Atoms Quotes - Page 4

• Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.

  Henry Adams

  God, Men, Always Trying

  Henry Adams (1986). “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres”, p.312, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Democritus sometimes does away with what appears to the senses, and says that none of these appears according to truth but only according to opinion: the truth in real things is that there are atoms and void. 'By convention sweet', he says, 'by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: but in reality atoms and void.'

  Sextus Empiricus

  Sweet, Real, Science

  18 Copy quote

• If we ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star ... They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe's future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.

  Martin Rees

  Stars, Future, Science

  7 Copy quote

• I have a peculiar theory about radium, and I believe it is the correct one. I believe that there is some mysterious ray pervading the universe that is fluorescing to it. In other words, that all its energy is not self-constructed but that there is a mysterious something in the atmosphere that scientists have not found that is drawing out those infinitesimal atoms and distributing them forcefully and indestructibly.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Believe, Science, Self

  7 Copy quote

• Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau! Mock on, mock on: 'Tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again. And every sand becomes a gem Reflected in the beams divine; Blown back they blind the mocking eye, But still in Israel's paths they shine. The atoms of Democritus And Newton's particles of light Are sands upon the Red Sea shore, Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

  William Blake

  Eye, Science, Blow

  'MS Note-Book' p. 7

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is unreasonable to expect science to produce a system of ethics-ethics are a kind of highway code for traffic among mankind-and the fact that in physics atoms which were yesterday assumed to be square are now assumed to be round is exploited with unjustified tendentiousness by all who are hungry for faith; so long as physics extends our dominion over nature, these changes ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you.

  Sigmund Freud

  Science, Yesterday, Squares

  Sigmund Freud, Oskar Pfister (1963). “Psycho-analysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud & Oskar Pfister”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Subatomic particles do not exist but rather show 'tendencies to exist', and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show 'tendencies to occur'.

  Fritjof Capra

  Science, Events, Way

  Fritjof Capra, Pier Luigi Luisi (2014). “The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision”, p.72, Cambridge University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture, and is in itself ennobling. ... Though to the layman, the world revealed by the chemist may seem more commonplace, it is not so to him. Each new insight into how the atoms in their interactions express themselves in structure and transformations, not only of inanimate matter, but particularly also of living matter, provides a thrill.

  Henry Taube

  Exercise, Science, Intellectual

  7 Copy quote

• 'By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and the void,' announced Democritus. The universe consists only of atoms and the void; all else is opinion and illusion. If the soul exists, it also consists of atoms.

  Edward Robert Harrison

  Science, Reality, Color

  Edward Robert Harrison (1986). “Masks of the universe”, Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We must infer that a plant or animal of any species, is made up of special units, in all of which there dwells the intrinsic aptitude to aggregate into the form of that species: just as in the atoms of a salt, there dwells the intrinsic aptitude to crystallize in a particular way.‎

  Herbert Spencer

  Animal, Dna, Special

  Herbert Spencer (1864). “The Principles of Biology”, p.181

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Over the last century, physicists have used light quanta electrons, alpha particles, X-rays, gamma-rays, protons, neutrons and exotic sub-nuclear particles for this purpose. Much important information about the target atoms or nuclei or their assemblage has been obtained in this way. In witness of this importance one can point to the unusual concentration of scattering enthusiasts among earlier Nobel Laureate physicists. One could say that physicists just love to perform or interpret scattering experiments.

  Clifford Shull

  Science, Light, Important

  Clifford G. Shull's Speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 1994.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do not want chemistry to degenerate into a religion; I do not want the chemist to believe in the existence of atoms as the Christian believes in the existence of Christ in the communion wafer.

  Marcellin Berthelot

  Christian, Believe, Science

  7 Copy quote

• It would not become physical science to see in its self created, changeable, economical tools, molecules and atoms, realities behind phenomena... The atom must remain a tool for representing phenomena.

  Ernst Mach

  Science, Reality, Self

  8 Copy quote

• A wonder then it must needs be,-that there should be any Man found so stupid and forsaken of reason as to persuade himself, that this most beautiful and adorned world was or could be produced by the fortuitous concourse of atoms.

  John Ray

  Beautiful, Stupid, Men

  John Ray (1827). “The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation, etc”, p.36

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!

  George Gamow

  Stars, Men, Years

  George Gamow (2012). “The Creation of the Universe”, p.137, Courier Corporation

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Courage, Heart, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.134, Harvard University Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Yet is it possible in terms of the motion of atoms to explain how men can invent an electric motor, or design and build a great cathedral? If such achievements represent anything more than the requirements of physical law, it means that science must investigate the additional controlling factors, whatever they may be, in order that the world of nature may be adequately understood.

  Arthur Compton

  Mean, Science, Men

  "The Human Meaning of Science".

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• These differences, they say, are three: shape, arrangement, and position; because they hold that what is differs only in contour, inter-contact, inclination.

  Democritus

  Science, Differences, Three

  7 Copy quote

• The story is told of Lord Kelvin, a famous Scotch physicist of the last century, that after he had given a lecture on atoms and molecules, one of his students came to him with the question, "Professor, what is your idea of the structure of the atom." "What," said Kelvin, "The structure of the atom? Why, don't you know, the very word 'atom' means the thing that can't be cut. How then can it have a structure?" "That," remarked the facetious young man, "shows the disadvantage of knowing Greek."

  Arthur Compton

  Mean, Cutting, Science

  13 Copy quote

• The most startling result of Faraday's Law is perhaps this. If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are composed of atoms, we cannot avoid concluding that electricity also, positive as well as negative, is divided into definite elementary portions, which behave like atoms of electricity.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

  Science, Law, Negative

  Hermann von Helmholtz (1971). “Selected writings of Hermann von Helmholtz”, Wesleyan Univ Pr

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• One summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me the effect was quite startling. ... It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the material of the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest.

  John Burroughs

  Summer, Country, Wall

  9 Copy quote

• The whole subject of the X rays is opening out wonderfully, Bragg has of course got in ahead of us, and so the credit all belongs to him, but that does not make it less interesting. We find that an X ray bulb with a platinum target gives out a sharp line spectrum of five wavelengths which the crystal separates out as if it were a diffraction grating. In this way one can get pure monochromatic X rays. Tomorrow we search for the spectra of other elements. There is here a whole new branch of spectroscopy, which is sure to tell one much about the nature of an atom.

  Henry Moseley

  Science, Giving, Interesting

  "H. G. J. Moseley: The Life and Letters of an English Physicist, 1887-1915" by J. L. Heilbron, University of California Press, (p. 205), 1974.

  61 Copy quote

  Show source

• Anything made out of destructible matter Infinite time would have devoured before. But if the atoms that make and replenish the world Have endured through the immense span of the past Their natures are immortal-that is clear. Never can things revert to nothingness!

  Lucretius

  Science, Past, Infinite Time

  Titus Lucretius Carus, Anthony M. Esolen (1995). “De rerum natura”, Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great scientific entrepreneurs free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so moved, build pyramids -- without any social relevance or human responsibility at all.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Dream, Responsibility, Science

  20 Copy quote

• Probably our atomic weights merely represent a mean value around which the actual atomic weights of the atoms vary within certain narrow limits... when we say, the atomic weight of, for instance, calcium is 40, we really express the fact that, while the majority of calcium atoms have an actual atomic weight of 40, there are not but a few which are represented by 39 or 41, a less number by 38 or 42, and so on.

  William Crookes

  Mean, Science, Numbers

  7 Copy quote