If the cosmos isn’t finite, then far, far away, floating duplicates of your brain – with all its experiences, thoughts, and emotions – are occasionally (and temporarily) thrown together by the random combining of atoms. Such ‘Boltzmann brains,’ as they’re called, are a disturbing consequence of an unlimited universe.
On a submicro scale, pure diamond is billions of billions of carbon atoms bonded to one another. If you shrunk yourself down and stood inside the diamond, you’d see nothing but carbon in a perfect pattern in every direction.
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.
I’m not terribly science-y. I couldn’t tell you what’s the binomial equation or how many atoms in a mole.
Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.
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 universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.
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.
There are millions and billions of atoms of memory of all kinds of musical themes in me.
We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.
I started my scientific work by putting forward a hypothesis on the arrangement of atoms in nitrogen-containing molecules.
Each day has a story to – deserves to be told, because we are made of stories. I mean, scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories.
The chemist, whose science is immediately concerned with the combinations of atoms, has rarely found it necessary to discuss their shapes, and gives them no particular forms in his diagrams. That does not mean that the shapes are unimportant, but rather that the older methods could not define them.
As far as extra dimensions are concerned, very tiny extra dimensions wouldn’t be perceived in everyday life, just as atoms aren’t: we see many atoms together but we don’t see atoms individually.
All the body wants to do biologically is decompose. Once you die, it’s, ‘Let me out here! I’m ready to shoot my atoms back into the universe!’
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.
In some sense, what you might have suspected from the first day of high-school chemistry is true: The periodic table is a colossal waste of time. Nine out of every 10 atoms in the universe are hydrogen, the first element and the major constituent of stars. The other 10 percent of all atoms are helium.
In Italy, on the breaking up of the Roman Empire, society might be said to be resolved into its original elements, – into hostile atoms, whose only movement was that of mutual repulsion.
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.
After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.
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