Stanislao Cannizzaro

Stanislao Cannizzaro (13 July 1826 – 10 May 1910) was an Italian chemist.

Quotes

• There is, indeed, nothing surprising in this necessity for a hypothesis to assist us in the comprehension of laws. It often happens that the mind of a person who is learning a new science, has to pass through all the phases which the science itself has exhibited in its historic evolution. In the teaching of astronomy, for example, we may, to a certain point, follow step by step the ascending road of induction, because that science itself travelled over the same road in its history, Kepler’s laws having, indeed, been discovered before they were interpreted and bound together in a single conception by the theory of gravitation.
  • S. Cannizzaro, Considerations on some Points of the Theoretic Teaching of Chemistry, J. Chem. Soc., 25, 941-967 (1872).

Quotes about Cannizzaro

• Cannizzaro felt very passionately that the history of chemistry needed to be in the minds of his students. In a beautiful essay on the teaching of chemistry, he described how he introduced his pupils to its study by 'endeavouring to place them…on the same level with the contemporaries of Lavoisier,' so that they might experience, as Lavoisier's contemporaries did, the full revolutionary force, the wonder of his thought; and then a few years ahead, so that they could experience the sudden, blinding illumination of Dalton.

'It often happens,' Cannizzaro concluded, 'that the mind of a person who is learning a new science, has to pass through all the phases which the science itself has exhibited in its historical evolution.' Cannizarro's words had a powerful resonance for me, because I, too, in a way, was living through, recapitulating, the history of chemistry in myself, rediscovering all the phases through which it had passed.

• Oliver Sacks, in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood