Atoms Quotes

• The story is told of Lord Kelvin, a famous Scotch physicist of the last century, that after he had given a lecture on atoms and molecules, one of his students came to him with the question, "Professor, what is your idea of the structure of the atom." "What," said Kelvin, "The structure of the atom? Why, don't you know, the very word 'atom' means the thing that can't be cut. How then can it have a structure?" "That," remarked the facetious young man, "shows the disadvantage of knowing Greek."

  

  Arthur Holly Compton
  • Ideas
  • Lord
  • Students

• Traditional nationalism cannot survive the fissioning of the atom. One world or none.

  

  Stuart Chase
  • World
  • Traditional
  • Nationalism

• I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.

  

  Richard Feynman
  • Universe
  • Atoms
  • Cosmology

• If the atoms in a decimetre cube of lead were all put into a chain side by side the same distance apart as they are in the normal lead, the strings of atoms so formed would reach over six million million miles.

  

  Francis William Aston
  • Science
  • Distance
  • Normal

• If we conceive all the changes in the physical world as reducible to the motion of atoms, motions generated by means of the fixed nuclear forces of those atoms, the whole of the world could thus be known by means of the natural sciences.

  

  Will Yun Lee
  • World
  • Changes
  • Sciences

• So if we're all quarks and electrons ..." he begins. What?" We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together." Better than that," I say. "Nothing really 'rubs together' in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons. So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time.

  

  Scarlett Thomas
  • World
  • Remember
  • Together

• From the results so far obtained it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the long-range atoms arising from collision of alpha particles with nitrogen are not nitrogen atoms but probably atoms of hydrogen, or atoms of mass 2. If this be the case, we must conclude that the nitrogen atom is disintegrated under the intense forces developed in a close collision with a swift alpha particle, and that the hydrogen atom which is liberated formed a constituent part of the nitrogen nucleus.

  

  Ernest Rutherford
  • Long
  • Difficult
  • Force

• I fell into a reverie, and lo, the atoms were gamboling before my eyes.

  

  August Kekule
  • Eyes
  • Atoms
  • Reverie

• We are so curiously made that one atom put in the wrong place in our original structure will often make us unhappy for life.

  

  William Godwin
  • Body
  • Made
  • Unhappy

• 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.

  

  Alexandre Dumas
  • Interests
  • Degree
  • Social Life

• It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour's bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.

  

  Erich Maria Remarque
  • Chance
  • Luck
  • Survive

• I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.

  

  Ernst Mach
  • Accept
  • Relativity
  • Dogmas

• Progressively higher levels of organization are attained as catalytic cycles on one level interlock and form hypercycles: these are systems on a higher level of organization. Thus molecules emerge from a combination of chemically active atoms; protocells emerge from sequences of complex molecules; eukaryotic cells emerge among the prokaryotes; metazoa make their appearance among the protozoa and converge in still higher-level ecological and social systems.

  

  Ervin Laszlo
  • Organization
  • Emerge
  • Molecules

• It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover.

  

  William Shakespeare
  • Science
  • Easy
  • Lovers

• 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.

  

  Richard Smalley
  • Research
  • Element
  • Produced

• If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than the war.

  

  Ernest Rutherford
  • War
  • Reason
  • Greater

• It would not become physical science to see in its self created, changeable, economical tools, molecules and atoms, realities behind phenomena... The atom must remain a tool for representing phenomena.

  

  Ernst Mach
  • Science
  • Phenomena
  • Self-created

• It is the retention by twentieth-century, Atom-Age men of the Neolithic point of view that says: You stay in your village and I will stay in mine. If your sheep eat our grass we will kill you, or we may kill you anyhow to get all the grass for our own sheep. Anyone who tries to make us change our ways is a witch and we will kill him. Keep out of our village.

  

  Carleton S. Coon
  • Men
  • Trying
  • May

• 'By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and the void,' announced Democritus. The universe consists only of atoms and the void; all else is opinion and illusion. If the soul exists, it also consists of atoms.

  

  Edward Robert Harrison
  • Reality
  • Illusion
  • Convention

• We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

  

  Niels Bohr
  • Poetry
  • Language
  • Atoms

• Why are atoms so small? ... Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water, then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if you then took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.

  

  Erwin Schrodinger
  • Water
  • Audience
  • Ocean

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

  

  Steven Chu
  • Intensity
  • Atoms
  • Moth

• With the new weapons like the atom bomb, Russia would have it, too, and use it first. It is a very difficult world. But that trouble is imminent is obvious.

  

  Karl Donitz
  • World
  • Difficult
  • Obvious

• It is unreasonable to expect science to produce a system of ethics-ethics are a kind of highway code for traffic among mankind-and the fact that in physics atoms which were yesterday assumed to be square are now assumed to be round is exploited with unjustified tendentiousness by all who are hungry for faith; so long as physics extends our dominion over nature, these changes ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you.

  

  Sigmund Freud
  • Faith
  • Changes
  • Ethics

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