Chemical Reaction Quotes & Sayings

It was obvious-to me at any rate-that the answer was to why an enzyme is able to speed up a chemical reaction by as much as 10 million times. It had to do this by lowering the energy of activation-the energy of forming the activated complex. It could do this by forming strong bonds with the activated complex, but only weak bonds with the reactants or products. — Linus Pauling

Love is a strange concept. That the very sight of someone, the very mention of their name, can cause an intense chemical reaction inside you is crazy. — Cassia Leo

Israel has a couple of hundred nuclear weapons and also chemical and biological weapons. This stockpile is not only a threat in itself but encourages others to proliferate in reaction and in self-defense. Is anybody saying anything about this? — Noam Chomsky

There's no doubt that there's certain songs and arrangements of music that release a chemical reaction in my brain. This sounds a little goofy, but I really believe that. It's such a euphoric experience that I sort of want to chase that experience as often as possible. — McG

The ideal of the 11th/17th century physicists was to be able to explain all physical reality in terms of the movement of atoms. This idea was extended by people like Descartes who saw the human body itself as nothing but a machine. Chemists tried to study chemical reaction in this light and reduce chemistry to a form of physics, and biologists tried to reduce their science to simply chemical reactions and then finally to the movement of physical particles. The idea of reductionsm which is innate to modern science and which was only fortified by the tehory of evolution could be described as the reduction fo the spirit to the psyche, the psyche to biological activity, life to lifeless matter and lifeless matter to purely quantitative particles or bundles of energy whose movements can be measured and quantified. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths. — Jane Hirshfield

The waking world. Even the most cynical among us must greet it with a touch of hope. Maybe it's a chemical reaction, our thoughts communing with sunrise and creating that brief, intense faith in newness. — David Levithan

The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Every chemical reaction has a transition state. — Derek Harold Richard Barton

When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there's a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.
Something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body it takes less than 90 seconds.
This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away.
After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you're thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again. — Jill Bolte Taylor

Scientifically, Love is a chemical reaction in your brain toward someone else. Your pupils dilate, breathing catches, and your heart beats faster as your mind goes into overdrive. Spiritually, true love is your soul's recognition of its counterpart in another person. No reasoning, because there is none. We all know what love is. Most of us just don't know how to love. — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

Human relationships are chemical reactions. If you have a reaction then you can never return back to your previous state of being. — Sui Ishida

When chemists artificially produce an amino acid or a sugar they almost always synthesize only a single product at a time, which they manage by carefully controlling the experimental conditions for the selected reaction, such as temperature and the concentrations of the various ingredients, to optimize the synthesis of their target compound. This is not an easy task and requires careful control of many different conditions inside customized flasks, condensers, separation columns, filtration devices and other elaborate chemical apparatus. Yet every living cell in your body is continually synthesizing thousands of distinct biochemicals within a reaction chamber filled with just a few millionths of a microliter of fluid.*7 How do all those diverse reactions proceed concurrently? And how is all this molecular action orchestrated within a microscopic cell? These questions are the focus of the new science of systems biology; but it is fair to say that the answers remain mysterious! — Johnjoe McFadden

Clarice has a curious chemical reaction to boredom and the result can be similar to dynamite in the hands of a lunatic ... — Anne Morice

At our most elemental, we are not a chemical reaction, but an energetic charge. Human beings and all living things are a coalescence of energy in a field of energy connected to every other thing in the world. This pulsating energy field is the central engine of our being and our consciousness, the alpha and the omega of our existence. — Lynne McTaggart

Love isn't an opinion, it's a chemical reaction. — Tony Randall

Education is a chemical reaction between knowledge and the mind; the byproducts are new thoughts, new ideas, new perceptions, and new feelings. — Debasish Mridha

I consider therapy successful when the family members (or individual clients) have discovered ways to get what they need from their relationships with the people in their lives, so that their relationship with me is no longer necessary to sustain them. Like a chemical catalyst that facilitates a reaction between two other substances, the therapeutic relationship catalyzes the transformation of relationships in the lives of clients. But the real healing takes place not in the therapeutic relationship but in the client's relationships with significant others. — Joseph A. Micucci

It was nobody's choice. It was a chemical reaction. I had to cut it. It basically fell out. Somebody had said to me that it was just because, you know, you're trying to make Gail, you know, because she's just now coming out of the closet ... Not even for 2 seconds would we ever do that. It literally was a really bad hair experience. — Charlotte Sullivan

What does despair mean to someone who interprets that emotion as a chemical reaction in the brain? — Mitchell Heisman

Michael John's music is soul-stirring. It gets inside the deepest part of you; it's almost a chemical reaction. — Kate Baldwin

On their own, each [character] is a victim of no importance. But when you bring them together, they become a dangerous weapon. Jeanne is the vowel and Sophie the consonant. Psychologists know this phenomenon well. Each individual is harmless, but together they create an explosive chemical reaction. It's like Bonnie and Clyde, like Thelma and Louise. — Claude Chabrol

She moved in her world in slow motion. The little pills she took kept her safe, her eyes were empty of colour, of light. Every couple of years Joe's father would take his wife to Greece, make a trek to a valley where the Virgin was said to appear. They would drink the holy water, cross themselves, and still the woman would search through her bag to get to the little pills that kept her sane. Sanity is a chemical reaction. — Christos Tsiolkas

For, even the preachers have begun to tell us that God is radium, or ether or some scientific compound, and that the worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction. — O. Henry

When we meet an Imago match, that chemical reaction occurs, and love ignites. All other bets, all other ideas about what we want in a mate, are off. We feel alive and whole, confident that we have met the person who will make everything all right. — Harville Hendrix

Anson looked searchingly at her. His eyes moved over her body. He thought: you meet a woman and she starts a chemical reaction in you. You think there is no one like her in the world, then something happens, and it is finished. She means less to me now than the used plate after a good meal, and how little can that be? — James Hadley Chase

Science tells you love is just a chemical reaction in the brain,
Let me be your Bunsen burner baby, let me be your naked flame! — John Otway

At that point [Father Sogol] gave me a roguish and forceful look demanding my complicity in this adroit falsehood. For naturally everyone was still in the dark. But by this simple ruse each person had the impression of belonging to a minority, of being among "one or two not yet informed," felt himself surrounded by a convinced majority, and was eager to be quickly convinced himself. This simple method of Sogol's for "getting the audience into the palm of his hand," as he phrased it, was a simple application of the mathematical method that consists in "considering the problem as solved." And he also used the chemical analogy of a "chain reaction." But if this use was employed in the service of truth, could one still call it falsehood? In any case everyone pricked up his ears. — Rene Daumal

We must learn to judge potential partners by the content of their character and the compatibility of temperament and life purpose, not by the chemical reaction of hormones and physical attraction, and not by the superficial value system of the European. — Nana Kwaku Opare

Love is a chemical reaction, but it cannot be fully understood or defined by science. And though a body cannot exist without a soul, it too cannot be fully understood or defined by science. Love is the most powerful form of energy, but science cannot decipher its elements. Yet the best cure for a sick soul is love, but even the most advanced physician cannot prescribe it as medicine. — Suzy Kassem

The chemists who uphold dualism are far from being agreed among themselves; nevertheless, all of them in maintaining their opinion, rely upon the phenomena of chemical reactions. For a long time the uncertainty of this method has been pointed out: it has been shown repeatedly, that the atoms put into movement during a reaction take at that time a new arrangement, and that it is impossible to deduce the old arrangement from the new one. It is as if, in the middle of a game of chess, after the disarrangement of all the pieces, one of the players should wish, from the inspection of the new place occupied by each piece, to determine that which it originally occupied. — Auguste Laurent

For an enzyme to be functional, it must fold into a precise three-dimensional shape. How such a complex folding can take place remains a mystery. A small chain of 150 amino acids making up an enzyme has an extraordinary number of possible folding configurations: if it tested 1,012 different configurations every second, it would take about 1,026 years to find the right one. . . . Yet, a denatured enzyme can refold within fractions of a second and then precisely react in a chemical reaction. . . . [I]t demonstrates a stunning complexity and harmony in the universe.21 — T. Colin Campbell

Do you think music has the power to change people? Like you listen to a piece and go through some major change inside?"
Oshima nodded."Sure, that can happen. We have an experience - like a chemical reaction - that transforms something inside us. When we examine ourselves later on, we discover that all the standards we've lived by have shot up another notch and the world's opened up in unexpected ways. Yes, I've had that experience. Not often, but it has happened. It's like falling in love. — Haruki Murakami

It is a simple chemical reaction that has nothing to do with fusion. — Nathan Lewis

Falling in love is a chemical reaction. But it wears off in a year. That's why you need a strong line of communication ... which includes laughter. — Yakov Smirnoff

All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition. — Mo Yan

Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it is not cured by medication. Depression may not even be an illness at all. Often, it can be a normal reaction to abnormal situations. Poverty, unemployment, and the loss of loved ones can make people depressed, and these social and situational causes of depression cannot be changed by drugs. — Irving Kirsch

The chemical interactions between many of these molecules are known, giving rise to genome-scale reconstructed biochemical reaction networks underlying cellular functions. — Bernhard O. Palsson

Thermodynamics is one of those words best avoided in a book with any pretence to be popular, but it is more engaging if seen for what it is: the science of 'desire'. The existence of atoms and molecules is dominated by 'attractions', 'repulsions', 'wants' and 'discharges', to the point that it becomes virtually impossible to write about chemistry without giving in to some sort of randy anthromorphism. Molecules 'want' to lose or gain electrons; attract opposite charges; repulse similar charges; or cohabit with molecules of similar character. A chemical reaction happens spontaneously if all the molecular partners desire to participate; or they can be pressed to react unwillingly through greater force. And of course some molecules really want to react but find it hard to overcome their innate shyness. A little gentle flirtation might prompt a massive release of lust, a discharge of pure energy. But perhaps I should stop there. — Nick Lane

Nowadays, however, we recognize that simultaneously with the typical case of a chemical reaction a typical case of catalytic effect had been studied which constitutes a limiting case. — Wilhelm, Ostwald

The development of a rational view of the nature of catalysis was thus absolutely dependent on the creation of the concept of the rate of chemical reaction. — Wilhelm, Ostwald

If there's a physical component to falling in love - the butterflies in your stomach, the roller coaster of your soul - then there's an equal physical component to falling out of love. It feels like your lungs are sieves, so you can't get enough air. Your insides freeze solid. Your heart becomes a tiny, bitter pearl, a chemical reaction to one irritating grain of truth. — Jodi Picoult

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. — C. G. Jung

A catalyst is a substance which alters the velocity of a chemical reaction without appearing in the final products. — Wolfgang Ostwald

Romantic love came under attack, first from the Freudians and then from the neuroscientists, who said that being in love was a chemical reaction in the brain. Marriage is no longer seen as a lifetime commitment. — Jane Ridley

One day I am gonna grow wings
a chemical reaction
hysterical but useless
hysterical and a let down — Radiohead

They've poisoned you with this 'love is patient, love is kind' bullshit since you were a kid. But love is scientific, man. I mean, it's really just a chemical reaction in the brain. Sometimes that reaction lasts a lifetime, repeating itself over and over again. And sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it goes supernova and then starts to fade. We're all just chemical hearts. Does that make love any less brilliant? I don't think so. — Krystal Sutherland

Water is at the center of every chemical reaction, and therefore should be the earth's most precious gift. — Janine Benyus

The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail. They remain the test, whether or not to read something. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates. — Jhumpa Lahiri