Catalyst Quotes (9 quotes)
A catalyst is a substance which alters the velocity of a chemical reaction without appearing in the final products.
'Über Katalyse', Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie (1901), 7, 995-1004 as quoted in J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, Vol. 4 (1901), 599-600.
A teacher … is never a giver of "truth”; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that the student must discover for himself. … For example, a skillful teacher might spur his student’s growth by confronting him with certain frustrations. A good teacher is a catalyst.
In 'Liberate Yourself From Classical Karate', Black Belt (Sep 1971), 27.
One day while I was sitting in a Santa Fe coach at Lawrence, Kansas, waiting for a branch line train to arrive, so that our train could go on west, I watched a section hand shoveling cinders into a flat car. He was alone. He seemed to have much trouble with his pipe. Between walking around the cinder pile and caring for his pipe he put just ten small shovelsful of cinders in the car in the first twenty minutes during which he was under my observation.
Then a small red-headed Irishman puffing on a short-stemmed cob-pipe came around the end of a string of cars hopped up on a pile of ties and sat there smoking. As long as the Irishman sat there, fifteen shovelsful per minute of those cinders went into that car.
The red-headed Irishman did not say a word, or do any work so far as I could see; but as long as he sat on that tie pile close to the cinder pile, the cinders went into the car thirty times as fast as when he was not there.
In railroading they call him a section boss. In chemistry it is a catalyst.
Then a small red-headed Irishman puffing on a short-stemmed cob-pipe came around the end of a string of cars hopped up on a pile of ties and sat there smoking. As long as the Irishman sat there, fifteen shovelsful per minute of those cinders went into that car.
The red-headed Irishman did not say a word, or do any work so far as I could see; but as long as he sat on that tie pile close to the cinder pile, the cinders went into the car thirty times as fast as when he was not there.
In railroading they call him a section boss. In chemistry it is a catalyst.
— Magazine
From article by F.E. Brown, 'Homely Illustrations: Catalysis', in Journal of Chemical Education (Dec 1925) 2, No. 12, 1195.
So many of the chemical reactions occurring in living systems have been shown to be catalytic processes occurring isothermally on the surface of specific proteins, referred to as enzymes, that it seems fairly safe to assume that all are of this nature and that the proteins are the necessary basis for carrying out the processes that we call life.
In 'The Physical Basis of Life', (1951), 39. As given in Andrew Brown, J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science (2005), 359.
The cell, too, has a geography, and its reactions occur in colloidal apparatus, of which the form, and the catalytic activity of its manifold surfaces, must efficiently contribute to the due guidance of chemical reactions.
'Some Aspects of Biochemistry', The Irish Journal of Medical Science (1932), 79, 344.
The numbers are a catalyst that can help turn raving madmen into polite humans.
Excerpt from address by Davis to a scientific society, 'The Philadelphia Story' collected in Philip Davis and William G. Chinn, 3.146 and All That (1985), 64. The context is the result of a "take a number" ticket used to organize a train station crowd competing for available taxis. Instead of chaos from queue jumping, the dispatcher used the ticket numbers for the loading order as each taxi pulled up.
This new force, which was unknown until now, is common to organic and inorganic nature. I do not believe that this is a force entirely independent of the electrochemical affinities of matter; I believe, on the contrary, that it is only a new manifestation, but since we cannot see their connection and mutual dependence, it will be easier to designate it by a separate name. I will call this force catalytic force. Similarly, I will call the decomposition of bodies by this force catalysis, as one designates the decomposition of bodies by chemical affinity analysis.
In'Some Ideas on a New Force which Acts in Organic Compounds', Annales chimie physiques, 1836, 61, 146. Translated in Henry M. Leicester and Herbert S. Klickstein, A Source Book in Chemistry 1400-1900 (1952), 267.
We do not know of any enzymes or other chemical defined organic substances having specifically acting auto-catalytic properties such as to enable them to construct replicas of themselves. Neither was there a general principle known that would result in pattern-copying; if there were, the basis of life would be easier to come by. Moreover, there was no evidence to show that the enzymes were not products of hereditary determiners or genes, rather than these genes themselves, and they might even be products removed by several or many steps from the genes, just as many other known substances in the cell must be. However, the determiners or genes themselves must conduct, or at least guide, their own replication, so as to lead to the formation of genes just like themselves, in such wise that even their own mutations become .incorporated in the replicas. And this would probably take place by some kind of copying of pattern similar to that postulated by Troland for the enzymes, but requiring some distinctive chemical structure to make it possible. By virtue of this ability of theirs to replicate, these genes–or, if you prefer, genetic material–contained in the nuclear chromosomes and in whatever other portion of the cell manifests this property, such as the chloroplastids of plants, must form the basis of all the complexities of living matter that have arisen subsequent to their own appearance on the scene, in the whole course of biological evolution. That is, this genetic material must underlie all evolution based on mutation and selective multiplication.
'Genetic Nucleic Acid', Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (1961), 5, 6-7.
With little more knowledge of what I was after than a cat has about catalysts … I set out to become a professional forester.
In Breaking New Ground (1947, 1998), 3.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
