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
John Charles Polanyi quotes about
Others think it the responsibility of scientists to coerce the rest of society, because they have the power that derives from special knowledge.
The time has come to underscore the fact that our and others' rights are contingent on our willingness to assert and defend them.
The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.
The moral force that we brought to this debate derived from our membership in an international community ruled by law - albeit unwritten law.
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.
In the late 1950s a major topic under discussion was whether Canada should acquire nuclear weapons.
It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience.
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.
Science exists, moreover, only as a journey toward troth. Stifle dissent and you end that journey.
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.]
For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.
Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.
Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.
Idealism is the highest form of reason.