Noble Gas Quotes (4 quotes)
[The unreactivity of the noble gas elements] belongs to the surest of experimental results.
Angewandte Chemie (1924), 37, 421. Trans. In Hilde Hein and George E. Hein, 'The Chemistry of Noble Gases- A Modern Case Study in Experimental Science', Journal of the History of Ideas (1966), 27, 420.
A small bubble of air remained unabsorbed... if there is any part of the phlogisticated air [nitrogen] of our atmosphere which differs from the rest, and cannot be reduced to nitrous acid, we may safely conclude that it is not more than 1/120 part of the whole.
Cavendish did not realize the significance of the remaining small bubble. Not until a century later were the air’s Noble Gases appreciated.
Cavendish did not realize the significance of the remaining small bubble. Not until a century later were the air’s Noble Gases appreciated.
'Experiments on Air', read 2 June 1785, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1785, 75, 382.
One of the memorable moments of my life was when Willard Libby came to Princeton with a little jar full of crystals of barium xenate. A stable compound, looking like common salt, but much heavier. This was the magic of chemistry, to see xenon trapped into a crystal.
Letter to Oliver Sacks. Quoted in Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001), footnote, 203.
There is an occasional glimmer of fertility [as compounds], the chemical equivalent of a blade of grass [in a desert]. So, gone … is the justification for “inert.” [Group 0 elements] are now known collectively as the noble gases, a name intended to imply a kind of chemical aloofness rather than a rigorous chastity.
In The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements (1995), 9.
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) -- 
