Hydrogen Atom Quotes

I would argue that masturbation is the human animal's most important adaptation. The very cornerstone of our technological civilization. Our hands evolved to grip tools, all right - including our own. You see, thinkers, inventors, and scientists are usually geeks, and geeks have a harder time getting laid than anyone. Without the built-in sexual release valve provided by masturbation, it's doubtful that early humans would have ever mastered the secrets of fire or discovered the wheel. And you can bet that Galileo, Newton, and Einstein never would have made their discoveries if they hadn't first been able to clear their heads by slapping the salami (or "knocking a few protons off the old hydrogen atom"). The same goes for Marie Curie. Before she discovered radium, you can be certain she first discovered the little man in the canoe. ~ Ernest Cline

My four things I care about are truth, meaning, fitness and grace. [...] Sam [Harris] would like to make an argument that the better and more rational our thinking is, the more it can do everything that religion once did. [...] I think about my personal physics hero, Dirac – who was the guy who came up with the equation for the electron, less well-known than the Einstein equations but arguably even more beautiful...in order to predict that, he needed a positively-charged and a negatively-charged particle, and the only two known at the time were the electron and the proton to make up, let's say, a hydrogen atom. Well, the proton is quite a bit heavier than the electron and so he told the story that wasn't really true, where the proton was the anti-particle of the electron, and Heisenberg pointed out that that couldn't be because the masses are too far off and they have to be equal. Well, a short time later, the anti-electron -- the positron, that is -- was found, I guess by Anderson at Caltech in the early 30s and then an anti-proton was created some time later. So it turned out that the story had more meaning than the exact version of the story...so the story was sort of more true than the version of the story that was originally told. And I could tell you a similar story with Einstein, I could tell it to you with Darwin, who, you know, didn't fully understand the implications of his theory, as is evidenced by his screwing up a particular kind of orchid in his later work...no ~ Eric R. Weinstein

Finally I got to carbon, and as you all know, in the case of carbon the reaction works out beautifully. One goes through six reactions, and at the end one comes back to carbon. In the process one has made four hydrogen atoms into one of helium. The theory, of course, was not made on the railway train from Washington to Ithaca ... It didn't take very long, it took about six weeks, but not even the Trans-Siberian railroad [has] taken that long for its journey. ~ Hans Bethe

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

The fine-structure constant derives its name from its origin. It first appeared in Sommerfeld's work to explain the fine details of the hydrogen spectrum. ... Since Sommerfeld expressed the energy states of the hydrogen atom in terms of the constant [alpha], it came to be called the fine-structure constant. ~ John S. Rigden

In size the electron bears the same relation to an atom that a baseball bears to the earth. Or, as Sir Oliver Lodge puts it, if a hydrogen atom were magnified to the size of a church, an electron would be a speck of dust in that church. ~ Waldemar Kaempffert

In this communication I wish first to show in the simplest case of the hydrogen atom (nonrelativistic and undistorted) that the usual rates for quantization can be replaced by another requirement, in which mention of "whole numbers" no longer occurs. Instead the integers occur in the same natural way as the integers specifying the number of nodes in a vibrating string. The new conception can be generalized, and I believe it touches the deepest meaning of the quantum rules. ~ Erwin Schrodinger

Each atom of the Holy Spirit is intelligent, and like all other matter has solidity, form, and size, and occupies space. ~ Orson Pratt

To understand hydrogen is to understand all of physics. ~ Victor Frederick Weisskopf

We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him, and science gives today the only world picture which we can consider as valid. It gives an understanding of the inside of the atom and of the whole universe, or the peculiar properties of the chemical substances and of the manner in which genes duplicate in biology. An educated layman can, of course, not contribute to science, but can enjoy and participate in many scientific discoveries which as constantly made. Such participation was quite common in the 19th century, but has unhappily declined. Literacy in science will enrich a person's life. ~ Hans Bethe

Knowing he [Bob Serber] was going to the [first atom bomb] test, I asked him how he planned to deal with the danger of rattlesnakes. He said, 'I'll take along a bottle of whiskey.' ... I ended by asking, 'What would you do about those possibilities [of what unknown phenomena might cause a nuclear explosion to propagate in the atmosphere]?' Bob replied, 'Take a second bottle of whiskey. ~ Edward Teller

I think; here I lie under a haystack ... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitely small in comparison with the rest of space, in which I am not, and which has nothing to do with me; and the period of time in which it is my lot to live is so petty beside the eternity in which I have not been, and shall not be ... And in this atom, this mathematical point, the blood is circulating, the brain is working and wanting something ... Isn't it loathsome? Isn't it petty? ~ Ivan Turgenev

Consider carbon, for example. The lifetime of carbon in the combined atmosphere-ocean-biosphere, the time it takes on average before the typical carbon atom is transferred to the sediment, is less than 200,000 years. ~ Michael B McElroy

He'd misspoken. She wasn't a blow. She was a hydrogen bomb directly aimed at his solar plexus. ~ Kelly Moran

Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Growth is the surviving influence in all our lives. The tree will send up its trunk in thick profusion from land burned black by atom bombs. Children will grow from poverty and filth and oppression and develop honor, integrity, contribute to all mankind. ~ Chester Himes

Minds vary in sensitiveness and in self-power, as bodies do in susceptibility of attraction and repulsion. When, when shall we learn that they are governed by laws as inexorable as physical laws, and that a man can as easily refuse to obey what has power over him as a steel atom can resist the magnet? ~ James Anthony Froude

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. ~ Jack London

Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren't created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today. ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb ... But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself? ~ Richard Wright

As a producer, I think one of the most important decisions you make is not necessarily the material you are working on but the production apparatus that you choose to develop the project with, and that determines what funding you go to, it determines many factors. ~ Atom Egoyan

But in that one moment, I died a thousand deaths only to be resurrected as a creature who would only live for you. To do your will. To sit at your feet, if it be your command. I didn't even know you. But I loved you with every atom, iota and ounce of my being. You could do or say anything and I would love you for it. Because it was you. ~ Celestine Matoive

The foodstuff, carbohydrate, is essentially a packet of hydrogen, a hydrogen supplier, a hydrogen donor, and the main event during its combustion is the splitting off of hydrogen. ~ Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

If the eye of the heart is open, in each atom there will be one hundred secrets ~ Farid Al-Din Attar

Because our own solar system has planets moving in nice circles, astronomers naturally assumed that the balls of dust and hydrogen and helium gas that become solar systems condensed evenly. We now realize that it is more likely that gravity compresses them in a haphazard, random way, resulting in planets that move in elliptical or irregular orbits that may intersect or collide with one another. This is imprtant because it may be that only solar systems with circular planetary orbits like ours are conducive to life. ~ Michio Kaku

I came to see myself one day and it was like looking into a mirror. I came to see that at any given moment, I am both equally ready to stay and to leave. It's like I always have my luggage with me and I can unpack or repack on short notice. I guess that's something you can call a traveler's heart. You are ready to stay with every atom in your body; but you are also ready to leave that way. You're not afraid of forever but you're also not afraid of nothing at all. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Oh, I wonder if I will ever feel the burst of birth-joy, that knowing that the indescribable, joyous thing that has wooed and wond me has passed through my life and produced one atom of the great reality. ~ Emily Carr

According to a Confucian view, there are four steps in social develpment, wrote Wilhem (Sr.). There are the individual, the family, the state, and mankind. The West had always emphasized the individual and the state. Individual development is extolled, and the single human being is regarded as central and as an atom of society. Over-emphasis on the function of the individual has led to deterioration of the family. Unlike Westerners, the Chinese have given greater weight to family and mankind. The consciousness of the individual is contained in the family, and since traditional China considered itself the world, Chinese considered themselves responsible for humankind rather than for the state. ~ Hellmut Wilhelm

There are only two things I can do better than most people. One of them is to make vodka from goats' milk, and the other is to put together an atom bomb. ~ Jonas Jonasson

The [character-]armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature.

The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand them, is mystic man. He is interested not in "material" but in "spiritual" things. He forms a mystical, supernatural idea about nature.

Both the mechanist and the mystic stand inside the limits and conceptual laws of a civilization which is ruled by a contradictory and murderous mixture of machines and gods. This civilization forms the mechanistic-mystical structures of men, and the mechanistic-mystical character structures keep reproducing a the mechanistic-mystical civilization. Both mechanists and mystics find themselves inside the framework of human structure in a civilization conditioned by mechanistics and mysticism. They cannot grasp the basic problems of this civilization because their thinking and philosophy correspond exactly to the condition they project and continue to reproduce. In order to realize the power of mysticism, one has only to think of the murderous conflict between Hindus and Muslims at the time India was divided. To comprehend what mechanistic civilization means, think of the "age of the atom bomb. ~ Wilhelm Reich

If to a poet a physicist may speak
Freely, as though we shared a common tongue,
For "peace in our time" I should hardly seek
By means that once proved wrong.
It seems the Muscovite
Has quite a healthy, growing appetite.
We can't be safe; at least we can be right.
Some bombs may help - perhaps a bomb-proof cellar,
But surely not the Chamberlain umbrella.
The atom is now big; the world is small.
Unfortunately, we have conquered space.
If war does come, it comes to all,
To every distant place.
Will people have the dash
That Britons had when their world seemed to crash
Before a small man with a small mustache?
You rhyme the atoms to amuse and charm us -
Your counsel should inspire, and not disarm us.

(Teller's reply to an anonymous British man's poem/message (that Americans are too belligerent), both in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists). ~ Edward Teller

Together the magicks swirled and danced around us, invisible but tangible, like an breeze. This wasn't defensive or offensive magic. It wasn't used to gather information, for strategy or diplomacy, or to fight a war against supernatural enemy.
It simply was.
It was fundamental, inexorable. It was nothing and everything, infinity and oblivion, from the magnificent furnace of a star to the electrons that hummed in an atom. It was life and death and everything in between, the urge to fight and grow and swim and fly. It was a cascade of water across boulders, the slow-moving advance of mountain glaciers, the march of time. ~ Chloe Neill

The distances across that atom, in relative measure, are the same as the distances across the universe. So there is no big and no little and I'm left to realize that the pain I feel, relative to me, is as big as two galaxies moving apart in the universe, ~ Chris Crutcher

It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. ~ Philip K. Dick

A disciple: I am worried about human suffering all over the world. What is the solution?Spiritual leader: The solution to our miseries lie within central atom of our being, 'I'. Once this central atom transcends to 'WE', human sufferings can be resolved. ~ Santosh Kalwar

You've a perfect right to call me as impractical as a dormouse, and to feel I'm out of touch with life. But this is the point where we simply can't see eye to eye. We've nothing whatever in common. Don't you see. . . it's not an accident that's drawn me from Blake to Whitehead, it's a certain line of thought which is fundamental to my whole approach. You see, there's something about them both. . . They trusted the universe. You say I don't know what the modern world's like, but that's obviously untrue. Anyone who's spent a week in London knows just what it's like. . . if you mean neurosis and boredom and the rest of it. And I do read a modern novel occasionally, in spite of what you say. I've read Joyce and Sartre and Beckett and the rest, and every atom in me rejects what they say. They strike me as liars and fools. I don't think they're dishonest so much as hopelessly tired and defeated."

Lewis had lit his pipe. He did it as if Reade were speaking to someone else. Now he said, smiling faintly, "I don't think we're discussing modern literature."

Reade had an impulse to call the debater's trick, but he repressed it. Instead he said quietly, "We're discussing modern life, and you brought up the subject. And I'm trying to explain why I don't think that murders and wars prove your point. I'm writing about Whitehead because his fundamental intuition of the universe is the same as my own. I believe like Whitehead that the universe is a single organism that so ~ Colin Wilson

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe. ~ Frank Zappa

In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and 'get' everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don't understand each atom of the potato! ~ Jean-Luc Godard

All the seeds of Christianity -- of superstition, were sown in my mind and
cultivated with great diligence and care.

All that time I knew nothing of any science -- nothing about the other side -- nothing of the objections that had been urged against the blessed Scriptures, or against the perfect Congregational creed. Of course I had heard the ministers speak of blasphemers, of infidel wretches, of scoffers who laughed at holy things. They did not answer their arguments, but they tore their characters into shreds and demonstrated by the fury of assertion that they had done the Devil's work. And yet in spite of all I heard -- of all I read. I could not quite believe. My brain and heart said No.

For a time I left the dreams, the insanities, the illusions and delusions, the nightmares of theology. I studied astronomy, just a little -- I examined maps of the heavens -- learned the names of some of the constellations -- of some of the stars -- found something of their size and the velocity with which they wheeled in their orbits -- obtained a faint conception of astronomical spaces -- found that some of the known stars were so far away in the depths of space that their light, traveling at the rate of nearly two hundred thousand miles a second, required many years to reach this little world -- found that, compared with the great stars, our earth was but a grain of sand -- an atom – found that the old belief that all the hosts of heaven had been created for ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Not one atom can rest until it finds its freedom. ~ Swami Vivekananda

We have here a proof that there is in the atom a fundamental quantity, which increases by regular steps as one passes from one element to the next. This quantity can only be the charge on the central positive nucleus, of the existence of which we already have definite proof. ~ Henry Moseley

The hydrogen bomb is not the answer to the Western peoples' dream of full and final insurance of their security ... While it has increased their striking power it has sharpened their anxiety and deepened their sense of insecurity. ~ B.H. Liddell Hart

The success that Americans are said to worship is success of a specific sort: accomplished not through hard work, primarily, but through the ingenious angle, the big break. Sit down at a lunch counter, stand back up a star. Invest in a new issue and watch it soar. Split a single atom, win a war. ~ Walter Kirn

Because I realize now, that's the way it works. That if you're lucky, you might get to fall in love so hard and so deep, that it changes you. That love seeps its way into every atom and molecule in your whole being, so that even if it's over, or the two of you are forced apart, you'll always carry the imprint of their soul with you, steady as a heartbeat. Forever ... ~ Melody Grace

Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty, and turn his vision from the low objects which surround him. Let him gaze on that brilliant light, set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe; let the earth appear to him a point in comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him wonder at the fact that this vast circle is itself but a very fine point in comparison with that described by the stars in their revolution round the firmament. But if our view be arrested there, let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the power of conception than nature that of supplying material for conception. The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought. ~ Blaise Pascal