Atoms Quotations

No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.

You may have heard the world is made up of atoms and molecules, but it's really made up of stories. When you sit with an individual that's been here, you can give quantitative data a qualitative overlay.

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.

I started my scientific work by putting forward a hypothesis on the arrangement of atoms in nitrogen-containing molecules.

For it goes without saying that this great recognition at this time will aid tremendously our efforts to find the necessarily large funds for the next voyage of exploration farther into the depths of the atom.

A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.

I am not sure why, but I have been obsessed by the Atom Bomb ever since it first happened.

Even the structure of the atom has been found by the mind. Therefore the mind is subtler than the atom. That which is behind the mind, namely the individual soul, is subtler than the mind.

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.

The atoms become like a moth, seeking out the region of higher laser intensity.

Broadly speaking, the discovery of X-rays has increased the keenness of our vision ten thousand times, and we can now 'see' the individual atoms and molecules.

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.

Organic compounds exist in which a hydrogen atom, joined to the carbon, acquires acid properties as a result of the proximity of certain functional groupings.

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.

Nanoengineering is learning how to make devices as small as 10 to 100 atoms in width. Much of the work is going on in the electronics industry, where there is great demand to pack more components onto computer chips.

I was actually telling people that - by harnessing the atom - we could enter a new era of unlimited power that would do away with the need to dam our beautiful streams.

In a gas, motion has the upper hand; the atoms are moving so fast that they have no time to enter into any sort of combination with each other: occasionally, atom must meet atom and, so to speak, each hold out vain hands to the other, but the pace is too great and, in a moment, they are far away from each other again.

Carbon nanotubes are amazing because they're really good electrical conductors, yet they are only a few atoms in diameter. You can make transistors out of them in the same way you can with silicon. At Berkeley, we made the narrowest device anybody had ever made. It was basically a single molecule.

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

The future of the world, dependent as it is upon atomic energy, requires more understanding and knowledge about the atom.

The infinite variety in the properties of the solid materials we find in the world is really the expression of the infinite variety of the ways in which the atoms and molecules can be tied together, and of the strength of those ties.

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

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the sermon on the mount.

In 1958, I was a delegate to the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva.

Everything, however complicated - breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests - is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn't offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws.

The atoms may be compared to the letters of the alphabet, which can be put together into innumerable ways to form words. So the atoms are combined in equal variety to form what are called molecules.

Amplifying atoms is more subtle than amplifying electromagnetic waves because atoms can only change their quantum state and cannot be created. Therefore, even if one could amplify gold atoms, one would not realize the dreams of medieval alchemy.

The difference between a gas and a liquid is that in the former, the atoms and molecules move to and fro in an independent existence, whereas in the latter, they are always in touch with one another, though they are changing partners continually.

Whenever we warm our hands by the fire, we allow the energy radiated by the fire to quicken up the movements of the atoms of which the hands are composed. When we cool any substance, we check those movements.

The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb.

On the basis of Lorentz's theory, if we limit ourselves to a single spectral line, it suffices to assume that each atom (or molecule) contains a single moving electron.

The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the United States reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't.

As the craft re-entered earth's atmosphere, it was coming in so fast, it heated up the surrounding atoms and molecules, and they became positively and negatively charged, and highly reactive, and began luminescing all around us.

During the 20th century, we came to understand that the essence of all substances - their colour, texture, hardness and so forth - is set by their structure, on scales far smaller even than a microscope can see. Everything on Earth is made of atoms, which are, especially in living things, combined together in intricate molecular assemblages.

The central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. If you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you'll find molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. Probe the smaller particles, you'll find something else, a tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string.

There are millions and billions of atoms of memory of all kinds of musical themes in me.

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

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.

Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?

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

It turns out all molecular and biological systems have speeds of the atoms move inside them; the fastest possible speeds are determined by their molecular vibrations, and this speed is about a kilometre per second.

Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.

Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist, the only difference between a living and a dead body is that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent.

What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.

When you vaporize rock, there is very little hydrogen -- whereas 50 percent of the atoms in a rock are oxygen.

If the Russians ever decide to atom bomb us, they're certain to drop an especially large one on the plant in Pleasantville.

98% of the atoms in your body were not there a year ago.

For the Earth is only an atom in the universe of worlds.

The electron, as it leaves the atom, crystallises out of Schrödinger's mist like a genie emerging from his bottle.

But it is necessary to insist more strongly than usual that what I am putting before you is a model-the Bohr model atom-because later I shall take you to a profounder level of representation in which the electron instead of being confined to a particular locality is distributed in a sort of probability haze all over the atom.

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.

If you were to look at each atom as a universe unto itself, think of the number of universes within each of us.

Just by being ourselves we are borne toward a destiny far beyond anything we could imagine. It is enough to know that the being I nourish inside me is the same as the Being that suffuses every atom of the cosmos.

The whole material world. It doesn't actually exist. Matter is not material. It's made up of atoms that are moving at lightning speeds around huge empty spaces. So as you go beyond the appearance of molecules, you end up with a subatomic world, and if you go beyond that you end up with nothing. Nothing is the source of everything.

Every individual, from the highest to the lowest degree, has his place in the ladder of social life, and around him swirls a little world of interests, composed of stormy passions and conflicting atoms

Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl, And, scarce-suspected, animate the whole.

My immediate reaction was that our job had just increased by two or three years, but that the samples were still there. A 200 miles-per-hour crash isn't going to dislodge solar wind atoms that are buried in the collectors. It's going to take longer and people are going to have to work harder...but the samples are still there.

New regulations would be a disaster at this point. Nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter at the level of individual atoms and molecules, offers the greatest benefits for society if left to grow through modest regulation, civilian research, and an emphasis on self-regulation and responsible professional culture.

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.

We talk about quantum weirdness and things being in two places at once, but it all involves atoms and molecules, stuff we don't normally interact with.

Our nuclear fission reactors operate like a slow A bomb, splitting heavy plutonium or uranium atoms into smaller elements and giving off power.

Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

I would love to have faith. When you take God out of the universe, there is no-one taking care us - we are just parcels of meat, collections of atoms - we have a little flowering on Earth, and then we're gone.

Virtually all of the atoms in our bodies and in the Earth were in interstellar grains - stardust grains - before the solar system formed. We're using this comet as a library that picked up records of the formation of our solar system, and has been storing them far from the sun at very low temperatures for four and a half billion years.

We are 'nuclear waste' from the fuel that makes stars shine; indeed, each of us contains atoms whose provenance can be traced back to thousands of different stars spread through our Milky Way.

It sometimes strikes me that the whole of science is a piece of impudence; that nature can afford to ignore our impertinent interference. If our monkey mischief should ever reach the point of blowing up the earth by decomposing an atom, and even annihilated the sun himself, I cannot really suppose that the universe would turn a hair.

The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .

We should note that this latter type of shift was successfully amplified to a considerable extent by Russian physicists using the intense light of a ruby laser whose wavelength is close to that of a transition of the potassium atom.

You know how to split atoms, how to send explorers to the moon, how to splice genes, but you don't know how people ought to live.

Vibrations are the key to everything. Atoms used to be, but atoms have quite gone out.

Every force field is simultaneously a field of information because even physics now acknowledges that an atom is not only a hierarchy of different states of energy, or different states of force fields.

The shelf life of molecules is very short. Ninety-eight percent of all the atoms in my body are gone by next year.

As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm, As is the atom, so is the universe, As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.

Neither is there a smallest part of what is small, but there is always a smaller (for it is impossible that what is should cease to be). Likewise there is always something larger than what is large.

...where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come united...

Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.

The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I'm not sure it'll ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe, everything except itself.

We thought it would be nice to have atoms interact in such a gentle way with the photons that they would just take an imprint of the photons, so that many atoms could 'see' the same photon and it would give rise to a lot of interesting effects. Myself and my colleagues had this project for a very long time and we were finally able to observe it.

The photons are smaller than the distance between atoms in the material.

We are trying to learn more about comets to see what the first materials were like or how water arrived on Earth. It's important because all the atoms in our bodies were formed from the stars.

Every so often, the memory atoms bond with the imagination atoms and something interesting -- a fictive precipitate -- will settle out of the solution.

There should have been a period when most of the atoms in the universe were neutral. This would have continued until stars and galaxies began forming.

After a few years of intensive research, we found a way to use a pulsed laser directed into a nozzle to vaporize any material, allowing for the first time the atoms of any element in the periodic table to be produced cold in a supersonic beam.

The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms

Although the hydrogen atoms are constantly scrambling, the overall range of types of structures can be characterized by three basic configurations." ()

It is really about trust and mutual respect. It is much more than just atoms and nuclear energy.

Darwin and his successors taught us how our biosphere evolved, and thereby transformed our conception of humanity's place in nature. In the twenty-first century, space scientists are setting Darwin in a grander cosmic context - probing the origins of Earth, stars, atoms and the universe itself.

They are very small rocks, but they are rocks nonetheless. And what do these minerals tell us about how these grains form? We think that much of the Earth's water and organics ... perhaps came from comets. So what will these samples tell us about basically where our atoms and molecules came from and then how they were delivered to Earth and in what amount?

Evolution, climate change, and the construction of the physical universe down to its atoms are processes that we measure in millions or billions of years.

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?

I'm aware there are certain products that are being advertised - food products - with 'no chemicals whatsoever.' Well, that would be pretty hard to arrange, since everything around us is made up of atoms and molecules - chemicals - including ourselves.

It has taken fifteen billion years to get you here. That is scientific fact. We are not just the products of our parents. Sixty percent of our body is hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen atoms in us go back to the fireball fourteen billion years ago. We have been around a long time, and it has been a great birthing process to bring us forward.

When you die, you are extinguished. From being you will be transformed to non-being. A god does not necessarily dwell among our capricious atoms.

You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life.

Every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.... These patterns of events are locked in with certain geometric patterns in the space. Indeed, each building and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space, and out of nothing else; they [patterns in the space] are the atoms and molecules from which a building or a town is made.

I'm aware there are certain products that are being advertised - food products - with 'no chemicals whatsoever.' Well, that would be pretty hard to arrange, since everything around us is made up of atoms and molecules - chemicals - including ourselves.

Nothing is indifferent, nothing is powerless in the universe; an atom might destroy everything, an atom might save everything!

We must infer that a plant or animal of any species, is made up of special units, in all of which there dwells the intrinsic aptitude to aggregate into the form of that species: just as in the atoms of a salt, there dwells the intrinsic aptitude to crystallize in a particular way.‎

I build quantum computers that store information on individual atoms and then massage the normal interactions between the atoms to make them compute.