Emilio Segrè Quotes in The Disappearing Spoon
Now, mistakes in science don’t always lead to baleful results. Vulcanized rubber, Teflon, and penicillin were all mistakes. Camillo Golgi discovered osmium staining, a technique for making the details of neurons visible, after spilling that element onto brain tissue. Even an outright falsehood—the claim of the sixteenth-century scholar and protochemist Paracelsus that mercury, salt, and sulfur were the fundamental atoms of the universe—helped turn alchemists away from the mind-warping quest for gold and usher in real chemical analysis. Serendipitous clumsiness and outright blunders have pushed science ahead all through history.
Pauling’s and Segrè’s were not those kind of mistakes.
Emilio Segrè Quotes in The Disappearing Spoon
Now, mistakes in science don’t always lead to baleful results. Vulcanized rubber, Teflon, and penicillin were all mistakes. Camillo Golgi discovered osmium staining, a technique for making the details of neurons visible, after spilling that element onto brain tissue. Even an outright falsehood—the claim of the sixteenth-century scholar and protochemist Paracelsus that mercury, salt, and sulfur were the fundamental atoms of the universe—helped turn alchemists away from the mind-warping quest for gold and usher in real chemical analysis. Serendipitous clumsiness and outright blunders have pushed science ahead all through history.
Pauling’s and Segrè’s were not those kind of mistakes.
