X Ray Crystallography Quotes

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. ~ J. D. Bernal

In 1945 J.A. Ratcliffe ... suggested that I [join his group at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge] to start an investigation of the radio emission from the Sun, which had recently been discovered accidentally with radar equipment ... [B]oth Ratcliffe and Sir Lawrence Bragg, then Cavendish Professor, gave enormous support and encouragement to me. Bragg's own work on X-ray crystallography involved techniques very similar to those we were developing for "aperture synthesis", and he always showed a delighted interest in the way our work progressed. ~ Martin Ryle

The present rate of progress [in X-ray crystallography] is determined, not so much by the lack of problems to investigate or the limited power of X-ray analysis, as by the restricted number of investigators who have had a training in the technique of the new science, and by the time it naturally takes for its scientific and technical importance to become widely appreciated. ~ William Lawrence Bragg

Our dog had an ingrown tail, we had to X-ray him to find out if he was happy. I ~ Stephen King

For me photography was the means to the end, but they made it the most important thing. (On the discovery of X-ray photography.) ~ Wilhelm Rontgen

I wonder if I were to have an X-ray at the little hospital, would the machine see my grief? Is it like rust, arheum about the heart? ~ Sebastian Barry

The furies are at home in the mirror; it is their address. Even the clearest water, if deep enough can drown. Never think to surprise them. Your face approaching ever so friendly is the white flag they ignore. There is no truce with the furies. A mirror's temperature is always zero. It is ice in the veins. It's camera is an x-ray. It is a chalice held out to you in silent communion, where gaspingly you partake of a shifting identity never your own. ~ R.S. Thomas

There are people out there who have x-ray vision. They can see through my walls, armor and scrims and filters right down to the real me. And the saddest thing in the world? I haven't forgotten who that person is. She's on there and waiting. Like sleeping beauty locked high in a tower, she's been patient and aware of the coma I've been in all these years. I realise the one hitch in having x-ray glasses is that I'm utterly exposed to him. It's one thing to want someone to keep looking, to swim over moats and dodge flaming arrows to find you. It's quite another when you ask yourself, really ask yourself, if you're finally ready to come out into the open. No matter what. ~ Liza Palmer

A patient suffering with cancer of the throat was informed of a new X-ray machine that would cure his condition. This man could neither read nor write, nor was he informed about any of the instruments or procedures of medical practice. When he first sat down in the doctor's office and received into his mouth a thermometer with which the doctor sought to take his temperature, he believed he was undergoing X-ray treatment. The doctor, alert to the practices of psychology, recognized this, and after leaving the thermometer in the patient's mouth for ten minutes, excused him and told him to return in two days. Three weeks of treatment with a thermometer cured this patient's cancerous condition! Obviously, it wasn't the thermometer that did it. It was Faith! ~ Uell S. Andersen

I grew up in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, in the early '90s, and hospitals and doctor's offices offered to x-ray candy. I was 7 or 8. The day after Halloween, my brother and I were sorting all of our candy, and my mom asked if she could have a piece of my gum. She put the gum in her mouth, bit down, and there was a shard of metal in it! ~ Cory Michael Smith

I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper ...
The effect was one which could only be produced in ordinary parlance by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known even that of the electric arc ...
I did not think I investigated ...
I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else ... It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new something unrecorded ...
There is much to do, and I am busy, very busy.
[Describing to a journalist the discovery of X-rays that he had made on 8 Nov 1895.] ~ Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen

Pain is nothing, just a warning signal from the body to the brain. Pain is no more the real thing than an X-ray photograph is the real thing. Biut of course he is wrong. ~ J.M. Coetzee

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history.

I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad,
which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list.

But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius nov ~ Grant Morrison

The writer cannot be a mere storyteller; he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely X-ray society's weaknesses, its ills, its perils. He or she must be actively involved shaping its present and its future. ~ Ken Saro-Wiwa

Buddha rode in the trunk, which had to be roped shut. I thought this was going to be the first in a long line of hassles. But, as it turned out, Tsung Tsai was right: Buddha was a breeze. He flowed through the porters, ticket checkers, and security at JFK, gliding on a benevolent cloud. His strange gray Buddha shadow floated on the x-ray monitor.

'Jesus!' said the x-ray operator to the guard.
'Similar', Tsung Tsai said. ~ George Crane

A great advantage of X-ray analysis as a method of chemical structure analysis is its power to show some totally unexpected and surprising structure with, at the same time, complete certainty. ~ Dorothy Hodgkin

Vhat ozzer abilities do you haf?" ter Borcht snapped, which his assistant waited, pen in hand.
Gazzy thought. "I have X-ray vision," he said. He peered at ter Borcht's chest, then blinked and looked alarmed.
Ter Borcht was startled for a second, but then he frowned. "Don't write dat down," he told his assistant in irritation. The assistant froze in midsentence.
"You. Do you haf any qualities dat distinguish you in any way?"
Nudge chewed on a fingernail. "You mean, like, besides the WINGS?" She shook her shoulders gently, and her beautiful fawn-colored wings unfolded a bit.
His face flushed, and I felt like cheering. "Yes," he said stiffly. "Besides de vings."
"Hmm. Besides de vings." Nudge tapped one finger against her chin. "Um..." Her face brightened. "I once ate nine Snickers bars in one sitting. Without barfing. That was a record!"
"Hardly a special talent," ter Borcht said witheringly.
Nudge was offended. "Yeah? Let's see YOU do it."
...
"I vill now eat nine Snickers bars," Gazzy said in a perfect, creepy imitation of ter Borcht's voice, "visout bahfing."
Iggy rubbed his forehead with one hand. "Well, I have a highly developed sense of irony."
Ter Borcht tsked. "You are a liability to your group. I assume you alvays hold on to someone's shirt, yes? Following dem closely?"
"Only when I'm trying to steal their dessert"
...Fang pretended to think, gazing up at the ceiling. "Besides my fashion sense? I pl ~ James Patterson

There is no doubt that I, also, had long been aware of the problem, i.e. producing X-ray interferences, before the inherent difficulties had finally been surmounted. ~ Max Von Laue

In our country they do not permit any information to be X-rayed through and through, nor any discussion to encompass all the facets of a subject. All this is invariably suppressed at the very beginning, so no ray of light should fall on the naked body of truth. And then all this is piled up in one formless heap covering many years, where it languishes for whole decades, until all interest and all means of sorting out the rusty blocks from all this trash are lost. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It was William Penn who said, "Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it." Brent knew that there was nothing right about this place and the way the prisoners were treated, and he was determined to do whatever he could to change that. ~ Kenneth Eade

When the doctors showed me an X-ray of my brain, they pointed to a black hole on the upper left side and told me that all memory from that spot was dead. I thought to myself that I hoped that's where I kept 'The Orange Blossom Special.' ~ Johnny Gimble

Over the past 50 years we got versions of X-ray specs and space vacations, and even death rays. But the X-ray specs don't fit on your face - they're big things that screen your luggage for guns. Space vacations are real, but they cost $20 million. We have death rays, but you have to be a triple Ph.D. to play with them. ~ Daniel H. Wilson

There is a mystique about psychiatry that people think that you have some kind of a magical lens, you know, Superman's X-ray vision into the soul. One of the reasons I left psychiatry is that I didn't believe that. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The x-ray of your skull shows a large, flobby mass floating inside. I have to consult my colleagues to be certain, but it looks like a long sausage snarled into a lump. ~ Benson Bruno

I was always shocked when I went to the doctor's office and they did my X-ray and didn't find that I had eight more ribs than I should have or that my blood was the color green. ~ Nicolas Cage

Nature loves logarithmic spirals. From sunflowers, seashells, and whirlpools, to hurricanes and giant spiral galaxies, it seems that nature chose this marvelous shape as its favorite "ornament." The constant shape of the logarithmic spiral on all size scales reveals itself beautifully in nature in the shapes of minuscule fossils or unicellular organisms known as foraminifera. Although the spiral shells in this care are composite structures (and not one continuous tube), X-ray images of the internal structure of these fossils show that the shape of the logarithmic spiral remained essentially unchanged for millions of years. ~ Mario Livio

For more than twenty years, I have been seeking a way to be both rational and spiritual. I have been looking for a ray of hope in an otherwise-compartmentalized world in which people segregate religious aspirations and rationality in the hope of not having to resolve the glaring gap between the two. It's a gap that seems almost impossible to bridge, but I refuse to accept that disparity. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

He reached up and stroked her uninjured cheek. "If you need me, I won't leave your side. I promise..."

THEY MADE HIM leave her side.

Due to so-called hospital "policy" and "safety regulations" - aka a load of bullshit - they wouldn't let Nick accompany Jordan into the X-ray room. He was debating whether to pull out his gun or his FBI badge - figuring one of them ought to do the trick - when Jordan squeezed his hand.

"I'll be fine. Maybe you could try to round me up a Vicodin or something for my wrist?" she suggested.

He threw her a knowing look. "You're trying to distract me."

"Yes. Because I see you making the don't-fuck-with-me face. And if you start shooting people, they'll get bumped ahead of me in the X-ray line, and then I'll really be screwed. ~ Julie James

When I say I can see through clothes, sometimes I try to use it as an X-ray vision to look into the dancer and see who this dancer is right now, at this exact moment in time. I live inside them in a way. ~ Twyla Tharp

The Tender Place

Your temples , where the hair crowded in ,
Were the tender place. Once to check
I dropped a file across the electrodes
of a twelve-volt battery -- it exploded
Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up.
Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed
The thunderbolt into your skull.
In their bleached coats, with blenched faces,
They hovered again
To see how you were, in your straps.
Whether your teeth were still whole .
The hand on the calibrated lever
Again feeling nothing
Except feeling nothing pushed to feel
Some squirm of sensation . Terror
Was the cloud of you
Waiting for these lightnings. I saw
An oak limb sheared at a bang.
You your Daddy's leg . How many seizures
Did you suffer this god to grab you
By the roots of the hair? The reports
Escaped back into clouds. What went up
Vaporized? Where lightning rods wept copper
And the nerve· threw off its skin
Like a burning child
Scampering out of the bomb-flash. They dropped you
A rigid bent bit of wire
Across the Boston City grid. The lights
In the Senate House dipped
As your voice dived inwards
Right through the bolt-hole basement.
Came up, years later,
Over-exposed, like an X-ray --
Brain-map still dark-patched
With the scorched-earth scars
Of your retreat . And your words ,
Faces reversed from ~ Ted Hughes

By now the only part of me not sweating were my eyeballs... An X-ray of my skull would have shown a hamster running furiously in an exercise wheel... ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

What is the matter with these people, these people who won't stop fighting, won't stop hurting each other long enough to see that a body is a thing of beauty, is a miracle of rivers and oceans and islands and continents contained within itself? That the brain is divided into two hemispheres, each symmetrical, each perfect, each with its own system of waterways. These people of war should be shown an x-ray of an intraparenchymal hemorrhage, of a hemorrhage in an eighteen-year-old girl's brain, a girl named Ivy. Take a look at that, people of war. See, you should not hurt each other, and this is why. Without you ever even trying, this is what can happen to your body, your beautiful body, and your brain, your beautiful symmetrical brain, and your heart, and your soul. ~ Alison McGhee

The basic problem for Lawrence was that he was lazy. He had figured out that everything was much simpler if, like Superman with his X-ray vision, you just stared through the cosmetic distractions and saw the underlying mathematical skeleton. Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart's content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. He saw it in the curve of the silver bars on his glockenspiel, saw it in the catenary arch of a bridge and in the capacitor-studded drum of Atanasoff and Berry's computing machine. Actually pounding on the glockenspiel, riveting the bridge together, or trying to figure out why the computing machine wasn't working were not as interesting to him. ~ Neal Stephenson

As an actor, if you're just sitting and staring and you don't know who you are in your own mind, it's vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up. ~ Albert Brooks

I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn't see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people's clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn't be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It wouldn't be satisfactory at all - or at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVision™, a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit. ~ Bill Bryson

Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world. ~ Jordan Ellenberg

I think politics is like an X-ray machine: Everything is found out eventually. ~ Nicolle Wallace

My best friend in medical school was a magician. And we were shown an X-ray of a sword-swallower, and I tried it and failed. Then I got a sword-swallower as a patient, and he taught me. ~ Hans Rosling

There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder. ~ Allen Frances

Poems are lenses, mirrors, and X-ray machines. ~ David Mitchell

Ribs hurting?" When he only shrugged, she shook her head. "Let me take a look."
"She barely caught me."
"Oh,for heaven's sake." Impatient, Keeley did what she would have done with one of her brothers: She tugged Brian's T-shirt out of his jeans.
"Well,darling,if I'd known you were so anxious to get me undressed,I'd have cooperated fully,and in private."
"Shut up.God, Brian, you said it was nothing."
"It's not much."
His definition of not much was a softball-size bruise the ribs in a burst of ugly red and black. "Macho is tedious, so just shut up."
He started to grin,then yelped when she pressed her fingers to the bruise. "Hell, woman,if that's your idea of tender mercies, keep them."
"You could have a cracked rib. You need an X ray."
"I don't need a damned-ouch! Bollocks and bloody hell, stop poking." He tried to pull his shirt down, but she simply yanked it up again.
"Stand still,and don't be a baby."
"A minute ago it was don't be macho, now it's don't be a baby. What do you want?"
"For you to behave sensibly."
"It's difficult for a man to behave sensibly when a woman's taking his clothes off in broad daylight. If you're going to kiss it and make it better, I've several other bruises. I've a dandy one on my ass as it happens."
"I'm sure that's terribly amusing.One of the men can drive you to the emergency room"
"No one's driving me anywhere. I'd know if my ribs are cracked as I've had a few in my time ~ Nora Roberts

It's so interesting how transparency works. Not only can you see yourself when you open, relax, show up fully, and allow vulnerability to be natural, but that empowers others to see more of you - and of themselves. On the other hand, when you're open, exposed, and undefended without even trying, you can see through layers of interference or illusions of opacity in people and situations that used to stop you. You have Superman's X-ray vision!" - from Transparency: Seeing Through to Our Expanded Human Capacity ~ Penney Peirce

Okay, to be fair, I had tried to Google-stalk him. But Google-stalking is a far cry from having your demonblood best friend park his vampmobile across the and use his x-ray vamp vision to spy into someone's house. That's just rude. ~ Cecily White

How do you become someone with X-ray vision? ~ Carol Rifka Brunt

This work made me more and more interested in biological matter, and I decided that I really wanted to work on the X-ray analysis of biological molecules. ~ Aaron Klug

I don't believe this. This is utter shit!" I yelled.
"Does it look like I'm lying?" Steven asked.
I rolled my eyes at his incredibly stupid question, "I don't know. Let me look at you with my x-ray vision to see through this stupid blindfold and I'll get back to you. ~ Sara Massa

He told me that a German doctor named Wolff figured it out in the 1800s by studying X-rays of infants' hips as they transitioned from crawling to walking. "A whole new evolution of bone structure takes place to support the mechanical loads associated with walking," said Lang. "Wolff had the great insight that form follows function." Alas, Wolff did not have the great insight that cancer follows gratuitous X-raying with primitive nineteenth-century X-ray machines. ~ Mary Roach

If I'm traveling, I'll take a film camera and a digital camera because sometimes there are moments where, if you've lost it, or if coming back and it accidentally goes through the X-ray machine and it gets overexposed, you might have had a really important moment to you and you would be really upset that you didn't have a back-up. ~ Dianna Agron

I told a doctor once, Doc, if you want to know what's inside of me, put down the x-ray and pick up my novel! ~ Gerard De Marigny

Gabe!" she calls. "Dr. Gabe."

He looks at her blankly

"Don't you know me? You're my OB-GYN."

Gabe's eyes move instinctively from her face to her crotch. He stares between her legs for a beat. His face lights up in recognition, as if he has X-ray vision.

"Joanne! Sure . . . Joanne. How are you?"

Both Joanne and I break up. Gabe blushes.

"I see so many women," he says, making it worse. ~ Alan Eisenstock