Christ from the dead, then the question of what represents `progress' - the movement of creation to its true destiny - becomes a far more open one. Further, if the end of creation is the reconciliation of all things with their creator, any particular evolutionary `advance' may or may not bring about that end.

Albert Einstein said: It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

While we are in this embarrassingly negative corner of chemistry, I cannot avoid that other great pointed finger, the one directed at the environmental damage laid at the subject’s door, or at least at its drains. It is impossible to deny that the unwanted effluent of the chemical plant has wrought ecological havoc. Ever since Perkin’s factories turned the nearby canals red, green, and yellow according to the manufacturing priorities of the day, mankind’s aspiration for its own betterment has been at an environmental cost. In fact, the green shoots of environmental pollution, if that is not too ironical a term, can be traced back to the Greeks and Romans, for analysis of ice cores laid down in those eras show traces of the consequences of metal working. The way forward is either legal or chemical. The legal constrains by the prospect of punishment; the chemical avoids by elimination at source. The latter, always the better mode of action, depends on developments of chemistry itself and has inspired the politico-environmento-chemical movement of green chemistry. In broad terms, green chemistry aims to minimize the impact of chemical manufacturing processes on the environment by strict guidelines about the use of materials and the elimination of waste.

Through chemistry we can unravel and comprehend the once inscrutable mysteries of the natural world. We can understand the green of a leaf and the red of a rose, the fragrance of a herb and new-mown hay. We can understand, in a halting but increasing way, the intricate and complex reticulation of processes in the natural world that constitute the awesome and multifaceted property we know as life. We are beginning, even more haltingly, to understand the chemical processes in our brains that enable us to perceive, wonder, and understand.

In preparation for our journey in which we shall nose around among the myths that a collaboration of ignorance and deep concern have jointly inspired, I would like to establish in broad terms my vision of the nature and limitations, if any, of the scientific method. I suspect that few would disagree that science is competent when it comes to the fabrication of novel stuff and novel applications of stuff in general. That, I believe, is not an issue to delay us. Nor shall I linger on the argument about whether these novel stuffs, including better medicines, better and more abundant foods, better fabrics, better modes of communication and transport, better modes of entertainment, and so on, weighed against the social costs, including better ways of killing, injuring our environment, and accidentally or intentionally maiming, add overall to the sum of human happiness. I focus instead on the ability of the scientific method to illuminate matters of great human concern and drive out ignorance while retaining wonder.

Then there is the extraordinary marriage of observation and mathematics. Mankind, and for some perhaps sociological reason it has been mostly man kind, has developed a sinewy language of the utmost rigour and austerity that has proved to be the perfect tool for teasing out objectively the consequences of an imaginative qualitative leap or of adding spine to a whim so that it can stand up to the harshness of quantitative comparison of prediction with observation. I hasten to add that mathematics does not appear explicitly in this book, but it does lie as a hidden deep foundation beneath it.

The crucial consideration, however, is where reliable solutions to the world’s problems will come from if it is not further development of chemistry. Chemistry holds the key to the enhancement of almost every aspect of our daily lives, from the cradle to the grave and all points in between. It has provided the material foundation of all our comforts, not only in health but in illness too, and there is no reason to suppose that it has reached its zenith. It contributes to our communications, both virtual and physical, for it provides the materials along which our electrons and photons travel in the complex network of patterns and interactions that result in computation. Moreover, it develops our fuels, rendering them more efficiently combustible and through catalysis minimizing their noxious products, and helps in the migration from fossil fuels to renewable sources, such as in the development of photovoltaic substances. Chemistry is the only solution to the problems it causes in the environment, be it in earth, air, or water.

Petroleum is, of course, an extraordinarily convenient source of energy, as it can be transported easily, even in weight-sensitive aircraft. Chemists have long contributed to the refinement of the raw material squeezed and pumped from the ground. They have developed processes and catalysts that have taken the molecules provided by Nature and used them to cut the molecules into more volatile fragments and reshape them so that they burn more efficiently. But burning Nature’s underground bounty might by future generations be seen as the wanton destruction of an invaluable resource, akin to species extinction. It is also finite, and although economically viable new sources of petroleum are constantly, for the time being at least, being discovered, it is proving hazardous and increasingly expensive to extract it. We have to accept that although an empty Earth is decades off, one day it will arrive and needs to be anticipated.

Closely allied with the contribution of chemists to the alleviation of disease is their involvement at a molecular level. Biology became chemistry half a century ago when the structure of DNA was discovered (in 1953). Molecular biology, which in large measure has sprung from that discovery, is chemistry applied to the functioning of organisms. Chemists, often disguised as molecular biologists, have opened the door to understanding life and its principal characteristic, inheritance, at a most fundamental level, and have thereby opened up great regions of the molecular world to rational investigation. They have also transformed forensic medicine, brought criminals to justice, and transformed anthropology.

The shift of chemistry’s attention to the processes of life has come at a time when the traditional branches of chemistry—organic, inorganic, and physical—have reached a stage of considerable maturity and are ready to tackle the awesomely complex network of processes going on inside organisms: human bodies in particular. The approach to the treatment, more importantly the prevention, of disease has been put on a rational basis by the discoveries that chemists continue to make. If you plan to enter this field, then genomics and proteomics will turn out to be of crucial importance to your work. This is truly a region of chemistry where you can feel confident about standing on the shoulders of the giants who have preceded you and know that you are attacking disease at its roots.

Then there is the dark side of chemistry. It would be inappropriate in this account of chemistry’s great achievements for no mention to be made of its ability to enhance humanity’s ability to damage and kill, for those achievements have come at a cost, in some cases to human life, in others to the environment.

Ideally, you want a job you’d do even if you weren’t paid to do it. That’s not an economic reality for most of us, but it’s the right goal to shoot for.

To learn from your experience and the experience of others it’s important to try to be dispassionate in looking at the world and analyzing it.

I try not to obsess on the past, but to learn from it. I try not to worry about the future, but to prepare for it. And while it’s difficult sometimes, I try to take pleasure in the moment, even when bad things happen.

I try to put things into two buckets: one I can do something about and one I can’t. The things I can’t do anything about, I try to ignore.

There are many things that are not nearly as dramatic, but can have a similarly negative long-term impact.

Character is like a tree, and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

To build trusting friendships, I’ve learned, it’s critical to be true to my passions, and express how I feel and what I want. If I weren’t open and honest, I wonder what sort of friends I’d have?

No matter how much wealth or fame you accumulate, if you don’t have true friends it’s unlikely you’ll be happy. Sadly I know too many people who have achieved their material goals, but have no friends.

I’ve found you can choose to let all the things that go wrong in life depress you. Or, you can accept that things will go wrong, try to laugh, and then look at what you can do. There’s a Japanese proverb that gets right to the point: We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.