Quotes from Frank Close

We are the lucky ones for we shall die, as there is an infinite number of possible forms of DNA all but a few billions of which will never burst into consciousness.

We have not been created out of nothing, but from primeval ur-matter, atoms formed billions of years ago that have for a brief while been gathered into collections that think they are us.

Alpha sets the scale of nature -- the size of atoms and all things made of them, the intensity and colors of light, the strength of magnetism, and the metabolic rate of life itself. It controls everything that we see. ... In 137, apparently, science had found Nature's PIN Code.

We are made of atoms. With each breath you inhale a million billion billion atoms of oxygen, which gives some idea of how small each one is. All of them, together with the carbon atoms in your skin, and indeed everything else on Earth, were cooked in a star some 5 billion years ago. So you are made of stuff that is as old as the planet, one-third as old as the universe, though this is the first time that those atoms have been gathered together such that they think that they are you.

This has led to an oft-quoted analogy that an atom's structure is similar to the solar system, the essential differences being the overall scale and that there is electromagnetic instead of gravitational attraction. However, this is a poor analogy for several reasons, one being that in reality the atom is far emptier than the solar system.

Our inability to see atoms has to do with the fact that light acts like a wave, and waves do not scatter easily from small objects. To see a thing, the wavelength of the beam must be smaller than it is.

the incident alpha had chipped a proton from the nitrogen, and then itself become bound to the target nucleus to form a nucleus of a form of oxygen. The alpha particle had modified the nitrogen nucleus; nuclear transmutation had been captured on film.

these were physically variant forms of the familiar elements. These different forms of an element are chemically identical—hence the same element—but physically different. These distinct varieties are called isotopes, from the Greek for 'equally placed' (in the periodic table of the elements).