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
It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience.
Science is a collection of stories, linking characters worthy of notice.
Discoveries that are anticipated are seldom the most valuable. ... It's the scientist free to pilot his vessel across hidden shoals into open seas who gives the best value.
Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good.
Science is an enterprise that can only flourish if it puts the truth ahead of nationality, ethnicity, class and color.
A wise man in China asked his gardener to plant a shrub. The gardener objected that it only flowered once in a hundred years. "In that case," said the wise man, "plant it immediately." [On the importance of fundamental research.]
The scientific and scholarly community is marked by the belief that the truth is to be found in all; none can claim it as their monopoly.
The time has come to underscore the fact that our and others' rights are contingent on our willingness to assert and defend them.
Better to die in the pursuit of civilized values, we believed, than in a flight underground. We were offering a value system couched in the language of science.
Science, it seemed, held the key to an age of ease and plenty, and for many that proved to be the case. But for still more, it did not.
For scholarship - if it is to be scholarship - requires, in addition to liberty, that the truth take precedence over all sectarian interests, including self-interest.
Under this scientific and moral pressure, the Canadian government conceded publicly that the use of these weapons in Vietnam was, in their view, a contravention of the Geneva Protocol.
That is of course flattering, since facts are incontrovertible. But it is also demeaning, since facts are meaningless. They contain no narrative.
When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves.