Quotes About Atoms

But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules - the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called primitive societies - with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as a kind of incest taboo.

Every atom, every minuscule part of the universe is nothing other than movement and change.

Lots of people believe consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like space and time. If that's the case, then it is turtles all the way down. We'll have this debate about our microbiome. About rocks and atoms and quarks. Until we have Gaia consciousness, there will always be an us-them divide, always a next frontier for empathy.

I think I'm more concerned with things that are very big and things that are very small than with all the stuff in between.

La luz que es energía y no materia. El big-bang creó la energía y la energía creó materia. También materia invisible a tu alrededor y dentro de ti. De átomos de estrellas tú... Y entre tú y el firmamento no hay línea divisoria.

We are thus faced with the following question: Why should an organ like our brain, with the sensorial system attached to it, of necessity consist of an enormous number of atoms, in order that its physically changing state should be in close and intimate correspondence with a highly developed thought?

Contrary to the common belief, the regular course of events, governed by the laws of physics, is never the consequence of one well-ordered configuration of atoms – not unless that configuration of atoms repeats itself a great number of times, either as in the periodic crystal or as in a liquid or in a gas composed of a great number of identical molecules.

All the physical and chemical laws that are known to play an important part in the life of organisms are of this statistical kind; any other kind of lawfulness and orderliness that one might think of is being perpetually disturbed and made inoperative by the unceasing heat motion of the atoms.

And why could all this not be fulfilled in the case of an organism composed of a moderate number of atoms only and sensitive already to the impact of one or a few atoms only? Because we know all atoms to perform all the time a completely disorderly heat motion, which, so to speak, opposes itself to their orderly behaviour and does not allow the events that happen between a small number of atoms to enrol themselves according to any recognizable laws.

Though the single atoms change their orientation incessantly, they produce on the average (owing to their enormous number) a constant small preponderance of orientation in the direction of the field and proportional to it.

It is a sentiment of tremendous truth and simplicity, yet tremendously difficult for the mind to metabolize — we remain material creatures, spiritually sundered by the fact of our borrowed atoms, which we will each return to the universe, to the stardust that made us, despite our best earthly efforts.

Dans le brasier initial l'hydrogène se transforme en hélium, l'atome à peine plus complexe que lui. Mais déjà, de cette transformation on peut déduire la première grande règle du jeu de notre univers : TOUJOURS PLUS COMPLEXE.

If we do find ET, we will at least have something in common with them. They may live on planet Zog and have seven tentacles, but they will be made of the same kinds of atoms as us. If they have eyes, they will gaze out on the same cosmos as we do. They will, like us, trace their origins back to a 'Big Bang' 13.8 billion years ago.

Chemists have always been in the business of taking atoms and putting them together with other atoms with precisely defined connections.

In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.

Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is conciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man?

Atoms, by collision, produce vortices, which generate bodies and ultimately worlds.

Epicurus was a materialist, but not a determinist. He followed Democritus in believing that the world consists of atoms and the void; but he did not believe, as Democritus did, that the atoms are at all times completely controlled by natural laws.

Y cómo se resiste la gente a devolverle al planeta los átomos prestados.

SOON IT WILL BE SAID OF YOU WHAT IS NOW SAID OF US: THEY DIED! Macabre and trivial. And how people fight against returning to the planet the atoms they've borrowed.

Whatever ignorance, pride or fanaticism may suggest to the contrary, Esoteric Cosmology can be shown inseparably connected with both philosophy and modern science. The gods of the ancients, the monads--from Pythagoras down to Leibnitz--and the atoms of the present materialistic school (as borrowed by them from the theories of the old Greek Atomists) are only a compound unit, or a graduated unity like the human frame, which begins with body and ends with spirit.

Atoms have substantial, chewy centers made of protons and neutrons stuck together by the most powerful force in the universe, which, in the great poetic tradition of physics, is officially called the strong force. from The Sun's Heartbeat

The central image for freedom in Lucretius is the clinamen or sudden "swerve." As the atoms in the cosmos fall downward and outward they capriciously swerve, and this change in direction provides for our freedom of will. Last poems, as I read them, execute clinamens in regard to a previous poetic career. They assert a final freedom for the imagination

We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.