Quotes About Atoms

If sensory recognition worked on the grandmother principle, the number of specific-recognition neurons for all possible combinations of nerve impulses would exceed the number of atoms in the universe.

and because atoms are so small, and are constantly being recycled, every breath you take contains atoms that were once breathed by Julius Caesar and Elvis Presley. So a little bit of you formerly ruled Rome, and sang, "Blue Suede Shoes".

If constants like G and ? do not vary in time, then the standard history of our Universe has a simple broad-brush appearance. During the first 300,000 years the dominant energy in the Universe is radiation and the temperature is greater than 3000 degrees and too hot for any atoms or molecules to exist. The Universe is a huge soup of electrons, photons of light and nuclei.

If we were to smooth out all the material in the Universe into a uniform sea of atoms we would see just how little of anything there is. There would be little more than about 1 atom in every cubic metre of space. No laboratory on Earth could produce an artificial vacuum that was anywhere near as empty as that. The best vacuum achievable today contains approximately 1000 billion atoms in a cubic metre.

We can easily imagine worlds in which the constants of Nature take on slightly different numerical values where living beings like ourselves would not be possible. Make the fine structure constant bigger and there can be no atoms, make the strength of gravity greater and stars exhaust their fuel very quickly, reduce the strength of nuclear forces and there can be no biochemistry, and so on.

Everything that is made of atoms has a density quite close to the density of a single atom given by the mass of an atom divided by its volume.

Quantum mechanics holds sway in the microworld of atoms and elementary particles. It teaches us that every mass in Nature, however solid or pointlike it may appear, has a wavelike aspect. This wave is not like a water wave. It is more analogous to a crime wave or a wave of hysteria: it is a wave of information.

Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light. That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.

The life-world of human and animal experience, with colours, tastes, solid objects, is a perceptual effect of massed atoms.

We forget we're mostly water till the rain falls and every atom in our body starts to go home.

Let us think of Nature as a builder, making all that we see out of atoms of a limited number of kinds, just as the builder of a house constructs it out of so many different kinds of things: bricks, slates, planks, panes of glass, and so on.

The way nails sometimes insist on bending when you hammer, as if they were trying to. Or the way machinery refuses to work. Matter's funny stuff. In large aggregates, it obeys natural law, but when you get down to the individual atom or electron, it's largely a matter of chance or whim—

Bohr argued that life was not infused into an organism by some mysterious 'vital' force but, like everything else in the universe, must be grounded in atoms and molecules that behaved according to the laws of physics and chemistry.

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?

Even when they are saturated in the sense of the older theory of valence, the elementary atoms still possess sufficient chemical affinity to bind other seemingly also saturated atoms and groups of atoms, under generation of clearly defined atomic bonds.

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.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

The sunlike energy released by the fusion of atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, is detonated by the fission of one of the heaviest, plutonium, named after the god of the underworld.

Spirit does not - as we have been told - keep trying to peel away from atoms of your body but is embedded in nature and you - yourself - are the crucible in which base metal can be turned to gold.

El movimiento de los átomos corre hacia arriba, hacia abajo, circularmente. Pero el curso de la virtud no está sujeto a ninguno de estos giros. Tiene, más bien, un no sé qué divino, de modo que hace su jornada por una órbita difícil e incomprensible.

And as for those parts that came from the earth, they shall return unto the earth again; and those that came from heaven, they also shall return unto those heavenly places. Whether it be a mere dissolution and unbinding of the manifold intricacies and entanglements of the confused atoms; or some such dispersion of the simple and incorruptible elements...

Alexander the Macedonian and his groom by death were brought to the same state; for either they were received among the same seminal principles of the universe, or they were alike dispersed among the atoms. Consider

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.