48 quotes found
“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”
“In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world....”
“The atoms of our body, as well, flow in and away from us. We, like waves and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous”
“The world existed for a very long time before this particular set of seven billion billion atoms came along and it will go right on after they're scattered up, down and sideways.”
“Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we’re made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support ...”
“After our negotiations were completed, the dome would be imploded and launched toward the nearest black hole, so that none of its atoms would ever contaminate this particular universe again. I thou...”
“Also unlike a planet, an electron—if excited by heat or light—can leap from its low-energy shell to an empty, high-energy shell. The electron cannot stay in the high-energy state for long, so it so...”
“The dogma of the impossibility of determining the atomic constitution of substances, which until recently was advocated with such fervor by the most able chemists, is beginning to be abandoned and ...”