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
Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it.
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.
If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience.
The respect for human rights, essential if we are to use technology wisely, is not something alien that must be grafted onto science. On the contrary, it is integral to science, as also to scholarship in general.