#atoms

Moreover, the abundance of chemical compounds and their importance in daily life hindered the chemist from investigating the question, in what does the individuality of the atoms of different elements consist. ↗

— Johannes Stark

#atoms #chemical #chemist #compounds #consist

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#beauty #cosmos #philosophy #science #universe

I have reveled in my littleness and irresponsibility. It has relieved me of the harassing desire to live, I feel content to live dangerously, indifferent to my fate; I have discovered I am a fly, that we are all flies, that nothing matters. It’s a great load off my life, for I don’t mind being such a micro-organism—to me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe—such a great universe, so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible—and eternal, so that come what may to my “Soul,” my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part—I shall still have some sort of a finger in the Pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me—but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you. ↗

— W.N.P. Barbellion

#death #life #death

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#cosmos #dna #sense-of-wonder #stars #wonder

The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust. ↗

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

#cosmic #star-stuff #biology

Man is born passionate of body, but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good in his main-spring of Mind. But God help us all! It is at present a sad jar of atoms. ↗

— Lord Byron

#body #born #god #god help #good

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion. ↗

— Democritus

#else #empty #empty space #everything #except

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. ↗

— Wilhelm Dilthey

#changes #conceive #could #fixed #forces

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. ↗

— William Turner

#been #data #give #heard #here

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms. ↗

— George Wald

#atom #atoms #knowing #made #physicist