John Charles Polanyi
John Charles Polanyi
John Charles Polanyi, PC CC FRSC OOnt FRSis a Hungarian-Canadian chemist who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for his research in chemical kinetics. Polanyi was educated at the University of Manchester, and did postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Canada and Princeton University in New Jersey. Polanyi's first academic appointment was at the University of Toronto, and he remains there as of 2014. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Polanyi has received numerous other awards, including...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 January 1929
CountryCanada
Scientia is knowledge. It is only in the popular mind that it is equated with facts.
[Intellectual courage is] the quality that allows one to believe in one's judgement in the face of disappointment and widespread skepticism. Intellectual courage is even rarer than physical courage.
Nothing is more irredeemably irrelevant than bad science.
Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it.
If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience.
Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.
Young people ask me if this country is serious about science. They aren't thinking about the passport that they will hold, but the country that they must rely on for support and encouragement.
Reality is no less precious if it presents itself to someone else. All are discoverers, and if we disenfranchise any, all suffer.
Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal.
Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.
In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.
It takes a trained and discerning researcher to keep the goal in sight, and to detect evidence of the creeping progress toward it.
I knew, however, that it would cost ten times what I had available in order to build a molecular beam machine. I decided to follow a byway, rather than the highway. It is a procedure I have subsequently recommended to beginning scientists in this country, where research strategy is best modelled on that used by Wolfe at the Plains of Abraham.
It is folly to use as one's guide in the selection of fundamental science the criterion of utility. Not because (scientists)... despise utility. But because. .. useful outcomes are best identified after the making of discoveries, rather than before.