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In my own field, x-ray crystallography, we used to work out the structure of minerals by various dodges which we never bothered to write down, we just used them. Then Linus Pauling came along to the laboratory, saw what we were doing and wrote out what we now call Pauling's Rules. We had all been using Pauling's Rules for about three or four years before Pauling told us what the rules were.

— John Desmond Bernal

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More quotes by John Desmond Bernal

Life is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states.

The progress in science has been anything but uniform in time and place.

Science in History (1954)

Hogben's Science for the Citizen would be an admirable text-book for such teaching.

The Social Function of Science (1939)

It would be as one-sided to assess the effects of science on society as of society on science.

Science in History (1954)

But if capitalism had built up science as a productive force, the very character of the new mode of production was serving to make capitalism itself unnecessary.

Marx and Science (1959)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Desmond Bernal (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.