Quotes About Atoms

Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs.

Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs.

According to convention there is a sweet and a bitter, a hot and a cold, and according to convention, there is an order. In truth, there are atoms and a void.

For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.

Atoms, in short, are very abundant. They are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-- up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-- probably once belonged to Shakespeare.

Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.

For you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you.

Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary drugstore—and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare.

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)

Of every 200 atoms in your body, 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen, and just 19 are carbon32.fn3

The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting—fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.

For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there

The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be: "All things are made of atoms.

The basic working arrangement of atoms is the molecule (from the Latin for "little mass").

Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary drugstore—and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you

your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which would have ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)

Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, then silently disassemble and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.

the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere.

atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world—billiard balls are most often used for illustration—they don't actually strike each other. "Rather," as Timothy Ferris explains, "the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other Ã¢â'¬Â¦

A physicist is the atoms' way of thinking about atoms. Anonymous

The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.

When you feel the sun warm on your back on a summer's day, it's really excited atoms you feel. The higher you climb, the fewer molecules there are, and so the fewer collisions between them.