Quotes About Atom

Physically, man is but an atom in space, and a pulsation in time. Spiritually, the entire outward universe receives significance from him, and the scope of his existence stretches beyond the stars.

The giants of the intellect, whom you admire so much, once taught you that the earth was flat and that the atom was the smallest particle of matter. The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies, not of achievements.

Nature is full of wonders; every atom is a standing miracle, and endowed with such qualities, as could not be impressed on it by a power and wisdom less than infinite.

But the first the general public learned about the discovery was the news of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atom bomb. A splendid achievement of science and technology had turned malign. Science became identified with death and destruction.

Splitting the atom is like trying to shoot a gnat in the Albert Hall at night and using ten million rounds of ammunition on the off chance of getting it. That should convince you that the atom will always be a sink of energy and never a reservoir of energy.

if we were organisms so sensitive that a single atom, or even a few atoms, could make a perceptible impression on our senses – Heavens, what would life be like! To stress one point: an organism of that kind would most certainly not be capable of developing the kind of orderly thought which, after passing through a long sequence of earlier stages, ultimately results in forming, among many other ideas, the idea of an atom.

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

When passion has wrecked the body in one life, it is stamped upon the seed atom. In the next descent to rebirth, it is therefore impossible for him to gather sound material with which to build a brain of stable construction.

Mass travel by air may prove to be more significant to world destiny than the atom bomb.

The road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

My PhD project was actually doing something that required a high-intensity laser. It was supposed to work in a way that many, many photons of light would interact with an atom all at the same time.

There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.

"Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world."

Every atom in me feels composed of lead. This is what dying is: a pull to the ground.

The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.

The buckyball, with sixty carbon atoms, is the most symmetrical form the carbon atom can take. Carbon in its nature has a genius for assembling into buckyballs. The perfect nanotube, that is, the nanotube that the carbon atom naturally wants to make and makes most often, is exactly large enough that one buckyball can roll right down the center.

an atom with an abnormal number of neutrons.)

Resulta un tanto fascinante pensar que si tu mismo te fueses deshaciendo con unas pinzas, átomo a átomo, lo que producirías sería un montón de fino polvo atómico, nada del cual habría estado nunca vivo pero todo él habría sido en otro tiempo tú.

It is a degree of slenderness way beyond the capacity of our imaginations, but you can get some idea of the proportions if you bear in mind that one atom is to the width of a millimetre line as the thickness of a sheet of paper is to the height of the Empire State Building.

If this seems confusing, you may take some comfort in knowing that it was confusing to physicists, too. Overbye notes: "Bohr once commented that a person who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what had been said." Heisenberg, when asked how one could envision an atom, replied: "Don't try.

By space the universe encompasses me and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.

I heard, when I was in Delhi, that the men of the West are studying the construction of the atom, and have guessed at the force imprisoned in it. Wait until they have learned how to explode the atom, and then see what they will do to one another.

Imagine (if you can) what the planetary model of the atom would have looked like — its satellite electrons orbiting its sunlike nucleus — if people had still thought the earth was flat. It would have been — literally — unthinkable.