Quotes about Atoms

The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.

Duality is not merely a philosophy; it is a physical state of being as well. The very atoms that make up our cells are based on positive and negative charges whose opposition sustains a certain life-form. Lipton has coined the phrase the “biology of consciousness” to summarize the transformational idea that living organisms, including humans, rather than being empirical givens, are actually malleable thought-forms. In other words, adopting a quantum perspective, we are basically waves that only cohere as particles through an act of consciousness. By changing our consciousness, we change our physical form and functioning.

Those who dismiss "revisionist" qualms about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as indulgences in peace-time sentimentality must count President Truman's own Chief of Staff among the bleeding hearts: "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. . . . The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion , and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. We were the first to have this weapon in our possession, and the first to use it. There is a practical certainty that potential enemies will have it in the future and that atomic bombs will some time be used against us."

It was necessary for us to discover greater powers of destruction than our enemies. We did. But after every war we have followed through with a new rise in our standard of living by the application of war-taught knowledge for the benefit of the world. It will be the same with the atomic bomb principles.

If you are going to deal in death, you should be willing to see the truth of it, not some glorious lie. If I have a battle with another sword player, it is between the two of us, our business, our truth. But if you run a planet and you get pissed off at somebody the next orbit over, you each might send a million soldiers to recycling plants. A smart rocket can come from a thousand klicks away to kill you; it doesn't care and it won't be in the least upset that it has blasted you to atomic debris. That's the real horror of modern war, that it is impersonal. Being cut with a sword hurts, and if you are close enough to do it, you can't miss the other's pain.

I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering.

Lord Rutherford was reported to have said that whoever talks about the liberation of atomic energy on an industrial scale is talking moonshine. Pronouncement of experts to the effect that something cannot be done has always irritated me.

The fortuitous or casual concourse of atoms.

If we are to survive the Atomic Age, we must have something to live by, to live on, and to live for. We must stand aside from the world's conspiracy of fear and hate and grasp once more the great monosyllables of life: faith, hope and love. Men must live by these if they live at all under the crushing weight of history.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.

We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.

Lines Written on the Window of his Jail the Night before his Execution. Let them bestow on every airth a limb; Then open all my veins, that I may swim To thee, my Maker! in that crimson lake; Then place my parboiled head upon a stake- Scatter my ashes-strew them in the air;- Lord! since thou know'st where all these atoms are, I'm hopeful thou'lt recover once my dust, And confident thou'lt raise me with the just.

At two-tenths the speed of light, dust and atoms might not do significant damage even in a voyage of 40 years, but the faster you go, the worse it is - space begins to become abrasive. When you begin to approach the speed of light, hydrogen atoms become cosmic-ray particles, and they will fry the crew. . . . So 60,000 kilometers per second may be the practical speed limit for space travel.

When oxygen and hydrogen find one another, their joining produces fiery passion. Out of this fire, water is born. Quaint Victorian chemistry gives us an image of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms in a fixed molecule that bounces around from place to place. The reality of water is not so orderly. The hydrogen atoms are not owned by any particular oxygen atom. Water is a substance very much in love with itself, and the atoms connect in webs and clusters where oxygen shares around the hydrogen atoms freely, a fluid situation indeed.

Man in his ceaseless search after truth has discovered and partially explored five world. These worlds differ from each other in the size of the units of space and time we need to describe them. In our every day practical world, we get along nicely with such units as feet and seconds. In the chemical world of molecules and atoms, the electrons complete their revolutions in a hundred million millionth of a second, while a hundred million atoms side by side extend only a distance of one inch. Inside the nucleus of the atom, we enter a third world, where events happen a million times faster still, and distances are a thousand times smaller than in the atom. In the fourth world, the astronomers measure revolutions of the planets in years, and the unit of distance, the light year, is about ten thousand million miles. Finally, we come to the spiritual world where time is measured in eternities and space is limitless. Thus, in thought we can travel from the almost infinitesimally small to the infinitely large.

It is going to be a long, hard haul; it will require patience, courage, faith that hangs on when hope fails, if we are to tame the rude barbarity of man, so that the atomic age becomes a blessing, not a curse. There never was such a day for the Christian gospel. God help us all in these years ahead to make that gospel live in men and nations!

Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole, arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer subjects of thought, they find in the contemplation of crystals and magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness found by mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly vitality.

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves.

Could we have avoided the tragedy of Hiroshima? Could we have started the atomic age with clean hands? No one knows. No one can find out.

We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. . . . The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.

By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space.

Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect-it was this work for which, sixteen years later he was awarded the Nobel prize. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time and matter into one fundamental unity. This last paper contains no references and quotes no authority. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist's. They contain very little mathematics. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done. It is pretty safe to say that, so long as physics lasts, no one will again hack out three major breakthroughs in one year.

In this era of world wars, in this atomic age, values have changed. We have learned that we are guests of existence, travelers between two stations. We must discover security within ourselves.

Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work out salvation. . . . Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace or world destruction.

Love is a balm that contains the power of healing and of renewing and of everlasting life within its effulgent essence. Love is the great refiner and beautifier. Love is more! Love is the key to every door. It is the creative reality behind every righteous desire and every ardent hope. Love is the cohesive power of the universe as it binds together atoms and substance. It holds families together-the world and the entire universe. If love were withdrawn all things would fall apart and disintegrate. When a human being eliminates love from his life he too begins to fall apart. Love is not only eternal but it is the most desirable element to possess.

The real scientist will realize that TRUTH has many avenues of approach to its many phases, and that spiritual truths are to be sought after even more determinedly than others which have to do with this life and earth only. It must be recognized when they do this that spiritual truths are not found on the drawing board or in test tubes. The pursuit of such prescribes that the things of man are understood by the spirit and perceptions of man while the things of God are made known by the revelations of God. Man in and of himself cannot find them out. Yet they are obtained by search-the search for truth, yes, spiritual truth. The youth in particular must not be deceived by the elementary discoveries that have been made by science in many fields. Rockets, missiles and their great potentiality are amazing to us all, but very minute when compared to the majesty of the universe. The real scientist would probably be the first to acknowledge the minor things that have been done thus far as a result of the discovery of atomic and hydrogen power. The fact that they have been able to draw on materials and sources of things already there is perhaps the best evidence of the greatness of God and the virtual nothingness of man thus far exhibited in his pursuits of knowledge. When we attempt to develop a true philosophy of life, one of the first things to do is to gain a full appreciation and understanding of God.

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd, And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd, And now a bubble burst, and now a world.