quotes about Atoms
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There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.
-- Albert Einstein -
It's very depressing to live in a time where it's easier to break an atom than a prejudice.
-- Albert Einstein -
It is harder to crack prejudice than an atom.
-- Albert Einstein -
Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
-- Aldo LeopoldSource : Aldo Leopold (2013). “Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology: (Library of America #238)”, p.548, Library of America
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Time travel is a terrifying weapon, far more powerful than anything ever before conceived,' he said grimly.'Mankind just isn't ready for that kind of knowledge. We're like children casually playing with an atom bomb.
-- Alex Scarrow -
See plastic Nature working to this end, The single atoms each to other tend, Attract, attracted to, the next in place Form'd and impell'd its neighbor to embrace.
-- Alexander Pope -
We should note that this latter type of shift was successfully amplified to a considerable extent by Russian physicists using the intense light of a ruby laser whose wavelength is close to that of a transition of the potassium atom.
-- Alfred KastlerSource : Alfred Kastler (1988). “Oeuvre scientifique: 1956-1983”
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Neither is there a smallest part of what is small, but there is always a smaller (for it is impossible that what is should cease to be). Likewise there is always something larger than what is large.
-- Anaxagoras -
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I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.
-- Arthur EddingtonSource : 1928 Stars and Atoms, lecture 1.
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The electron, as it leaves the atom, crystallises out of Schrödinger's mist like a genie emerging from his bottle.
-- Arthur Eddington -
But it is necessary to insist more strongly than usual that what I am putting before you is a model-the Bohr model atom-because later I shall take you to a profounder level of representation in which the electron instead of being confined to a particular locality is distributed in a sort of probability haze all over the atom.
-- Arthur Eddington -
The question whether atoms exist or not... belongs rather to metaphysics. In chemistry we have only to decide whether the assumption of atoms is an hypothesis adapted to the explanation of chemical phenomena... whether a further development of the atomic hypothesis promises to advance our knowledge of the mechanism of chemical phenomena... I rather expect that we shall some day find, for what we now call atoms, a mathematico-mechanical explanation, which will render an account of atomic weight, of atomicity, and of numerous other properties of the so-called atoms.
-- August Kekule -
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The separate atoms of a molecule are not connected all with all, or all with one, but, on the contrary, each one is connected only with one or with a few neighbouring atoms, just as in a chain link is connected with link.
-- August Kekule -
I was an impostor, the worthy associate of a brigand, &c., &c., and all this for an atom of chlorine put in the place of an atom of hydrogen, for the simple correction of a chemical formula!
-- Auguste LaurentSource : David M. Knight, Auguste Laurent (1998). “The Development of Chemistry, 1789-1914: Chemical method”, Routledge
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Sir Arthur Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics. Sir James Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do.
-- Bertrand Russell -
If the Russians ever decide to atom bomb us, they're certain to drop an especially large one on the plant in Pleasantville.
-- Billy Rose -
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Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world.
-- Blaise Pascal -
It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
-- Blaise Pascal -
The atom bomb fueled the entire world that came after it. It showed that indiscriminate killing and indiscriminate homicide on a mass level was possible ... whereas if you look at warfare up until that point, you had to see somebody to shoot them or maim them, you had to look at them. You don't have to do that anymore.
-- Bob Dylan -
You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.
-- Bruce Sterling -
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If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?
-- Carl Sagan -
Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.
-- Carl Sagan -
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.
-- Carl Sagan -
There are more potential combinations of DNA [physical forms] than there are atoms in the universe.
-- Carl Sagan -
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As the salt flavors every drop in the Atlantic, so does sin affect every atom of our nature. It is so sadly there, so abundantly there, that if you cannot detect it, you are deceived.
-- Charles Spurgeon -
If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe.
-- Christian de Duve -
Ideas are like matter, infinitely divisible. It is not given to us to get down so to speak to their final atoms, but to their molecular groupings-the way is never ending and the progress infinitely delightful and profitable....
-- Christian Nestell Bovee -
One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.
-- Christopher HitchensSource : Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.67, Atlantic Books Ltd
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The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I'm not sure it'll ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe, everything except itself.
-- Daniel Mainwaring -
You don't meditate to experiment with altered states of consciousness or whatever else. You meditate only to perceive by yourself that everything is within us, every atom of the universe, and that we already possess everything we would wish to find outside of ourselves.
-- Daniel OdierSource : Daniel Odier (1997). “Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love”, p.73, Simon and Schuster
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You know how to split atoms, how to send explorers to the moon, how to splice genes, but you don't know how people ought to live.
-- Daniel Quinn -
Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.
-- David EaglemanSource : David Eagleman (2009). “Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives”, p.84, Vintage
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The cricket's gone, we only hear machines In erg and atom they exact their pay. And life is largely lived on silver screens.
-- David McCord -
Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom.
-- David R. Brower -
I was actually telling people that - by harnessing the atom - we could enter a new era of unlimited power that would do away with the need to dam our beautiful streams.
-- David R. Brower -
Atoms for peace. Man is still the greatest miracle and the greatest problem on earth.
-- David Sarnoff -
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Just by being ourselves we are borne toward a destiny far beyond anything we could imagine. It is enough to know that the being I nourish inside me is the same as the Being that suffuses every atom of the cosmos.
-- Deepak Chopra -
98% of the atoms in your body were not there a year ago.
-- Deepak Chopra -
The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.
-- Democritus -
These differences, they say, are three: shape, arrangement, and position; because they hold that what is differs only in contour, inter-contact, inclination.
-- Democritus -
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The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb.
-- Diana Vreeland -
There is no such word as 'too late,' in the wide world — nay, not in the universe. What! shall we, whose atom of time is but a fragment out of an ever-present eternity — shall we, so long as we live, or even at our life's ending, dare to cry out to the Eternal One, 'It is too late!'
-- Dinah -
For the Earth is only an atom in the universe of worlds.
-- Edgar Cayce -
Scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories
-- Eduardo GaleanoSource : "Eduardo Galeano, Chronicler of Latin America’s 'Open Veins,' on His New Book 'Children of the Days'". "Democracy Now!" with Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh, www.democracynow.org. May 8, 2013.
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In Italy, on the breaking up of the Roman Empire, society might be said to be resolved into its original elements, - into hostile atoms, whose only movement was that of mutual repulsion.
-- Edward EverettSource : Edward Everett (1850). “Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions”, p.655, Рипол Классик
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Mathematics directs the flow of the universe, lurks behind its shapes and curves, holds the reins of everything from tiny atoms to the biggest stars.
-- Edward FrenkelSource : Edward Frenkel (2014). “Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality”, p.5, Basic Books
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If you show this devious little liar one atom's worth of compassion I will have you shot.
-- Elizabeth Wein -
From the results so far obtained it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the long-range atoms arising from collision of alpha particles with nitrogen are not nitrogen atoms but probably atoms of hydrogen, or atoms of mass 2. If this be the case, we must conclude that the nitrogen atom is disintegrated under the intense forces developed in a close collision with a swift alpha particle, and that the hydrogen atom which is liberated formed a constituent part of the nitrogen nucleus.
-- Ernest Rutherford -
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Now I know what the atom looks like.
-- Ernest RutherfordSource : "Rutherford, Simple Genius". Book by David Wilson, 1983.
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I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.
-- Ernst Mach -
You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life.
-- Erwin ChargaffSource : Erwin Chargaff (1978). “Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature”, p.189, Paul & Company Pub Consortium
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I'm aware there are certain products that are being advertised - food products - with 'no chemicals whatsoever.' Well, that would be pretty hard to arrange, since everything around us is made up of atoms and molecules - chemicals - including ourselves.
-- Francis Collins -
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If the atoms in [a] decimetre cube of lead were all put into a chain side by side the same distance apart as they are in the normal lead, the strings of atoms so formed would reach over six million million miles.
-- Francis William Aston -
Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule.
-- Fred Hoyle -
Chemists have always been in the business of taking atoms and putting them together with other atoms with precisely defined connections.
-- George M. Whitesides -
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Nanoengineering is learning how to make devices as small as 10 to 100 atoms in width. Much of the work is going on in the electronics industry, where there is great demand to pack more components onto computer chips.
-- George M. Whitesides -
A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.
-- George MacDonald -
It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
-- George WaldSource : Foreword to L. J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment (1958)
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It has been rightly said that nothing is unimportant, nothing powerless in the universe; a single atom can dissolve everything, and save everything! What terror! There lies the eternal distinction between good and evil.
-- Gerard De NervalSource : Martin Esslin (2009). “The Theatre of the Absurd”, p.16, Vintage
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Nothing is indifferent, nothing is powerless in the universe; an atom might destroy everything, an atom might save everything!
-- Gerard De Nerval -
We may say that a basic substance is one which has a lone pair of electrons which may be used to complete the stable group of another atom, and that an acid is one which can employ a lone pair from another molecule in completing the stable group of one of its own atoms.
-- Gilbert N. Lewis -
Now where there are no parts, there neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible. And these monads are the true atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
In a malleable world where everything from atoms to cells is changing to match our beliefs, we're limited only by the way we think of ourselves in that world.
-- Gregg Braden -
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There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.
-- Harold E. Varmus -
The Middle Ages burned its heretics and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs.
-- Harold InnisSource : Harold A. Innis, Daniel Drache (1995). “Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change: Selected Essays”, p.17, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
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In the last four days I have got the spectrum given by Tantalum. Chromium. Manganese. Iron. Nickel. Cobalt. and Copper and part of the Silver spectrum. The chief result is that all the elements give the same kind of spectrum, the result for any metal being quite easy to guess from the results for the others. This shews that the insides of all the atoms are very much alike, and from these results it will be possible to find out something of what the insides are made up of.
-- Henry MoseleySource : "H. G. J. Moseley: The Life and Letters of an English Physicist, 1887-1915" by J. L. Heilbron, University of California Press, (p. 209), 1974.
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Mathematics transfigures the fortuitous concourse of atoms into the tracery of the finger of God.
-- Herbert Turnbull -
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When you die, you are extinguished. From being you will be transformed to non-being. A god does not necessarily dwell among our capricious atoms.
-- Ingmar Bergman -
It is the nature of the mind that makes individuals kin, and the differences in the shape, form or manner of the material atoms out of whose intricate relationships that mind is built are altogether trivial.
-- Isaac Asimov -
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
-- Jack London -
Within your physical atoms the origins of all consciousness still sings.
-- Jane Roberts -
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In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and 'get' everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don't understand each atom of the potato!
-- Jean-Luc GodardSource : "Ideas, Not Plots, Inspire Jean-Luc Godard" by David Sterritt, www.csmonitor.com. August 03, 1994.
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The fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe.
-- Jeanette Winterson -
Football tactics are rapidly becoming as complicated as the chemical formula for splitting the atom.
-- Jimmy Greaves -
By recognizing that the chemical atom is composed of single separable electric quanta, humanity has taken a great step forward in the investigation of the natural world.
-- Johannes Stark -
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For under certain conditions the chemical atoms emit light waves of a specific length or oscillation frequency - their familiar characteristic spectra - and these can come in the form of electromagnetic waves only from accelerated electric quanta.
-- Johannes Stark -
If the experimental physicist has already done a great deal of work in this field, nevertheless the theoretical physicist has still hardly begun to evaluate the experimental material which may lead him to conclusions about the structure of the atom.
-- Johannes Stark -
In my view the structure of the whole atom was that of an individual, with all its parts interconnected, and the emission of a spectral line appeared to me to be the result of the coherence and co-operation of several electric quanta.
-- Johannes Stark -
The discovery of various phenomena has led to a recognition of the fact that the chemical atom is an individual which again is itself made up of several units into a selfcontained whole.
-- Johannes Stark -
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It is more likely that more than a century will pass before we know the structure of the chemical atoms as thoroughly as we do our solar system.
-- Johannes Stark -
The emitters of the spectral series are without exception single atoms, not compounds of atoms.
-- Johannes Stark -
The removal of an electron from the surface of an atom - that is, the ionization of the atom - means a fundamental structural change in its surface layer.
-- Johannes Stark -
By allowing the positive ions to pass through an electric field and thus giving them a certain velocity, it is possible to distinguish them from the neutral, stationary atoms.
-- Johannes Stark -
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We have learnt through experience that when an electrical ray strikes the surface of an atom, an electron, and in some circumstances a second and even a third electron, can be detached.
-- Johannes Stark -
Matter, though divisible in an extreme degree, is nevertheless not infinitely divisible. That is, there must be some point beyond which we cannot go in the division of matter. ... I have chosen the word “atom†to signify these ultimate particles.
-- John Dalton -
In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world...all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.
-- John Gribbin -
How comes it to pass, if they be only moved by chance and accident, that such regular mutations and generations should be begotten by a fortuitous concourse of atoms.
-- John SmithSource : John Smith, Simon Patrick, John Worthington (1821). “Select discourses”, p.53
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Do you know how hard it is to say nothing? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I had practiced not saying anything the whole way from the airport, and it was still nearly killing me.
-- Jojo Moyes -
The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say is the answer to the atom bomb.
-- Joseph Campbell -
Mass travel by air may prove to be more significant to world destiny than the atom bomb.
-- Juan Trippe -
After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.
-- K. Eric DrexlerSource : Foresight Institute Interview, www.foresight.org. June 15, 1987.
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I loved her, atom by atom, one burning cell at a time.
-- Kami GarciaSource : Kami Garcia, Margaret Stohl (2010). “Beautiful Darkness”, p.26, Hachette UK
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He knows what I'm thinking. Always. We're connected. The atoms between us ferry messages back and forth.
-- Karen Marie Moning -
With the new weapons like the atom bomb, Russia would have it, too, and use it first. It is a very difficult world. But that trouble is imminent is obvious.
-- Karl DonitzSource : Said to Leon Goldensohn, July 14, 1946. "The Nuremberg Interviews". Book by Leon Goldensohn, 2004.
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The atoms of the earth are formed inside of stars. Nothing really dies, everything is transformed.
-- Kelly EastonSource : Kelly Easton (2001). “The Life History of a Star”, p.159, Simon and Schuster
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It was my responsibility that this world got itself an atom bomb, because there were only a handful of nuclear physicists in the thirties - only a handful. And we were all beating the desk and saying "How wonderful it will be if we discover atomic fission.
-- L. Ron Hubbard -
I am not sure why, but I have been obsessed by the Atom Bomb ever since it first happened.
-- Lanford Wilson -
Teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth because I do not want it to fall on me-nor Thee-nor anybody living. Amen!
-- Langston Hughes -
He [Democritus] is probably best known for two of the most scientifically intuitive quotes ever uttered by an ancient: 'Nothing exists except atoms and space, everything else is opinion'.....
-- Leon M. Lederman -