Amazing Atoms Quotes

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The amazing thing is that 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 - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could 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 (A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing)
Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?
Becky Chambers (A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, #1))
You and I -- we're just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?
Becky Chambers (A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, #1))
People who worry that nuclear weaponry will one day fall in the hands of the Arabs, fail to realize that the Islamic bomb has been dropped already, it fell the day MUHAMMED (pbuh) was born.
Joseph Adam Pearson.
In the end, this is a difficult story to sum up. The making of the atomic bomb is one of history's most amazing examples of teamwork and genius and poise under pressure. But it's also the story of how humans created a weapon capable of wiping our species off the planet. It's a story with no end in sight. And, like it or not, you're in it.
Steve Sheinkin (Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon)
After a while the Senior Wrangler said, "Do you know, I read the other day that every atom in your body is changed every seven years? New ones keep getting attached and old ones keep on dropping off. It goes on all the time. Marvelous, really." The Senior Wrangler could do to a conversation what it takes quite thick treacle to do to the pedals of a precision watch. "Yes? What happens to the old ones?" said Ridcully, interested despite himself. "Dunno. They just float around in the air, I suppose, until they get attached to someone else." The Archchancellor looked affronted. "What, even wizards?" "Oh, yes. Everyone. It's part of the miracle of existence." "Is it? Sounds like bad hygiene to me," said the Archchancellor. "I suppose there's no way of stopping it?" "I shouldn't think so," said the Senior Wrangler, doubtfully. "I don't think you're supposed to stop miracles of existence." "But that means everythin' is made up of everythin' else," said Ridcully. "Yes. Isn't it amazing?
Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man (Discworld, #11; Death, #2))
If you think atomic explosions in Asia wouldn't affect Americans, consider this. A study published in Scientific American in 2010 looked at the probable impact of a "small" nuclear war, one in which India and Pakistan each dropped fifty atomic bombs. The scientists concluded that the explosions would ignite massive firestorms, sending enormous amounts of dust and smoke into the atmosphere. This would block some of the sun's light from reaching the earth, making the planet colder and darker - for about ten years. Farming would collapse, and people all over the globe would starve to death. And that's if only half of one percent of all the atomic bombs on earth were used. In the end, this is a difficult story to sum up. The making of the atomic bomb is one of history's most amazing examples of teamwork and genius and poise under pressure. But it's also the story of how humans created a weapon capable of wiping our species off the planet. It's a story with no end in sight. And, like it or not, you're in it.
Steve Sheinkin (Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon)
But Charley doesn’t have our problems. He doesn’t belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself. He doesn’t even know about race, nor is he concerned with his sisters’ marriage. It’s quite the opposite. Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully. It would be difficult to explain to a dog the good and moral purpose of a thousand humans gathered to curse one tiny human. I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quick and vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)
All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need…fantasies to make life bearable.” REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. “Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—” YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. “So we can believe the big ones?” YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. “They’re not the same at all!” YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. “Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—” MY POINT EXACTLY. She tried to assemble her thoughts. THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TWO GALAXIES HAVE BEEN COLLIDING FOR A MILLION YEARS, said Death, apropos of nothing. DON’T TRY TO TELL ME THAT’S RIGHT. “Yes, but people don’t think about that,” said Susan. “Somewhere there was a bed…” CORRECT. STARS EXPLODE, WORLDS COLLIDE, THERE’S HARDLY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE HUMANS CAN LIVE WITHOUT BEING FROZEN OR FRIED, AND YET YOU BELIEVE THAT A…A BED IS A NORMAL THING. IT IS THE MOST AMAZING TALENT. “Talent?” OH, YES. A VERY SPECIAL KIND OF STUPIDITY. YOU THINK THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS INSIDE YOUR HEADS. “You make us sound mad,” said Susan. A nice warm bed… NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME? said Death
Terry Pratchett (Hogfather (Discworld, #20; Death, #4))
The embodiment of his mystic precepts, he appeared at any given moment to be on the verge of an amazing disintegration, his particular complex of atoms ready to go shooting off into the great void like a burst of fireworks.
Thomas Ligotti (Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe)
The more she thought about it, the more she realized: Oak Ridgers had kept the most amazing secret ever.
Denise Kiernan (The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II)
Who built this tree of universe that has not stopped changing from the very minute (atomic) times undergoing many beautiful and wonderful changes; Who must eat fruits bearing from this tree? Why is that all are not eating these fruits equally without differences? What is the reason? Could someone like us plant another tree like that? Why not? The eternal that does not dry up but continues to give required fruits to the souls. This creator, is he in front of us or not? If not how does this work? Without doubt we all realize that work does not happen without a reason. Therefore, one who is giving us this variety of unlimited fruits without end in this tree of universe must be immensely powerful, with unlimited knowledge, unfathomable, have infinite empathy and having many other amazing qualities. His existence is documented in all vedas and puranas. Although he exists, the reason we are not able to witness, we have to admit is our deficiency in body, faculty and mind. Our ancestors called and praised him as “Paramatma and Sarveshvara.” We have to resolve that we will practice sadhana to be able to see Paramatma and offer to Sarveshvara with great devotion our spiritual practices, without desire for any benefits. This is called Ishwarapranidhana.
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya
is an amazing revelation for those who are interested in uncovering the fundamental secrets of life. It is the way that chemistry—the study of how atoms bond to create molecules—becomes biology.
Walter Isaacson (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race)
Where do you think the term ‘count’ came from, anyway?” “Earth, I thought. A pre-atomic—late Roman, actually—term for a nobleman who ran a county. Or maybe the district was named after the rank.” “On Barrayar, it is in fact a contraction of the term ‘accountant.’ The first ’counts were Varadar Tau’s—an amazing bandit, you should read up on him sometime—Varadar Tau’s tax collectors.” “All this time I thought it was a military rank! Aping medieval history.” “Oh, the military part came immediately thereafter, the first time the old goons tried to shake down somebody who didn’t want to contribute. The rank acquired more glamour later.
Lois McMaster Bujold (Barrayar (Vorkosigan Saga, #7))
[S]uppose you make a hole in an ordinary evacuated electric light bulb and allow the air molecules to pass in at the rate of 1,000,000 a second, the bulb will become full of air in approximately 100,000,000 years.
Francis William Aston
We begin life as uninhibited explorers with a boundless fascination for the ever growing world to which we have access. And what I find amazing is that if that fascination is fed, and if it's challenged, and if it's nurtured, it can grow to an intellect capable of grappling with such marvels as the quantum nature of reality, the energy locked inside the atom, the curved spacetime of the cosmos, the elementary constituents of matter, the genetic code underlying life, the neural circuitry responsible for consciousness, and perhaps even the very origin of the universe.
Brian Greene
In less than fifteen minutes he not only agreed that the reaction was authentic but also speculated that in the process extra neutrons would boil off that could be used to split more uranium atoms and thereby generate power or make bombs. It was amazing to see how rapidly his mind worked. .
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
We begin life as uninhibited explorers with a boundless fascination for the ever growing world to which we have access. And what I find amazing is that if that fascination is fed, and if it's challenged, and if it's nurtured, it can grow to an intellect capable of grappling with such marvels as the quantum nature of reality, the energy locked inside the atom, the curved spacetime of the cosmos, the elementary constituents of matter, the genetic code underlying life, the neural circuitry responsible for consciousness, and perhaps even the very origin of the universe." - Brian Greene
Brian Greene
A brick could be used to show you how to live a richer, fuller, more satisfying life. Don’t you want to have fulfillment and meaning saturating your existence? I can show you how you can achieve this and so much more with just a simple brick. For just $99.99—not even an even hundred bucks, I’ll send you my exclusive life philosophy that’s built around a brick. Man’s used bricks to build houses for centuries. Now let one man, me, show you how a brick can be used to build your life up bigger and stronger than you ever imagined. But act now, because supplies are limited. This amazing offer won’t last forever. You don’t want to wake up in ten years to find yourself divorced, homeless, and missing your testicles because you waited even two hours too long to obtain this information. Become a hero today—save your life. Procrastination is only for the painful things in life. We prolong the boring, but why put off for tomorrow the exciting life you could be living today? If you’re not satisfied with the information I’m providing, I’m willing to offer you a no money back guarantee. That’s right, you read that wrong. If you are not 100% dissatisfied with my product, I’ll give you your money back. For $99.99 I’m offering 99.99%, but you’ve got to be willing to penny up that percentage to 100. Why delay? The life you really want is mine, and I’m willing to give it to you—for a price. That price is a one-time fee of $99.99, which of course everyone can afford—even if they can’t afford it. Homeless people can’t afford it, but they’re the people who need my product the most. Buy my product, or face the fact that in all probability you are going to end up homeless and sexless and unloved and filthy and stinky and probably even disabled, if not physically than certainly mentally. I don’t care if your testicles taste like peanut butter—if you don’t buy my product, even a dog won’t lick your balls you miserable cur. I curse you! God damn it, what are you, slow? Pay me my money so I can show you the path to true wealth. Don’t you want to be rich? Everything takes money—your marriage, your mortgage, and even prostitutes. I can show you the path to prostitution—and it starts by ignoring my pleas to help you. I’m not the bad guy here. I just want to help. You have some serious trust issues, my friend. I have the chance to earn your trust, and all it’s going to cost you is a measly $99.99. Would it help you to trust me if I told you that I trust you? Well, I do. Sure, I trust you. I trust you to make the smart decision for your life and order my product today. Don’t sleep on this decision, because you’ll only wake up in eight hours to find yourself living in a miserable future. And the future indeed looks bleak, my friend. War, famine, children forced to pimp out their parents just to feed the dog. Is this the kind of tomorrow you’d like to live in today? I can show you how to provide enough dog food to feed your grandpa for decades. In the future I’m offering you, your wife isn’t a whore that you sell for a knife swipe of peanut butter because you’re so hungry you actually considered eating your children. Become a hero—and save your kids’ lives. Your wife doesn’t want to spread her legs for strangers. Or maybe she does, and that was a bad example. Still, the principle stands. But you won’t be standing—in the future. Remember, you’ll be confined to a wheelchair. Mushrooms are for pizzas, not clouds, but without me, your life will atom bomb into oblivion. Nobody’s dropping a bomb while I’m around. The only thing I’m dropping is the price. Boom! I just lowered the price for you, just to show you that you are a valued customer. As a VIP, your new price on my product is just $99.96. That’s a savings of over two pennies (three, to be precise). And I’ll even throw in a jar of peanut butter for free. That’s a value of over $.99. But wait, there’s more! If you call within the next ten minutes, I’ll even throw in a blanket free of charge. . .
Jarod Kintz (Brick)
NEUTRINOS | The neutrino (meaning “little neutral one”) has no electrical charge and almost no mass. A fundamental particle, neutrinos are copiously produced in nuclear reactions and hardly ever interact with matter. As you read this, one hundred billion of them pass through every square centimeter of your body every second, but only a few will ever jostle even one of your atoms in your lifetime. The only way to detect neutrinos, then, is to force-feed them lots of atoms with which to interact. This is the idea behind IceCube, a giant neutrino detector located at the South Pole. Hot water bores holes in the ice, into which cables carrying light detectors are lowered. Then the water freezes around them. When neutrinos jostle an atom in the ice, these detectors see a characteristic flash of light. By this clever technique, IceCube transforms an entire cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice into a dedicated neutrino detector. Even more amazing, some of the neutrinos IceCube detected will have hit Earth at the North Pole and traveled all the way through the planet without interacting with a single atom before they enter the cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going)
Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards. That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic. And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning it into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the room with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.
Warren Ellis (CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis)
The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides
Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1))
I have a very limited time left in this marvelous form of stardust which I’ve been talking about over the past few months. I don’t feel any dread. I want to assure you that I don’t feel fear about this. It seems very petty to complain about the eventual dissipation of my stardust back into the stardust of the cosmos after having lived 72 years in this extraordinary form of existence that very few molecules in the entire universe get to experience. Indeed, to even use the word "experience" with respect to my stardust is amazing. Atoms don’t have experiences. They’re just stuff. That’s all I really am is stuff. But stuff so complexly organized across several thresholds of stuff-complexity, that it’s able to reflect upon its stuff-ness and what an extraordinary thing it has been to be alive and aware that it’s alive and aware that it’s aware that it’s alive.
Erik Olin Wright (Stardust to Stardust: Reflections on Living and Dying)
And there is more still. DNA, proteins, and the other components of life couldn’t prosper without some sort of membrane to contain them. No atom or molecule has ever achieved life independently. Pluck any atom from your body, and it is no more alive than is a grain of sand. It is only when they come together within the nurturing refuge of a cell that these diverse materials can take part in the amazing dance that we call life. Without the cell, they are nothing more than interesting chemicals. But without the chemicals, the cell has no purpose. As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, “If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?” It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake—but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
Arthur H. Compton “Science is the glimpse of God’s purpose in nature. The very existence of the amazing world of the atom and radiation points to a purposeful creation, to the idea that there is a God and an intelligent purpose back of everything . . . An orderly universe testifies to the greatest statement ever uttered: ‘In the beginning, God . . .’ ” Arthur H. Compton, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics
Anonymous
First of all, when we are all finished, and we have a mathematical theory by which we can compute consequences, what can we do? It really is an amazing thing. In order to figure out what an atom is going to do in a given situation we make up rules with marks on paper, carry them into a machine which has switches that open and close in some complicated way, and the result will tell us what the atom is going to do! If the way that these switches open and close were some kind of model of the atom, if we thought that the atom had switches in it, then I would say that I understood more or less what is going on. I find it quite amazing that it is possible to predict what will happen by mathematics, which is simply following rules which really have nothing to do with what is going on in the original thing. The closing and opening of switches in a computer is quite different from what is happening in nature.
Anonymous
What Am I? (Psalm 8) What am I? A mass of contradictions a cacophony of atoms flesh transcendent in some mysterious way. I am my past reborn and reckoned so it is no longer past but present and present tomorrow too. I am my will that strains against yet rests in my tether because I don’t have to hold on. I am my heart of flesh and also stone amazed at He who draws water from rock to quench the thirst of nations. I am my mind that takes me places feet never could to heights and depths reserved for angels where I fear and hope to tread. I am my feet too my most honest friends, taking me where I want to go whether I want to or not. I am my hands open to receive and heal but shut too in fists of hatred ready to strike. What am I? A mass of atoms and contradictions made merely, made exquisitely a human being. The glory of You is me fully alive. The glory of me is You, the Living God.
Karen Dabaghian (A Travelogue of the Interior: Finding Your Voice and God's Heart in the Psalms)
We live in a world that was created from an unlikely series of events. Atoms and molecules formed, and specks of dust created galaxies. Stars and nebulas are destroyed and reborn daily. Our planet was the result of billions of years of astronomical impacts, chemical combinations, and terrestrial evolutions. Human life evolved from molecules of water and developed a unique consciousness; and the forms of life given this amazing gift of life and consciousness, are destroying the very planet from which they were created. A remarkable chain of events has led to our existence. Earth’s thin atmosphere sustains life and is being destroyed by the very life that it is sustaining. We have been given the gift of life and still we take this experience for granted. Unless we realize the effect that we have on our environment, the Earth will become uninhabitable for life, and everything we have ever known, every person, every event, every memory or good feeling we have felt will be nothing but the past of a self-destructive organism.
Joseph P. Kauffman (Conscious Collective: An Aim for Awareness)
You have no idea what a buckyball is, do you?” I shake my head. “None whatsoever.” His eyes light up. “This is actually kind of interesting,” he says, which is almost always what someone says right before starting in on something that is not even a little bit interesting. “A fullerene is a hollow structure made of carbon atoms. A buckyball is just a spherical fullerene. They’re useful enough in isolation, but you can make macro structures out of them with some really amazing mechanical properties—” At which point I grab him by the back of the neck, pull him over on top of me, and kiss him. His eyes are wide open and his jaw is clamped shut, but when I don’t let go, he slowly relaxes into it. After a while, I come up for air. He pulls back a few inches and raises one eyebrow. “Sorry,” I say. “You really needed to stop talking.” “That’s okay,” he says. “I mean, I was just kind of surprised, and I thought—
Edward Ashton (Three Days in April)
In this chapter we will look at the entire edifice of QFT. We will see that it is based on three simple principles. We will also list some of its achievements, including some new insights and understandings not previously mentioned. THE FOUNDATION QFT is an axiomatic theory that rests on a few basic assumptions. Everything you have learned so far, from the force of gravity to the spectrum of hydrogen, follows almost inevitably from these three basic principles. (To my knowledge, Julian Schwinger is the only person who has presented QFT in this axiomatic way, at least in the amazing courses he taught at Harvard University in the 1950's.) 1. The field principle. The first pillar is the assumption that nature is made of fields. These fields are embedded in what physicists call flat or Euclidean three-dimensional space-the kind of space that you intuitively believe in. Each field consists of a set of physical properties at every point of space, with equations that describe how these particles or field intensities influence each other and change with time. In QFT there are no particles, no round balls, no sharp edges. You should remember, however, that the idea of fields that permeate space is not intuitive. It eluded Newton, who could not accept action-at-a-distance. It wasn't until 1845 that Faraday, inspired by patterns of iron filings, first conceived of fields. The use of colors is my attempt to make the field picture more palatable. 2. The quantum principle (discetization). The quantum principle is the second pillar, following from Planck's 1900 proposal that EM fields are made up of discrete pieces. In QFT, all physical properties are treated as having discrete values. Even field strengths, whose values are continues, are regarded as the limit of increasingly finer discrete values. The principle of discretization was discovered experimentally in 1922 by Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach. Their experiment (Fig. 7-1) showed that the angular momentum (or spin) of the electron in a given direction can have only two values: +1/2 or -1/2 (Fig. 7-1). The principle of discretization leads to another important difference between quantum and classical fields: the principle of superposition. Because the angular momentum along a certain axis can only have discrete values (Fig. 7-1), this means that atoms whose angular momentum has been determined along a different axis are in a superposition of states defined by the axis of the magnet. This same superposition principle applies to quantum fields: the field intensity at a point can be a superposition of values. And just as interaction of the atom with a magnet "selects" one of the values with corresponding probabilities, so "measurement" of field intensity at a point will select one of the possible values with corresponding probability (see "Field Collapse" in Chapter 8). It is discretization and superposition that lead to Hilbert space as the mathematical language of QFT. 3. The relativity principle. There is one more fundamental assumption-that the field equations must be the same for all uniformly-moving observers. This is known as the Principle of Relativity, famously enunciated by Einstein in 1905 (see Appendix A). Relativistic invariance is built into QFT as the third pillar. QFT is the only theory that combines the relativity and quantum principles.
Rodney A. Brooks (Fields of Color: The theory that escaped Einstein)
It wasn’t that I was a fan of Stalin; I didn’t like his eyes, which were beady and shifty in the news photographs; and his hands looked too small for his body. More important, I knew that there were no freedoms in the Soviet Union (or Russia, as we all called it), and I was sure that if I lived there I’d have to be against the government, and that meant I’d end up in Siberia. But I thought there was something amazingly stupid about the Cold War; Stalin was now the devil incarnate, only four years after he had served on the side of the angels, namely us. Either we’d made a mistake during the war, or we were making a mistake now. And there was a larger problem, of which Stalin was part: Why were so many Americans so scared, all the time? We were the strongest country in the world. We won the war. We had the atom bomb. In May, Truman finally broke the Russian blockade of Berlin with a giant airlift. So why were these people shitting in their pants when they thought about communists? The communists won in China, but that didn’t mean they were about to land in Los Angeles. And why did so many people think that the communists might be behind anything that made sense: unions, health care, free education? Even in 1949, there were people saying that we shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin in 1945, we should’ve kept going all the way to Moscow. George Patton, he knew how to deal wit’ dese bastids. Oney thing they respect is force.
Pete Hamill (A Drinking Life: A Memoir)
Who wants to serve in a police vice squad, spending hours peeking into men’s johns to detect acts of homosexuality? Who wants a job as a debt-collection agent, spending his whole day being nasty to people? What sort of person voluntarily serves as a prison guard or hangman? Also, alas, one might ask what kind of individual would want to spend millions of dollars to become president of the United States, never away from the telephone, guarded around the clock by agents of the Secret Service, reading tomes of amazingly uninteresting documents, and being accompanied day and night by a warrant officer carrying a black bag containing the mechanisms to set off the atomic bomb? We believe that all such occupations, dreary or dangerous as they may be, are exercises of high responsibility and even of glory, despite the maxim that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” But what is their actual end and purpose? Towards what is Progress? In fact, what on Earth are we doing? No one has even the ghost of a notion, save perhaps a few simple-minded people who live to smell flowers, to listen to the sea, to watch trees in the wind, to climb mountains, to eat pâté de veau en croûte, to drink the Malvasia wine from Ruby Hill, and to cuddle up with a lovely woman—and such pursuits are not really expensive, as compared with the trillions spent on the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.
Alan W. Watts (Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown)
Curiously, Schrodinger's equation describes the change in the probability that we will obtain a particular result if we conduct an experiment. It is telling us something about what we can know about the world. Thus, when we say that a particle is behaving like a wave, we should not think of this wave as if it were a water wave or a sound wave. It is more appropriate to regard it as a wave of information or probability, like a crime wave or a wave of hysteria. For, if a wave of hysteria passes through a population, it means that we are more likely to find hysterical behaviour there. Likewise, if an electron wave passes through your laboratory it means that you are more likely to detect an electron there. There is complete determinism in quantum theory, but not at the level of appearances or the things that are measured. Schrodinger's amazing equation gives a completely deterministic description of the change of the quantity (called the wave function') which captures the wavelike aspect of a given situation. But the wave function is not observable. It allows you only to calculate the result of a measurement in terms of the probabilities of different outcomes. It might tell you that fifty percent of the time you will find the atom to have one state, and fifty percent of the time, another. And, remarkably, in the microscopic realm, this is exactly what the results of successive measurements tell you: not the same result every time but a pattern of outcomes in which some are more likely than others.
John D. Barrow (The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe)
Tinder would work with Justin’s younger brother to throw a birthday party for one of his popular, hyperconnected friends on campus, and use it to promote Tinder. The Tinder team would do all the work to make it an incredible party. The day of the party, students from USC were getting bused to a luxurious house in LA, where everything had been set up to pull you inside. Sean described how it worked: There was one catch with the party: First, you had to download the Tinder app to get in. We put a bouncer in the house to check that you had done it. The party was great—it was a success, and more importantly, the next day, everyone at the party woke up and remembered they had a new app on their phone. There were attractive people they hadn’t gotten to talk to, and this was their second chance. The college party launch tactic worked. For the Tinder team, this one party created the highest ever one-day spike of downloads, however modest it might seem in retrospect. It’s not just the number that matters here, but that it was “500 of the right people”—Sean would explain to me later. It was a group of the most social, most hyperconnected people on the USC campus, all on Tinder at the same time. Tinder started to work. Matches began to happen, as the students who met each other from the previous night started to swipe through and then chat. Amazingly, 95 percent of this initial cohort started to use this app every day for three hours a day. The Tinder team built one atomic network, but soon figured out how to build the next one—just throw another party. And then another, by going to other schools, and throwing even more parties. Each network was successively easier to start. Tinder quickly reached 4,000 downloads, then 15,000 within a month, and then 500,000 just a month after that—first by replicating the campus launch, but then letting the organic viral growth take over.
Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
The new Christians in Corinth also had such questions, asking the apostle Paul, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of a body will they come?’ (1 Corinthians 15: 35). To answer their question, Paul uses the analogy of a seed. When you sow you do not place the mature plant in the ground but a tiny ‘simple’ seed. Yet God has created the seed so that it grows into a plant that is far more complex and glorious than the seed. I have a small vegetable patch where I plant a few seeds every spring. To me all the seeds look roughly the same, so I always find it amazing, even miraculous, that these tiny identical dry, black specks grow into delicious lettuce, rocket, spinach or carrots. Paul says that our earthly bodies and resurrected bodies are like the relationship of seeds to plants. There is a continuity between seed and plant, just as there is a continuity between our body here on earth and our bodies in the new creation. Yet there is also a difference: ‘The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body’ (1 Corinthians 15: 42–44). Our resurrected bodies will not be less than our earthly bodies, just as a plant is not less than the seed it comes from. Our risen bodies will not be physicality-minus, but physicality-plus, just as Jesus’ resurrected body was physicality-plus. When Jesus unites heaven and earth, we will not just have earthly bodies but bodies that are also part of the eternal, imperishable, glorious dimension of heaven. They will not just be natural bodies, but ‘spiritual’ bodies; not because they are made of some non-material ‘spirit’ matter, but because they are filled with the empowering Spirit of God, the same Spirit that was given at Pentecost as the firstfruits of the new creation. So we don’t need to worry about what happens to the specific atoms of our bodies after we have died. The God who not only transforms seeds into plants, but who in the beginning created from nothing every atom of the entire material universe, is more than capable of recreating our bodies at the resurrection of the dead. It is his power that holds every molecule of the universe together so that it does not disintegrate into chaos (Colossians 1: 17) and on the last day will bring every molecule together to ‘transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body’ (Philippians 3: 21). But what happens if I am alive on earth on the day that Jesus returns? What kind of a body will I have then?
James Paul (What on Earth is Heaven?)
You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?
Becky Chambers (A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, #1))
every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?
Becky Chambers (A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, #1))
The following statement is something we all understand, but it bears repeating because it is perhaps the coolest, most interesting scientific fact that we know about our universe and human existence:   Hydrogen, given sufficient time, turns into people.   It is an amazing statement if you think about it. A collection of simple atoms swirling around in the early universe, combined with the ordinary laws of nature like gravity, created human beings living here on planet earth over the course of billions of years.
Marshall Brain (The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches)
Without knowing their age…” She paused. “The Mayan’s were amazing. They knew some things that are beyond current explanation. For example, they calculated the length of a day down to two one-thousandths of what our modern atomic clocks calculate it to be. And that was two thousand years ago. Their understanding of astronomy and mathematics were…well, inexplicable. The problem is…they didn’t come this far south.” She crossed her arms. With a look of frustration, she began to say something but stopped.
Michael C. Grumley (Leap (Breakthrough, #2))
We’re talking about fundamentals here; the fundamental physical laws pertaining to the day-to-day running of the universe. Physicists call them the fundamental constants—things like the masses of atomic particles, the speed of light, the electric charges of electrons, the strength of gravitational force.… They’re beginning to realize just how finely balanced they are. One flip of a decimal point either way and things would start to go seriously wrong. Matter wouldn’t form, stars wouldn’t twinkle, the universe as we know it wouldn’t exist and, if we insist on taking the selfish point of view in the face of such spectacular, epic, almighty destruction, nor would we. The cosmic harmony that made life possible exists at the mercy of what appear, on the face of it, to be unlikely odds. Who or what decided at the time of the Big Bang that the number of particles created would be 1 in 1 billion more than the number of antiparticles, thus rescuing us by the width of a whisker from annihilation long before we even existed (because when matter and antimatter meet, they cancel each other out)? Who or what decided that the number of matter particles left behind after this oversize game of cosmic swapping would be exactly the right number to create a gravitational force that balanced the force of expansion and didn’t collapse the universe like a popped balloon? Who decided that the mass of the neutron should be just enough to make the formation of atoms possible? That the nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together, in the face of their natural electromagnetic desire to repulse each other, should be just strong enough to achieve this, thus enabling the universe to move beyond a state of almost pure hydrogen? Who made the charge on the proton exactly right for the stars to turn into supernovas? Who fine-tuned the nuclear resonance level for carbon to just delicate enough a degree that it could form, making life, all of which is built on a framework of carbon, possible? The list goes on. And on. And as it goes on—as each particularly arrayed and significantly defined property, against all the odds, and in spite of billions of alternative possibilities, combines exquisitely, in the right time sequence, at the right speed, weight, mass, and ratio, and with every mathematical quality precisely equivalent to a stable universe in which life can exist at all—it adds incrementally in the human mind to a growing sense, depending on which of two antithetical philosophies it chooses to follow, of either supreme and buoyant confidence, or humble terror. The first philosophy says this perfect pattern shows that the universe is not random; that it is designed and tuned, from the atom up, by some supreme intelligence, especially for the purpose of supporting life. The other says it’s a one in a trillion coincidence.
Martin Plimmer (Beyond Coincidence: Amazing Stories of Coincidence and the Mystery and Mathematics Behind Them)
The Earth and the Universe, in particular matter and energy that are their building blocks, are governed according to the various laws of physics. No matter where we go or what we do, these physical laws are always in force and remain absolute. These physical processes govern how matter and energy can be transformed and its behavior in various situations where they interact with other elements or forces. Yet beyond the physical aspects of the world we can see, there is another microscopic world operating under its own set of laws, also governing the behavior of matter and energy. Scientists describe this set of laws in a group of theories known as Quantum Physics, or the study of how matter and energy behave on the atomic, nuclear and even smaller microscopic levels.
Jared Hendricks (Quantum Physics: Beginner's Guide to the Most Amazing Physics Theories)
Planck suggested that atoms themselves can absorb or discharge energy only in specific bundles called quanta. If the energy and radiation frequency are proportional, then at higher frequencies the energy would likewise become larger. It is not possible for a standing wave to produce an energy bigger than kT. Thus, the standing wave’s high-frequency radiancy is capped.
Jared Hendricks (Quantum Physics: Beginner's Guide to the Most Amazing Physics Theories)
13 “The Skylark of Space,” Edward Elmer Smith, with Lee Hawkins Garby (uncredited) (The Buffalo Book Co., 1946); first serialized in Amazing Stories, 1928. 15 “this theory predicted results that were nonsensical”: Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles, Robert Eisberg and Robert Resnick (John Wiley and Sons, 1974). 16
James Kakalios (The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics: A Math-Free Exploration of the Science that Made Our World)
There are about 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a human body
Tasnim Essack (223 Amazing Science Facts, Tidbits and Quotes)