"I can remember that I was asked, perhaps when I was a junior, if I would give some lectures in the evening for students who were having trouble in freshman chemistry . . . I can remember presenting chemical bond theory on the 'hook-and-eye' basis . . . [When] I ran across the papers by Langmuir which were published that year . . . I was very impressed by this work on the electronic structure of molecules or ideas about shared electron pair bonds, and it may well be that that was the start of my interest in chemical bonding."
Linus Pauling. Interview by John Heilbron, in Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science, by Anthony Serafini. 1964.

"When I was in Europe...I received a letter from A. A. Noyes saying that he was writing to offer me an appointment as 'Assistant Professor of Theoretical Chemistry and Mathematical Physics,' and I accepted it, but by the time that I got here it had been changed to 'Assistant Professor of Theoretical Chemistry' . . . I don't know what happened with the physics, whether Millikan objected to my having a joint appointment or whether Noyes decided . . . [Noyes] was preventing me from going to Berkeley, and he may have decided that he didn't want me associated with the physics department in this way, that perhaps I would shift."
Linus Pauling. AHQP (Archive for the History of Quantum Physics), interview transcript part 2. Interview by John Heilbron. March 27, 1964.

"At Berkeley and at Pasadena, the chemists, the physical chemists, were learning as much physics and mathematics as the physicists did and they were able to take advantage of this opportunity in the way that European chemists were not."
Linus Pauling. AHQP (Archive for the History of Quantum Physics), interview transcript part 2. Interview by John Heilbron. March 27, 1964.

"Goudsmit and I were never together, I think, during the period when [The Structure of Line Spectra] was written. He would write a draft of some material that he thought ought to go in the book and then using that as a basis I wrote the corresponding sections of the book."
Linus Pauling. AHQP (Archive for the History of Quantum Physics), interview transcript part 2. Interview by John Heilbron. March 27, 1964.

"[P.W.] Bridgman . . . would say that a question that does not have operational significance, that does not lead to an experiment of some sort, or an observation, it's significant. I never have been bothered by the detailed or penetrating discussions about interpretation of quantum mechanics."
Linus Pauling. AHQP (Archive for the History of Quantum Physics), interview transcript part 2. Interview by John Heilbron. March 27, 1964.

"The department of chemistry [at Harvard] seemed to me to be rather uncooperative in that the different professors ran their own little groups...I just thought that I wouldn't feel at home there...."
Linus Pauling. AHQP (Archive for the History of Quantum Physics), interview transcript part 2. Interview by John Heilbron. March 27, 1964.

"There was this long gap from 1928 when I wrote my first paper on quantum mechanics of the chemical bond in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, and 1931 when I wrote the first significant paper. Well, there was this gap because I was having so much trouble getting a result that was in simple enough form to be valuable to chemists and to have more significance than numbers that you would get out of a computer nowadays."
Linus Pauling. AHQP (Archive for the History of Quantum Physics), interview transcript part 2. Interview by John Heilbron. March 27, 1964.

"I was just as pleased to be Assistant Professor of Theoretical Chemistry but pretty soon, when I became Professor in 1931, I said I wanted to have the title of Professor of Chemistry -- not theoretical chemistry...not physical chemistry...just Professor of Chemistry."
Linus Pauling. AHQP (Archive for the History of Quantum Physics), interview transcript part 2. Interview by John Heilbron. March 27, 1964.

"We had to have the ideas about partial ionic character of covalent bonds, you know, which I developed in about ’33, ’32, before it became possible to discuss electro-neutrality in a very significant way."
Linus Pauling. AHQP (Archive for the History of Quantum Physics), interview transcript part 2. Interview by John Heilbron. March 27, 1964.

"I published a paper with Jack Sherman on the calculation of some of these overlap integrals with a simplification.... It's in The Nature of the Chemical Bond, the results are -- with a simplification of some sort; it's like taking Slater functions, I don't know what it was, but actually evaluating the overlap integrals. Our conclusion was that the bond strength function giving angular dependence alone is really pretty good -- not perfect but pretty good."
Linus Pauling. AHQP (Archive for the History of Quantum Physics), interview transcript part 2. Interview by John Heilbron. March 27, 1964.

Back to Quotes Index.