Molecule Man Quotes

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Their patch was a molecule with fangs under the words exite! chemicus sum! Which was Latin for, Back off, man! I'm a scientist!
Larry Correia (Monster Hunter Vendetta (Monster Hunter International, #2))
What is it about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?...The thing man wanted to invent, but never did...If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It is a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledygook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
You might as well ask a man to eat molecules with a pair of chop-sticks, as to try to interest me, about the lesser carnivora, when I know of what is before me.
Bram Stoker
Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued.
David Eagleman (Sum: forty tales from the afterlives)
When you walk through a forest that has not been tamed and interfered with by man, you will see not only abundant life all around you, but you will also encounter fallen trees and decaying trunks, rotting leaves and decomposing matter at every step. Wherever you look, you will find death as well as life. Upon closer scrutiny, however, you will discover that the decomposing tree trunk and rotting leaves not only give birth to new life, but are full of life themselves. Microorganisms are at work. Molecules are rearranging themselves. So death isn't to be found anywhere. There is only the metamorphosis of life forms. What can you learn from this? Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.
Eckhart Tolle (Stillness Speaks)
No man is an island, said John Donne, but I humbly dare to add: No man or woman is an island, but every one of us is a peninsula, half attached to the mainland, half facing the ocean – one half connected to family and friends and culture and tradition and country and nation and sex and language and many other things, and the other half wanting to be left alone to face the ocean. I think we ought to be allowed to remain peninsulas. Every social and political system that turns each of us into a Donnean island and the rest of humankind into an enemy or a rival is a monster. But at the same time every social and political and ideological system that wants to turn each of us into no more than a molecule of the mainland is also a monstrosity. The condition of peninsula is the proper human condition. That's what we are and that's what we deserve to remain.
Amos Oz (How to Cure a Fanatic)
Just before the Clear Air Turbulence went back into warp and its crew sat down at the table, the ship expelled the limp corpse of Zallin. Where it had found a live man in a suit, it left a dead youth in shorts and a tattered shirt, tumbling and freezing while a thin shell of air molecules expanded around the body, like an image of departing life.
Iain Banks (Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1))
Man is no form no mighty molecule no just idea alone — all that Thing — I feel man tender radiance at Heart between breast and belly, that physical place where the Self urges — delicate sensation
Allen Ginsberg (Wait Till I'm Dead: Uncollected Poems)
There is no man more perfect for me, no one I'd rather spend my life with, no one I will ever want more. But I need someone who wants me equally in return. I love you with every ounce that I am, down to the smallest molecule of my being, but that isn't enough if you won't reciprocate.
Genna Rulon (Only for You (For You, #1))
The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big bang. The three-billion-year history of life’s evolution from self-reproducing molecules to civilization contains twists and romances that cannot be matched by any myth or epic. There is also the poetic vision of space and time in relativity, the weird subatomic world of quantum mechanics … these wondrous stories of science all possess an irresistible attraction. Through the medium of science fiction, I seek only to create my own worlds using the power of imagination, and to make known the poetry of Nature in those worlds, to tell the romantic legends that have unfolded between Man and Universe.
Liu Cixin (The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1))
Some say we are not like humans but we are more like them than we are different. Man and animals are in the same species as mammals as they have mammary glands that produce the milk to nurse their young. Their lungs breathe air and their blood is warm. They are vertebrates in that their skeletal system and well-designed spines hold their bodies together. Each cell is made of molecules, each molecule is made of atoms, and each atom is made of protons, neutrons and mostly electrons, which are made of waves of fibered light.
Kate McGahan (Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge: An Afterlife Story of Loss, Love and Renewal (Jack McAfghan Pet Loss Trilogy Book 3))
I just couldn’t understand how you could go from being alive, from having molecules and blood cells constantly shifting around inside you, and thought processes and a mind full of memories and dreams and love and hate, and in just one tiny second these miraculous things stop and you’re dead. How could all that disappear? What happened to your soul, your essence, your wonder? Just because a muscle stops beating? It made absolutely no sense.
Sarra Manning (Let's Get Lost)
All she wants is for both of them to be different. Not very different, a little would do it. Same molecules, different arrangement. All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless.
Margaret Atwood (Life Before Man)
Like no other particle on earth, the morphine molecule seemed to possess heaven and hell. It allowed for modern surgery, saving and improving too many lives to count. It stunted and ended too many lives to count with addiction and overdose. Discussing it, you could invoke some of humankind’s greatest cultural creations and deepest questions: Faust, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, discussions on the fundamental nature of man and human behavior, of free will and slavery, of God and evolution. Studying the molecule you naturally wandered into questions like, Can mankind achieve happiness without pain? Would that happiness even be worth it? Can we have it all?
Sam Quinones (Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic)
The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can call “his own,” and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human community.
Pope John Paul II
Nicotine, in fact, is an unusual drug because it does very little except trigger compulsive use. According to researcher Roland R. Griffiths, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, “When you give people nicotine for the first time, most people don’t like it. It’s different from many other addictive drugs, for which most people say they enjoy the first experience and would try it again.” Nicotine doesn’t make you high like marijuana or intoxicated like alcohol or wired up like speed. Some people say it makes them feel more relaxed or more alert, but really, the main thing it does is relieve cravings for itself. It’s the perfect circle. The only point of smoking cigarettes is to get addicted so one can experience the pleasure of relieving the unpleasant feeling of craving, like a man who carries around a rock all day because it feels so good when he puts it down.
Daniel Z. Lieberman (The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race)
What is there about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?" Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. "It's perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It's a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you're a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
We’ve all been near death more than once.” He shook his head. “No one has ever been able to pinpoint the trigger.” “But?” “But it is legend that ambrosia only rises when—” She held her breath. “—an archangel loves true.” The world stopped. The air particles seemed to still above her, the molecules suspended as she stared at the magnificence of the man who held her in his arms. “Maybe I was just biologically compatible.” It came out a ragged whisper. “Perhaps.” The possession of lips against her neck. “We have eternity to discover the truth. And in that eternity, you will be mine.
Nalini Singh (Angels' Blood (Guild Hunter, #1))
When I haven't been kissed in a long time, I walk behind well-dressed women on cold, December mornings and shovel the steamy exhalations pluming from their lips down my throat with both hands, hoping a single molecule will cling to my lungs. When I haven't been kissed in a long time, I sneak into the ladies room of a fancy restaurant, dig into the trashcan for a napkin where a woman checked her lipstick, then go home, light candles, put on Barry White, and press the napkin all over my body. When I haven't been kissed in a long time, I start thinking leeches are the most romantic creatures, cause all they want to do is kiss. If only someone invented a kinder, gentler leech, I'd paint it bright pink and pretend Winona Ryder's lips crawled off her face, up my thigh, and were sucking on my swollen bicep. When I haven't been kissed in a long time, I create civil disturbances, then insult the cops who show up, till one of them grabs me by the collar and hurls me up against the squad car, so I can remember, at least for a moment, what it's like to be touched.
Jeffrey McDaniel
While conversion of sugars to ethanol is the predominant reaction, it is only one of potentially thousands of biochemical reactions taking place during fermentation. As a result, wine contains trace amounts of a large number of organic acids, esters, sugars, alcohols, and other molecules. Wine is, in fact, one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman.
Neel Burton (The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting)
The man shrank. It was funny, but people never seemed to notice at first glance how big. Henry was. Maybe it was because of his clothes, which were like one of those lame but curiously impenetrable disguises from a comic book (why does no one ever see that 'bookish' Clark Kent, without his glasses, is Superman?). Or maybe it was a question of his making people see. He had the far more remarkable talent of making himself invisible: in a room, in a car, a virtual ability to dematerialize at will – and perhaps this gift was only the converse of that one: the sudden concentration of his wandering molecules rendering his shadowy form solid, all at once, a metamorphosis startling to the viewer.
Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
Examples of such self-reorganization abound in Order Out of Chaos. Heat moving evenly through a liquid suddenly, at a certain threshold, converts into a convection current that radically reorganizes the liquid, and millions of molecules, as if on cue, suddenly form themselves into hexagonal cells.
Ilya Prigogine (Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (Radical Thinkers))
The convert will understand. How do they translate ºyw in your English interpretation?” “Atom,” said the convert. “You don’t find that strange, considering atoms were unknown in the sixth century?” The convert chewed her lip. “I never thought of that,” she said. “You’re right. There’s no way atom is the original meaning of that word.” “Ah.” Vikram held up two fingers in a sign of benediction. He looked, Alif thought, like some demonic caricature of a saint. “But it is. In the twentieth century, atom became the original meaning of ºyw, because an atom was the tiniest object known to man. Then man split the atom. Today, the original meaning might be hadron. But why stop there? Tomorrow, it might be quark. In a hundred years, some vanishingly small object so foreign to the human mind that only Adam remembers its name. Each of those will be the original meaning of ºyw.” Alif snorted. “That’s impossible. ºyw must refer to some fundamental thing. It’s attached to an object.” “Yes it is. The smallest indivisible particle. That is the meaning packaged in the word. No part of it lifts out—it does not mean smallest, nor indivisible, nor particle, but all those things at once. Thus, in man’s infancy, ºyw was a grain of sand. Then a mote of dust. Then a cell. Then a molecule. Then an atom. And so on. Man’s knowledge of the universe may grow, but ºyw does not change.” “That’s . . .” The convert trailed off, looking lost. “Miraculous. Indeed.
G. Willow Wilson (Alif the Unseen)
You might as well ask a man to eat molecules with a pair of chopsticks, as to try to interest me about the lesser carnivora, when I know of what is before me. —R. M. Renfield
Lydia Kang (Opium and Absinthe)
It occurred to Soo-Ja that if she gave him permission, he'd kiss her right then and there. But she realized that all along, what she really wasn't to have him in the present - how could she, married woman that she was, married man that he was — but to rewrite the past, have him go back in time and create a version that allowed them to kiss. To be able to kiss him did not seem to take much — a step forward, the angling of her face. But, in fact, it required rearranging the molecules of every interaction they had ever had, from the very first day they met.
Samuel Park (This Burns My Heart)
Man beginning with his proud humanism, tried to make himself autonomous, but rather than becoming great, he had found himself ending up as only a collection of molecules-and nothing more.
Francis A. Schaeffer (How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture)
Only the neurosurgeon dares to improve upon five billion years of evolution in a few hours. The human brain. A trillion nerve cells storing electrical patterns more numerous than the water molecules of the world’s oceans. The soul’s tapestry lies woven in the brain’s nerve threads. Delicate, inviolate, the brain floats serenely in a bone vault like the crown jewel of biology. What motivated the vast leap in intellectual horsepower between chimp and man? Between tree dweller and moon walker? Is the brain a gift from God, or simply the jackpot of a trillion rolls of DNA dice?
Frank T. Vertosick Jr.
The world moves with motiveless necessity. By this is meant that it has no motive of its own, but is under the necessity of manifesting your concept, the arrangement of your mind, and your mind is always arranged in the image of all you believe and consent to as true. The rich man, poor man, beggar man or thief are not different minds, but different arrangements of the same mind, in the same sense that a piece of steel when magnetized differs not in substance from its demagnetized state but in the arrangement and order of its molecules. A single electron revolving in a specified orbit constitutes the unit of magnetism.
Neville Goddard (The Power of Awareness)
If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. (I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a change to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man's doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night, so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself.
Henry Miller (Tropic of Capricorn (Tropic, #2))
But at the height of the thermosphere, at fifty miles or more, the air is so thin that any two molecules will be miles apart and hardly ever come in contact. So although each molecule is very warm, there are few interactions between them and thus little heat transference. This is good news for satellites and spaceships because if the exchange of heat were more efficient any man-made object orbiting at that level would burst into flame.
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
As for Nate, it’s simple. All she wants is for both of them to be different. Not very different, a little would do it. Same molecules, different arrangement. All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless.
Margaret Atwood (Life Before Man)
The face that Moses had begged to see—was forbidden to see—was slapped bloody (Exodus 33:19–20). The thorns that God had sent to curse the earth’s rebellion now twisted around his own brow.… “On your back with you!” One raises a mallet to sink in the spike. But the soldier’s heart must continue pumping as he readies the prisoner’s wrist. Someone must sustain the soldier’s life minute by minute, for no man has this power on his own. Who supplies breath to his lungs? Who gives energy to his cells? Who holds his molecules together? Only by the Son do “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). The victim wills that the soldier live on—he grants the warriors continued existence. The man swings. As the man swings, the Son recalls how
Joshua Harris (Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship)
[John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature—a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules—out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.
Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man)
Of course, human tissue completely It's unlikely that scar was composed of the same molecules. Do you think it is really appropriate to consider people to be the same entity they were seven years earlier? Because, physically, they're not. They're connected but every part has changed. Like a renovated house. It seems like after seven years you should not be liable for things you did before. Why should a man be imprisoned for a crime committed by a different physical entity? Should we expect a couple to stay married when they barely share a molecule with the people who said 'I do'? I don't think so.
Max Barry (Machine Man)
The face that Moses had begged to see – was forbidden to see – was slapped bloody (Exodus 33:19-20) The thorns that God had sent to curse the earth’s rebellion now twisted around his brow… “On your back with you!” One raises a mallet to sink the spike. But the soldier’s heart must continue pumping as he readies the prisoner’s wrist. Someone must sustain the soldier’s life minute by minute, for no man has this power on his own. Who supplies breath to his lungs? Who gives energy to his cells? Who holds his molecules together? Only by the Son do “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). The victim wills that the soldier live on – he grants the warrior’s continued existence. The man swings. As the man swings, the Son recalls how he and the Father first designed the medial nerve of the human forearm – the sensations it would be capable of. The design proves flawless – the nerves perform exquisitely. “Up you go!” They lift the cross. God is on display in his underwear and can scarcely breathe. But these pains are a mere warm-up to his other and growing dread. He begins to feel a foreign sensation. Somewhere during this day an unearthly foul odor began to waft, not around his nose, but his heart. He feels dirty. Human wickedness starts to crawl upon his spotless being – the living excrement from our souls. The apple of his Father’s eye turns brown with rot. His Father! He must face his Father like this! From heaven the Father now rouses himself like a lion disturbed, shakes His mane, and roars against the shriveling remnant of a man hanging on a cross.Never has the Son seen the Father look at him so, never felt even the least of his hot breath. But the roar shakes the unseen world and darkens the visible sky. The Son does not recognize these eyes. “Son of Man! Why have you behaved so? You have cheated, lusted, stolen, gossiped – murdered, envied, hated, lied. You have cursed, robbed, over-spent, overeaten – fornicated, disobeyed, embezzled, and blasphemed. Oh the duties you have shirked, the children you have abandoned! Who has ever so ignored the poor, so played the coward, so belittled my name? Have you ever held a razor tongue? What a self-righteous, pitiful drunk – you, who moles young boys, peddle killer drugs, travel in cliques, and mock your parents. Who gave you the boldness to rig elections, foment revolutions, torture animals, and worship demons? Does the list never end! Splitting families, raping virgins, acting smugly, playing the pimp – buying politicians, practicing exhortation, filming pornography, accepting bribes. You have burned down buildings, perfected terrorist tactics, founded false religions, traded in slaves – relishing each morsel and bragging about it all. I hate, loathe these things in you! Disgust for everything about you consumes me! Can you not feel my wrath? Of course the Son is innocent He is blamelessness itself. The Father knows this. But the divine pair have an agreement, and the unthinkable must now take place. Jesus will be treated as if personally responsible for every sin ever committed. The Father watches as his heart’s treasure, the mirror image of himself, sinks drowning into raw, liquid sin. Jehovah’s stored rage against humankind from every century explodes in a single direction. “Father! Father! Why have you forsaken me?!” But heaven stops its ears. The Son stares up at the One who cannot, who will not, reach down or reply. The Trinity had planned it. The Son had endured it. The Spirit enabled Him. The Father rejected the Son whom He loved. Jesus, the God-man from Nazareth, perished. The Father accepted His sacrifice for sin and was satisfied. The Rescue was accomplished.
Joni Eareckson Tada (When God Weeps Kit: Why Our Sufferings Matter to the Almighty)
if one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the very top those over-all organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large patterns of cerebral excitation that are correlated with mental states or psychic activity…. Near the apex of this command system in the brain…. we find ideas. Man over the chimpanzee has ideas and ideals. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burst-wise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell. Who
Douglas R. Hofstadter (I Am a Strange Loop)
Never mind undressing me with his eyes. He’s disassembling me. Atoms, molecules, every fiber and filament of my being stripped down, analyzed, assessed. I don’t know what he sees or what he thinks of it; there’s still no face under that hood. Forget all my previous bets about normal humanity lurking in the shadows. This man is a ghost.
Lex Veia (City of Shadows (Shadow & Ghost, #1))
The whole cosmos is a materialized thought of the Creator. This heavy, earthly clod, floating in space, is a dream of God. He made all things out of His consciousness, even as man in his dream consciousness reproduces and vivifies a creation with its creatures. “‘God first created the earth as an idea. Then He quickened it; energy atoms came into being. He coordinated the atoms into this solid sphere. All its molecules are held together by the will of God. When He withdraws His will, the earth again will disintegrate into energy. Energy will dissolve into consciousness; the earth-idea will disappear from objectivity. “‘The substance of a dream is held in materialization by the
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi)
When light from the sun enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it hits all sorts of molecules (mostly nitrogen and oxygen molecules) on its way to Earth and bounces off them like a pinball. This is called scattering, which means that on a clear day, if you look at any part of the sky, the light you see has been bouncing around the atmosphere before coming into your eye. If all light was scattered equally, the sky would look white. But it doesn’t. The reason is that the shorter wavelengths of light are more likely to be scattered than the longer ones, which means that blues get bounced around the sky more than reds and yellows. So instead of seeing a white sky when we look up, we see a blue one.
Mark Miodownik (Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World)
We are not separated from the world by our own edges… We’re part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother’s garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is. Your mother and sisters don’t have that awareness. Not yet, anyway. They believe they’re contained in their bodies, in the biographical facts of their lives.’ Sylvie felt like her father had shown her a part of herself she didn’t know existed… And the father and daughter had walked home, their arms touching, molecules dancing between them, and stars turning on like tiny lightbulbs in the evening sky. … Syvlie would wait - forever, if necessary - for a man who saw the expanse of her. The way her father had.
Ann Napolitano (Hello Beautiful)
At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the replicator. It may not necessarily have been the biggest or the most complex molecule around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself. This may seem a very unlikely sort of accident to happen. So it was. It was exceedingly improbable. In the lifetime of a man, things that are that improbable can be treated for practical purposes as impossible. That is why you will never win a big prize on the football pools. But in our human estimates of what is probable and what is not, we are not used to dealing in hundreds of millions of years. If you filled in pools coupons every week for a hundred million years you would very likely win several jackpots.
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
What do you mean, words whose meanings evolved?" asked Alif. "That doesn't make sense. The Quran is the Quran." Vikram folded his legs-Alif did not watch this operation closely-and smiled at his audience. "The convert will understand. How do they translate ذرة in your English interpretation?" "Atom," said the convert. You don't find that strange, considering atoms were unknown in the sixth century?" The convert chewed her lip. "I never thought of that," she said. "You're right. There's no way atom is the original meaning of that word." "Ah." Vikram held up two fingers in a sign of benediction. He looked, Alif thought, like some demonic caricature of a saint. "But it is. In the twentieth century, atom became the original meaning of ذرة, because an atom was the tiniest object known to man. Then man split the atom. Today, the original meaning might be hadron. But why stop there? Tomorrow, it might be quark. In a hundred years, some vanishingly small object so foreign to the human mind that only Adam remembers its name. Each of those will be the original meaning of ذرة. Alif snorted. "That's impossible. ذرة must refer to some fundamental thing. It's attached to an object." "Yes it is. The smallest indivisible particle. That is the meaning packaged in the word. No part of it lifts out-it does not mean smallest, nor indivisible, nor particle, but all those things at once. Thus, in man's infancy, ذرة was a grain of sand. Then a mote of dust. Then a cell. Then a molecule. Then an atom. And so on. Man's knowledge of the universe may grow, but ذرة does not change." "That's..."The convert trailed off, looking lost. "Miraculous. Indeed.
G. Willow Wilson (Alif the Unseen)
Life, a miracle of nature, an evolved molecule of matter, blossomed in the vast expanse of oceans. Methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor When joined under the radio-active sun, The molecules of non living matter underwent massive changes and became live. It's this accident that made the molecule of protein, Which even Stanley Miller reproduced in lab. Evolution went on, and on and changed , from amoeba to dinosaurs, from ape to man, It was an amazing architecture of nature , Which still continue improving human brain. The amazing creation nature, the man, kept on exploring the mysteries of nature, and succeeded in duplicating nature's marvel through his latest invention - the cloning, and succeeded in decoding even the genetic code. Still we have to salute the mother nature, which has many more mysteries in store!.
V.A. Menon
Ostholm’s managerial compass at Astra had been consistent for twenty-four years. Once, he spotted a distraught person, possibly Swiss, at Basel airport. When he walked up to him, he learnt that the young man had failed in his job interview at a pharmaceutical company. The researcher had an idea of preventing acid secretion in the stomach by shutting down proton pumps. After Ostholm showed interest, right there at the airport, the man drew a diagram to explain the idea. Ostholm asked if he had a molecule in mind. Convinced by the man’s reply, he instantly wrote him an offer letter and invited him to Stockholm. Astra was already working on anti-ulcers and the drug that Ostholm’s offer letter propelled was the multi-billion-dollar anti-ulcer drug Omeprazole which turned around Astra’s fortunes. If Ostholm sensed a scientist’s passion, he would brook no barrier to his/her support.
Seema Singh (Mythbreaker: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and the Story of Indian Biotech)
I’d like to tell you not to be afraid, but I’ve lost my voice. I’m not used to all these legs, these claws, these feelers. It’s the old story, predictable as fallout—the rearrangement of molecules. And everyone is surprised and no one understands why each man tries to kill the thing he loves, when the change comes over him. So now you know what I never found the time to say. Sweetheart, put down your flamethrower. You know I always loved you.
Lawrence Raab
It is a pretty structure, isn’t it? It makes you think of something solid, stable, well linked. In fact it happens in chemistry as in architecture that ‘beautiful’ edifices, that is symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals of the arches of bridges. And it is also possible that the explanation is neither remote nor metaphysical: to say ‘beautiful’ is to say ‘desirable’, and ever since man has built he has wanted to build at the smallest expense and in the most durable fashion, and the aesthetic enjoyment he experiences when contemplating his work comes afterward. Certainly, it has not always been this way: there have been centuries in which ‘beauty’ was identified with adornment, the superimposed, the frills; but it is probable that they were deviant epochs and that the true beauty, in which every century recognises itself, is found in upright stones, ships’ hulls, the blade of an axe, the wing of a plane.
Primo Levi (The Periodic Table)
What is there about fire that’s so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?” Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. “It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it’d burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It’s a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don’t really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
Historically, holism had been a break from the reductionist methods of science. Holism (...) is a way of viewing the universe as a web of interactions and relationships. Whole systems (and the universe can be seen as an overarching system of systems) have properties beyond those of their parts. All things are, in some sense, alive, or a part of a living system; the real world of mind and matter, body and consciousness, cannot be understood by reducing it to pieces and parts. 'Matter is mind' – this is perhaps the holists' quintessential belief. The founding theories of holism had tried to explain how mind emerges from the material universe, how the consciousness of all things is interconnected. The first science, of course, had failed utterly to do this. The first science had resigned human beings to acting as objective observers of a mechanistic and meaningless universe. A dead universe. The human mind, according to the determinists, was merely the by-product of brain chemistry. Chemical laws, the way the elements combine and interact, were formulated as complete and immutable truths. The elements themselves were seen as indivisible lumps of matter, devoid of consciousness, untouched and unaffected by the very consciousnesses seeking to understand how living minds can be assembled from dead matter. The logical conclusion of these assumptions and conceptions was that people are like chemical robots possessing no free will. No wonder the human race, during the Holocaust Century, had fallen into insanity and despair. Holism had been an attempt to restore life to this universe and to reconnect human beings with it. To heal the split between self and other. (...) Each quantum event, each of the trillions of times reality's particles interact with each other every instant, is like a note that rings and resonates throughout the great bell of creation. And the sound of the ringing propagates instantaneously, everywhere at once, interconnecting all things. This is a truth of our universe. It is a mystical truth, that reality at its deepest level is an undivided wholeness. It has been formalized and canonized, and taught to the swarms of humanity searching for a fundamental unity. Only, human beings have learned it as a theory and a doctrine, not as an experience. A true holism should embrace not only the theory of living systems, but also the reality of the belly, of wind, hunger, and snowworms roasting over a fire on a cold winter night. A man or woman (or child) to be fully human, should always marvel at the mystery of life. We each should be able to face the universe and drink in the stream of photons shimmering across the light-distances, to listen to the ringing of the farthest galaxies, to feel the electrons of each haemoglobin molecule spinning and vibrating deep inside the blood. No one should ever feel cut off from the ocean of mind and memory surging all around; no one should ever stare up at the icy stars and feel abandoned or alone. It was partly the fault of holism that a whole civilization had suffered the abandonment of its finest senses, ten thousand trillion islands of consciousness born into the pain and promise of neverness, awaiting death with glassy eyes and murmured abstractions upon their lips, always fearing life, always longing for a deeper and truer experience of living.
David Zindell (The Broken God (A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, #1))
All right, but you know Star Trek, and ‘Beam me up, Scotty’? How they can teleport people around?” “Yeah. The transporters.” “Do you know how they work?” “Just … special effects. CGI or whatever they used.” “No, I mean within the universe of the show. They work by breaking down your molecules, zapping you over a beam, and putting you back together on the other end.” “Sure.” “That is what scares me. I can’t watch it. I find it too disturbing.” I shrugged. “I don’t get it.” “Well, think about it. Your body is just made of a few different types of atoms. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on. So this transporter machine, there is no reason in the world to break down all of those atoms and then send those specific atoms thousands of miles away. One oxygen atom is the same as another, so what it does is send the blueprint for your body across the beam. Then it reassembles you at the destination, out of whatever atoms it has nearby. So if there is carbon and hydrogen at the planet you’re beaming down to, it’ll just put you together out of what it has on hand, because you get the exact same result.” “Sure. “So it’s more like sending a fax than mailing a letter. Only the transporter is a fax machine that shreds the original. Your original body, along with your brain, gets vaporized. Which means what comes out the other end isn’t you. It’s an exact copy that the machine made, of a man who is now dead, his atoms floating freely around the interior of the ship. Only within the universe of the show, nobody knows this. “Meanwhile, you are dead. Dead for eternity. All of your memories and emotions and personality end, right there, on that platform, forever. Your wife and children and friends will never see you again. What they will see is this unnatural photocopy of you that emerged from the other end. And in fact, since transporter technology is used routinely, all of the people you see on that ship are copies of copies of copies of long-dead, vaporized crew members. And no one ever figures it out. They all continue to blithely step into this machine that kills one hundred percent of the people who use it, but nobody realizes it because each time, it spits out a perfect replacement for the victim at the other end.
David Wong (This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It (John Dies at the End, #2))
What is there about fire that’s so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?” Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. “It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it’d burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It’s a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don’t really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you’re a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
What is there about fire that’s so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?” Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. “It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it’d burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It’s a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don’t really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you’re a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure".
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
What is there about fire that's so lovely? Not matter what age we are, what draws us to it? It's perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It's a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you're a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
The man shrank. It was funny, but people never seemed to notice at first glance how big Henry was. Maybe it was because of his clothes, which were like one of those lame but curiously impenetrable disguises from a comic book (why does no one ever see that “bookish” Clark Kent, without his glasses, is Superman?). Or maybe it was a question of his making people see. He had the far more remarkable talent of making himself invisible—in a room, in a car, a virtual ability to dematerialize at will—and perhaps this gift was only the converse of that one: the sudden concentration of his wandering molecules rendering his shadowy form solid, all at once, a metamorphosis startling to the viewer.
Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
As a science fiction writer who began as a fan, I do not use my fiction as a disguised way to criticize the reality of the present. I feel that the greatest appeal of science fiction is the creation of numerous imaginary worlds outside of reality. I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read. The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big bang. The three-billion-year history of life’s evolution from self-reproducing molecules to civilization contains twists and romances that cannot be matched by any myth or epic. There is also the poetic vision of space and time in relativity, the weird subatomic world of quantum mechanics … these wondrous stories of science all possess an irresistible attraction. Through the medium of science fiction, I seek only to create my own worlds using the power of imagination, and to make known the poetry of Nature in those worlds, to tell the romantic legends that have unfolded between Man and Universe.
Liu Cixin (The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1))
Among the most virulent of all such cultural parasite-equivalents is the religion-based denial of organic evolution. About one-half of Americans (46 percent in 2013, up from 44 percent in 1980), most of whom are evangelical Christians, together with a comparable fraction of Muslims worldwide, believe that no such process has ever occurred. As Creationists, they insist that God created humankind and the rest of life in one to several magical mega-strokes. Their minds are closed to the overwhelming mass of factual demonstrations of evolution, which is increasingly interlocked across every level of biological organization from molecules to ecosystem and the geography of biodiversity. They ignore, or more precisely they call it virtue to remain ignorant of, ongoing evolution observed in the field and even traced to the genes involved. Also looked past are new species created in the laboratory. To Creationists, evolution is at best just an unproven theory. To a few, it is an idea invented by Satan and transmitted through Darwin and later scientists in order to mislead humanity. When I was a small boy attending an evangelical church in Florida, I was taught that the secular agents of Satan are extremely bright and determined, but liars all, man and woman, and so no matter what I heard I must stick my fingers in my ears and hold fast to the true faith. We are all free in a democracy to believe whatever we wish, so why call any opinion such as Creationism a virulent cultural parasite-equivalent? Because it represents a triumph of blind religious faith over carefully tested fact. It is not a conception of reality forged by evidence and logical judgment. Instead, it is part of the price of admission to a religious tribe. Faith is the evidence given of a person’s submission to a particular god, and even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god. The cost to society as a whole of the bowed head has been enormous. Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere, at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time. The explicit denial of evolution presented as a part of a “creation science” is an outright falsehood, the adult equivalent of plugging one’s ears, and a deficit to any society that chooses to acquiesce in this manner to a fundamentalist faith.
Edward O. Wilson (The Meaning of Human Existence)
Lougarry was waiting over the brow of the hill, lying so still in the grass that a butterfly had perched within an inch of her nose. The stems bent and shimmered as she rose to her feet, and the butterfly floated away like a wind-borne petal. Fern wondered if , like Ragginbone, the she-wolf possessed the faculty of making herself at one with her surroundings, not invisible but transmuted, so close to nature that she could blend with it at will and be absorbed into its many forms, becoming grass blade and wildflower, still earth and moving air, resuming her true self at the prompting of a thought. It came to Fern that we are all part of one vast pattern of Being, the real world and the shadow-world, sunlight and werelight, Man and spirit, and to understand and accept that was the first step toward the abnegation of ego, the affirmation of the soul. To comprehend the wind, not as a movement of molecules but as the pulse of the air, the pulse of her pulse, was to become the wind, to blow with it through the dancing grasses to the edge of the sky...
Jan Siegel (Prospero's Children (Fern Capel))
What is there about fire that’s so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?” Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. “It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it’d burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It’s a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don’t really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you’re a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical.” Montag stood looking in now at this queer house, made strange by the hour of the night, by murmuring neighbor voices, by littered glass, and there on the floor, their covers torn off and spilled out like swan feathers, the incredible books that looked so silly and really not worth bothering with, for these were nothing but black type and yellowed paper and raveled binding. Mildred, of course. She
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
All right, but you know Star Trek, and ‘Beam me up, Scotty’? How they can teleport people around?” “Yeah. The transporters.” “Do you know how they work?” “Just … special effects. CGI or whatever they used.” “No, I mean within the universe of the show. They work by breaking down your molecules, zapping you over a beam, and putting you back together on the other end.” “Sure.” “That is what scares me. I can’t watch it. I find it too disturbing.” I shrugged. “I don’t get it.” “Well, think about it. Your body is just made of a few different types of atoms. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on. So this transporter machine, there is no reason in the world to break down all of those atoms and then send those specific atoms thousands of miles away. One oxygen atom is the same as another, so what it does is send the blueprint for your body across the beam. Then it reassembles you at the destination, out of whatever atoms it has nearby. So if there is carbon and hydrogen at the planet you’re beaming down to, it’ll just put you together out of what it has on hand, because you get the exact same result.” “Sure. “So it’s more like sending a fax than mailing a letter. Only the transporter is a fax machine that shreds the original. Your original body, along with your brain, gets vaporized. Which means what comes out the other end isn’t you. It’s an exact copy that the machine made, of a man who is now dead, his atoms floating freely around the interior of the ship. Only within the universe of the show, nobody knows this. “Meanwhile, you are dead. Dead for eternity. All of your memories and emotions and personality end, right there, on that platform, forever. Your wife and children and friends will never see you again. What they will see is this unnatural photocopy of you that emerged from the other end. And in fact, since transporter technology is used routinely, all of the people you see on that ship are copies of copies of copies of long-dead, vaporized crew members. And no one ever figures it out. They all continue to blithely step into this machine that kills one hundred percent of the people who use it, but nobody realizes it because each time, it spits out a perfect replacement for the victim at the other end.” I
David Wong (This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It (John Dies at the End, #2))
Why suffer the slings and arrows when I can just wet my nose, insert it into the light socket, and never have to deal with anxiety, heartache, or my mother’s boiled chicken ever again? Hamlet chose not to because he feared what might happen in an afterlife, but I didn’t believe in an afterlife, so given my utterly dismal appraisal of the human condition and its painful absurdity, why go on with it? In the end, I couldn’t come up with a logical reason why and finally came to the conclusion that as humans, we are simply hardwired to resist death. The blood trumps the brain. No logical reason to cling to life, but who cares what the head says—the heart says: Have you seen Lola in a miniskirt? As much as we whine and moan and insist, often quite persuasively, that life is a pointless nightmare of suffering and tears, if a man suddenly entered the room with a knife to kill us, we instantly react. We grab him and fight with every ounce of our energy to disarm him and survive. (Personally, I run.) This, I submit, is a property strictly of our molecules. By now you’ve probably figured out not only I’m no intellectual but also no fun at parties.
Woody Allen (Apropos of Nothing)
Everywhere power has to be seen in order to give the impression that it sees. But this is not the case. It doesn't see anything. It is like a woman walled up in a 'peepshow'. It is separated from society by a two-way mirror. And it turns slowly, undresses slowly, adopting the lewdest poses, little suspecting that the other is watching and masturbating in secret. The metro. A man gets on - by his glances, gestures and movements, he carves out a space for himself and protects it. From that space, he sets his actions to those of the neighbouring, approximate molecules. He becomes the centre of a physical pressure, sniffs out hostile vibrations and emanations, or friendly ones, on the verge of panic. He joins up with others out of fear. He innervates his whole body with a calculated indifference, wraps himself in a superficial reverie, created only to keep others at a distance. He deciphers nothing, protects himself from the crossfire of everyone's gazes and sets his own as a backhand down the line, staring at a particular face at the back of the carriage until the very lightness of his stare stirs the other in his sleep. When the train accelerates or brakes, all the bodies are thrown in the same direction, like the shoals of fish which change direction simultaneously. The marvellous underwater lethargy of the metro, the self-defence of the capillary systems, the cruel play of vague thoughts - all while waiting for the stop at Faidherbe-Chaligny. The crucial thing is not to have sweeping views of the future, but to know where to plant your primal scene. The danger for us is that we'll keep running up against the wall of the Revolution. For this is the source of our misery: our phobias, our prohibitions, our phantasies, our utopias are imbedded in the nineteenth century, where their foundations were laid down. We have to put an end to this historical coagulation. Beyond it, all is permitted. It will perhaps be the adventure of the end of the century to dissolve the wall of the Revolution and to plunge on beyond it, towards the marvels of form and spirit.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
In the same paper Boltzmann was able to derive a proof of the irreversibility of macroscopic phenomena. It is the difference of scale between the objects that we observe in everyday life on the one hand, and molecules on the other hand, which explains this irreversibility through the laws of probability.
Carlo Cercignani (Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms)
At first he did not realize what he had accomplished; he thought that he had remained within the boundaries of mechanics, that he was computing actual numbers of molecules, without realizing how much probability was involved.
Carlo Cercignani (Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms)
However, if one truly wishes to speak of magical processes, consider the scenario related to origins theory and evolution. Does not evolution postulation demand that we believe in a mystical (unobserved, undemonstrated, and unknowable) process wherein magic mud in a magical but nonliving primordial pond developed magical soup which magically gave rise to magical living molecules (only once) that magically decided to self-replicate over magical periods of eons of time with magical inputs of outside sources of mystical power? Moreover—what accounts for these mystical and magical organisms deciding to branch off into other magical living organisms until many millions of intricately different living organisms, each with multiple and interdependent systems, came into being? Additionally—what accounts for the fact that some of these organisms eventually evolved into human beings who now have the capacity to think of evolution theory? Phew! Talk about magic! Again, the magical process of evolution, devoid of any intelligent input, demands much more faith than I am capable of imagining or expressing.
Carl Gallups (The Magic Man in the Sky: Effectively Defending the Christian Faith)
The existence of such rays coming from man and all living things has been suspected by scientists for many years. Today is the first experimental proof of their existence. The discovery shows that every atom and every molecule in nature is a continuous radio broadcasting station. . .
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi)
For a long time the celebrated theory of Boscovich was the ideal of physicists. […] If this theory were to hold good for all phenomena, we should be still a long way off what Faust’s famulus hoped to attain, viz. to know everything. But the difficulty […] would be only a quantitative one; nature would be a difficult problem, but not a mystery for the human mind. […] this simple conception of Boscovich is refuted in every branch of science, the Theory of Gases not excepted. The assumption that the gas-molecules are aggregates of material points, in the sense of Boscovich, does not agree with facts.
Carlo Cercignani (Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms)
In the description of matter as a collection of molecules instead of a continuum, questions related to reversibility are presented for the first time in the invention, almost as a joke, of what is now known as “Maxwell’s demon”.
Carlo Cercignani (Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms)
Then the molecules bestowed upon the seeker “the curse of progress”. Progress was something by which man could make his society progressively more iniquitous and unjust and thereby feel more miserable. The other life forms never deviated from what Mother Nature had endowed them with. The seeker had to run faster than his designed speed to achieve progress while the lower creations, who never desired any progress, maintained their designed speed. Going faster than the design is surely going to have a deleterious effect on the engine and the chassis. You cannot send a bullock cart to space and expect it to retrieve a lost satellite. And that was what that exactly happened.
Biju Vasudevan (The Molecular Slaves)
Meditation has nothing to do with contemplation of eternal questions, or of one’s own folly, or even of one’s navel, although a clearer view on all of these enigmas may result. It has nothing to do with thought of any kind—with anything at all, in fact, but intuiting the true nature of existence, which is why it has appeared, in one form or another, in almost every culture known to man. The entranced Bushman staring into fire, the Eskimo using a sharp rock to draw an ever-deepening circle into the flat surface of a stone achieves the same obliteration of the ego (and the same power) as the dervish or the Pueblo sacred dancer. Among Hindus and Buddhists, realization is attained through inner stillness, usually achieved through the samadhi state of sitting yoga.4 In Tantric practice, the student may displace the ego by filling his whole being with the real or imagined object of his concentration; in Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a seashell or a flower petal. When body and mind are one, then the whole thing, scoured clean of intellect, emotions, and the senses, may be laid open to the experience that individual existence, ego, the “reality” of matter and phenomena are no more than fleeting and illusory arrangements of molecules. The weary self of masks and screens, defences, preconceptions, and opinions that, propped up by ideas and words, imagines itself to be some sort of entity (in a society of like entities) may suddenly fall away, dissolve into formless flux where concepts such as “death” and “life”, “time” and “space”, “past” and “future” have no meaning. There is only a pearly radiance of Emptiness, the Uncreated, without beginning, therefore without end.5 Like the round bottomed Bodhidharma doll, returning to its centre, meditation represents the foundation of the universe to which all returns, as in the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation. In this “void”, this dynamic state of rest, without impediments, lies ultimate reality, and here one’s own true nature is reborn, in a return from what Buddhists speak of as “great death”. This is the Truth of which Milarepa speaks.
Peter Matthiessen (The Snow Leopard)
Truth be told, the reality show itself quickly degenerated into a televisual soap opera that was not that different than old variety shows made for large audiences. And its audience was amplified at the usual rate of competing media, which leads to the self- propagation of the show via a prophetic method: self-fulfilling prophecy. In the end, the ratings for the show play part of the spiral and return cycle of the advertising flame. But all of this is of little interest. It is only the original idea which has any value: submitting a group to a sensory deprivation experiment ( Which in other times was a form of calculated torture. But are we not in the middle of exploring all the historical forms of torture, served in homeopathic doses, under the guise of mass culture or avant-garde art? This is precisely one of the principle themes of contemporary art.), in order to record the behavior of human molecules within a vacuum - and no doubt with the design of watching them tear each other apart in the artificial promiscuity. We have not yet reached this point, but this existential micro-situation functions as a universal metaphor for the modern being, holed up in his personal loft, which is no longer his physical or mental universe. It is his digital and tactile universe, of Turing’s “spectral body”, of the digital man, captured within the labyrinth of the networks, of man turned into his own (white) mouse.
Jean Baudrillard (Telemorphosis (Univocal))
Freud was right in linking play and phantasy, but he was surely wrong in believing that play and phantasy should be abandoned in favour of rationality. When I suggested that people who realized their creative potential were constantly bridging the gap between inner and outer worlds, I was not referring only to the creation of works of art or to the construction of scientific hypotheses, but to what Winnicott has aptly called ‘creative apperception’. Creative apperception depends upon linking subjective and objective; upon colouring the external world with the warm hues of the imagination. Winnicott wrote: It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living.9 It seems probable that there is always an element of play in creative living. When this playful element disappears, joy goes with it, and so does any sense of being able to innovate. Creative people not infrequently experience periods of despair in which their ability to create anything new seems to have deserted them. This is often because a particular piece of work has become invested with such overwhelming importance that it is no longer possible to play with it. What Gibbon referred to as ‘the vanity of authors’ sometimes makes them regard their work with such desperate seriousness that ‘playing around’ with it becomes impossible. Kekule, describing the vision which led to the discovery of the ring structure of organic molecules referred to above, said: ‘Let us learn to dream, gentlemen.’ He might equally well have said: ‘Let us learn to play.’ The subjective can be so over-emphasized that the individual’s inner world becomes entirely divorced from reality. In that case we call him mad. On the other hand, as Winnicott points out, the individual can suppress his inner world in such a way that he becomes over-compliant with external reality. If the individual regards the external world merely as something to which he has to adapt, rather than as something in which his subjectivity can find fulfilment, his individuality disappears and his life becomes meaningless or futile. An inner world of phantasy must be regarded as part of man’s biological inheritance. Imagination is active in even the best adjusted and happiest human being; but the extent of the gap between inner and outer worlds, and hence the ease or difficulty with which the gap is bridged, varies greatly in different individuals. Some of these differences are examined in subsequent chapters.
Anthony Storr (Solitude: A Return to the Self)
Mucus is made from giant molecules called mucins, each consisting of a central protein backbone with thousands of sugar molecules branching off it. These sugars allow individual mucins to become entangled, forming a dense, nearly impenetrable thicket – a Great Wall of Mucus that stops wayward microbes from penetrating deeper into the body. And if that wasn’t deterrent enough, the wall is manned by viruses.
Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
Atoms, elements and molecules are three important knowledge in Physics, chemistry and Biology. mathematics comes where counting starts, when counting and measurement started, integers were required. Stephen hawking says integers were created by god and everything else is work of man. Man sees pattern in everything and they are searched and applied to other sciences for engineering, management and application problems. Physics, it is required understand the physical nature or meaning of why it happens, chemistry is for chemical nature, Biology is for that why it happened. Biology touch medicine, plants and animals. In medicine how these atoms, elements and molecules interplay with each other by bondage is being explained. Human emotions and responses are because of biochemistry, hormones i e anatomy and physiology. This physiology deals with each and every organs and their functions. When this atom in elements are disturbed whatever they made i e macromolecules DNA, RNA and Protein and other micro and macro nutrients and which affects the physiology of different organs on different scales and then diseases are born because of this imbalance/ disturb in homeostasis. There many technical words are there which are hard to explain in single para. But let me get into short, these atoms in elements and molecules made interplay because of ecological stimulus i e so called god. and when opposite sex meets it triggers various responses on body of each. It is also harmone and they are acting because of atoms inside elements and continuous generation or degenerations of cell cycle. There is a god cell called totipotent stem cell, less gods are pluripotent, multi potent and noni potent stem cells. So finally each and every organ system including brain cells are affected because of interplay of atoms inside elements and their bondages in making complex molecules, which are ruled by ecological stimulus i e god. So everything is basically biology and medicine even for animals, plants and microbes and other life forms. process differs in each living organisms. The biggest mystery is Brain and DNA. Brain has lots of unexplained phenomenon and even dreams are not completely understood by science that is where spiritualism/ soul touches. DNA is long molecule which has many applications as genetic engineering. genomics, personal medicine, DNA as tool for data storage, DNA in panspermia theory and many more. So everything happens to women and men and other sexes are because of Biology, Medicine and ecology. In ecology every organisms are inter connected and inter dependent. Now physics - it touch all technical aspects but it needs mathematics and statistics to lay foundation for why and how it happened and later chemistry, biology also included inside physics. Mathematics gave raise to computers and which is for fast calculation on any applications in any sciences. As physiological imbalances lead to diseases and disorders, genetic mutations, again old concept evolution was retaken to understand how new biology evolves. For evolution and disease mechanisms, epidemiology and statistics was required and statistics was as a data tool considered in all sciences now a days. Ultimate science is to break the atoms to see what is inside- CERN, but it creates lots of mysterious unanswerable questions. laws in physics were discovered and invented with mathematics to understand the universe from atoms. Theory of everything is a long search and have no answers. While searching inside atoms, so many hypothesis like worm holes and time travel born but not yet invented as far as my knowledge. atom is universe, and humans are universe they have everything that universe has. ecology is god that affects humans and climate. In business these computerized AI applications are trying to figure out human emotions by their mechanism of writing, reading, texting, posting on social media and bla bla. Arts is trying to figure out human emotions in art way.
Ganapathy K
PCP intoxicates by causing the limbic system, which processes emotions, to function independently from perceptions of the outside world.
Sara Manning Peskin (A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain)
There it was then. I would build a scientific religion, a religious science. I would reinvigorate man’s interest in the stars via spirituality. By chapel and telescope I would show reality in its nakedness, and convince the people of the Myriad of Man that we are but universe experiencing itself. At last we would look into the mirror of Being, and see only Universe looking back. “We would find wonder in the imponderable majesty of the little, in all of the cells and molecules and atoms and quarks inside one’s body, the beauty of it, the absurdity. That is where we would apprehend the transcendent. And in finding that transcendent, we would at last realise we are but matter, and finally seek to stop conquering more matter. The way out was not up, to some holy, blazing firmament, but down, into the skin, into the quiet absurdity of being.
Exurb1a (Geometry for Ocelots)
I stared at the girl who was my heart displaced outside my chest. Only with her did I ever feel this agonizingly alive. Every beat of my heart, every molecule of blood in my veins, and breath in my lungs claimed and reanimated by her.
Giana Darling (Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6))
How could you,” began Mackey, “how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof . . . how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you . . . ?” Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or snake. “Because,” Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, as if talking to himself, “the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did.
Daniel Z. Lieberman (The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race)
Maybe the wine went to my head. Maybe the weeks of battling the press had worn me down. For some reason, when the conversation took an unexpected turn, I became touchy. Then angry. Disproportionately, sloppily angry. Meg said something I took the wrong way. It was partly a cultural difference, partly a language barrier, but I was also just over-sensitive that night. I thought: Why’s she having a go at me? I snapped at her, spoke to her harshly—cruelly. As the words left my mouth, I could feel everything in the room come to a stop. The gravy stopped bubbling, the molecules of air stopped orbiting. Even Nina Simone seemed to pause. Meg walked out of the room, disappearing for a full fifteen minutes. I went and found her upstairs. She was sitting in the bedroom. She was calm, but said in a quiet, level tone that she would never stand for being spoken to like that. I nodded. She wanted to know where it came from. I don’t know. Where did you ever hear a man speak like that to a woman? Did you overhear adults speak that way when you were growing up? I cleared my throat, looked away. Yes. She wasn’t going to tolerate that kind of partner. Or co-parent. That kind of life. She wasn’t going to raise children in an atmosphere of anger or disrespect. She laid it all out, super-clear. We both knew my anger hadn’t been caused by anything to do with our conversation. It came from somewhere deep inside, somewhere that needed to be excavated, and it was obvious that I could use some help with the job.
Prince Harry (Spare)
How much does a thought weigh? While no one would deny the substance, the physicality, the realness of those qualities grouped under the banner of endosemiotics—cells, hormones, nerves, etc.—psychosemiotics is generally considered to belong to the realms of the subjective and physically insubstantial. This, however, has already been disproven. Using the neuron model for consciousness, physicists have determined that a thought (defined as a piece of information), when converted from neuro electricity to mass, possesses weight roughly equal to that of a water molecule. And regardless of its humble size, this measurement still demonstrates thought/information manifesting in the realm of physical; a real energy. Importantly, information only enters the physical upon interpretation. A man sees a piece of art. In the process of interpreting that art, information manifests as a thought—not just conceptually, but, as elucidated above, physically. Here, an essential question emerges: Where does this information go once it has been manifested?
B.R. Yeager (Negative Space)
Molecule is a daunting word that turns out to have a simple meaning: a molecule is a group of atoms bound together. You are probably already familiar with atoms, like oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen. When atoms are linked together, we call the resulting structure a molecule.
Sara Manning Peskin (A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain)
Aside from evidence for proactive violence among contemporary hunter-gatherers, two thorny facts don’t entirely square with the view that we stopped fighting ever since we became hunter-gatherers. The first fact is muscle. The average adult man today is 12 to 15 percent heavier than the average adult woman, but women have much higher percentages of body fat masking underlying differences in muscle mass. Whole-body scans show that males average 61 percent more muscle mass then females, with most of that difference in the upper body.30 Men’s extra brawn, moreover, is added during puberty, when testosterone levels shoot up, accelerating muscle growth in the arms, shoulders, and neck.31 In this regard, human men resemble male kangaroos, whose upper bodies also enlarge during adolescence to help them fight.32 Enhanced upper-body muscularity in male humans might also have been selected for hunting, but we cannot rule out aggression. The second fact is literally staring us in the face. Consider the faces of assorted males in the genus Homo lined up for you in figure 16. Note that until about 100,000 years ago, even in some of the earliest Homo sapiens, males tend to have massive, heavily built faces and menacingly large browridges. The earliest H. sapiens males have smaller, less robust faces than Neanderthals and other non-modern humans, but truly lightly built, “feminized” faces don’t appear until less than 100,000 years ago.33 It is intriguing to hypothesize that these big faces reflect higher levels of testosterone during adolescence. In males today, elevated testosterone contributes to not only higher libidos, more impulsivity, and more reactive aggression but also bigger browridges and larger faces.34 Another molecule that possibly affects facial masculinization is the neurotransmitter serotonin, which reduces aggression; less masculinized faces are associated with higher levels of serotonin.35
Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
I think the fool is the man that believes he knows what’s out there. We live in a mysterious world, Finn. We’re nothing but atoms and molecules, walking around like we own the place. Who’s to say there’s not spirits around us? What happens to all that energy after death?
Emily Littlejohn (A Season to Lie (Detective Gemma Monroe, #2))
The Hub, a cluster of bubbles in a web of metal, hung in empty space, in that region known to Earthmen as Hither Sagittarius. The owner was Pan Pascoglu, a man short, dark and energetic, almost bald, with restless brown eyes and a thick mustache. A man of ambition, Pascoglu hoped to develop the Hub into a fashionable resort, a glamor-island among the stars — something more than a mere stopover depot and junction point. Working to this end, he added two dozen bright new bubbles — “cottages”, as he called them — around the outer meshes of the Hub, which already resembled the model of an extremely complex molecule.
Jack Vance (Magnus Ridolph)
It was probably in Psychologies Magazine, that Margo read about negative ions, the invisible molecules that our bodies absorb in abundance in places like beaches and that are reported to produce biochemical reactions that ease stress,
Nina Manning (The Beach House)
Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason; his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind. “All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality. “Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth. “The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
Miracles were for the good. What did a damned man do when he was graced with one? If he had even a fucking ounce of goodness, he would turn and run from her, free her of his ominous presence and his death-dealing ways. Oh, but there was not even an ounce of that in me. Not even a fucking molecule. I was all bad, and unfortunately or not for Bea, I was all hers.
Giana Darling (Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6))
I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read. The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big bang. The three-billion-year history of life’s evolution from self-reproducing molecules to civilization contains twists and romances that cannot be matched by any myth or epic. There is also the poetic vision of space and time in relativity, the weird subatomic world of quantum mechanics … these wondrous stories of science all possess an irresistible attraction. Through the medium of science fiction, I seek only to create my own worlds using the power of imagination, and to make known the poetry of Nature in those worlds, to tell the romantic legends that have unfolded between Man and Universe. But I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.
Liu Cixin (The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1))
The Human Heart CONSIDER, FOR example, the human heart and its accompanying circulatory system. The human heart is vastly superior to any human artifact. Every second it undergoes a cycle of contraction and expansion, and beats continually and faithfully for the duration of a human lifetime. It starts beating in the womb and in eighty years will beat about two billion times. The cardiac muscle itself consists of an interconnected syncytium of billions of muscle cells specially adapted to resist fatigue and contract autonomously without external activation or control. Within the cardiac muscle cells there are trillions of tightly packed molecular arrays of contractile filaments whose regular rhythmic lengthening and shortening generate the cardiac cycle. At rest each of us needs about a fourth a liter of oxygen per minute to satisfy our energy needs.30 This involves the movement every minute of one hundred trillion oxygen molecules across every square millimeter of the alveolar surface of the lungs. And with every contraction the heart pumps one hundred billion red blood cells through hundreds of kilometers of tiny capillaries.31 Coursing through the capillaries in the lungs, each of these tiny nano-machines carries one billion molecules of oxygen (O2) from the lungs to the tissues, each loosely bound to an iron atom in the hemoglobin. By the heart’s unceasing activity it ensures a bountiful supply of oxygen to provide us with the vital energy of life. The red cells themselves, no less than the heart, are also miracles of bioengineering. During its 120-day lifetime in the circulatory system, each red cell makes hundreds of thousands of circuits, covering hundreds of miles. It is only because the red cell membranes are uniquely soft and strong—one hundred times softer than a latex membrane of comparable thickness but stronger than steel32—that they can withstand these repeated deformations as they squeeze though the smallest capillaries, which in many cases have a diameter of five microns, almost half the diameter of the average red blood cell.
Michael Denton (The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence (Privileged Species Series))
The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman; and modern society is a mass composed solely of individual families as its molecules. Today, in the great majority of cases, the man has to be the earner, the breadwinner of the family, at least among the propertied classes, and this gives him a dominating position which requires no special legal privileges. In the family, he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat.
Rius (Introducing Marx: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides))
Nicotine doesn’t make you high like marijuana or intoxicated like alcohol or wired up like speed. Some people say it makes them feel more relaxed or more alert, but really, the main thing it does is relieve cravings for itself. It’s the perfect circle. The only point of smoking cigarettes is to get addicted so one can experience the pleasure of relieving the unpleasant feeling of craving, like a man who carries around a rock all day because it feels so good when he puts it down.
Daniel Z. Lieberman (The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race)
The syndrome acquired the name Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease after Jakob incorrectly gave credit to a fellow German scientist, Hans Creutzfeldt, who Jakob felt had described a similar case a few years earlier. Creutzfeldt’s case turned out to be a different disease—and the pairing ended up being particularly unfortunate, since Jakob was Jewish and Creutzfeldt likely had ties to the Nazi regime—but the name stuck.
Sara Manning Peskin (A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain)
But no organism could survive in the rarefied world that the physicist, up to the present generation, regarded as the real one, the abstract area of mass and motion-any more than man could survive without massive equipment on the life-forsaken moon. The actual world occupied by organisms is one of literally indescribable richness and complexity: a life-furthering accumulation of molecules, organisms, species, each bearing the impress of countless functional adaptations and selective transformations, the residue of billions of years of evolution. Of these vast transformations only an infinitesimal part is visible or can be reduced to any mathematical order. Form, color, odor, tactile sensations, emotions, appetites, feelings, images, dreams, words, symbolic abstractions-that plenitude of life which even the humblest being in some degree exhibits-cannot be resolved in any mathematical equation or converted into a geometric metaphor without eliminating a large part of the relevant experience.
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
It is, in fact, natural to think that man may be a finite-state machine, not only in his function as a message source which produces words, but in all his other behavior as well. We can think if we like of all possible conditions and configurations of the cells of the nervous system as constituting states (states of mind, perhaps). We can think of one state passing to another, sometimes with the production of a letter, word, sound, or a part thereof, and sometimes with the production of some other action or of some part of an action. We can think of sight, hearing, touch, and other senses as supplying inputs which determine or influence what state the machine passes into next. If man is a finite-state- machine, the number of states must be fantastic and beyond any detailed mathematical treatment. But, so are the configurations of the molecules in a gas, and yet we can explain much of the significant behavior of a gas in terms of pressure and temperature merely. Can we someday say valid, simple, and important things about the working of the mind in producing written text and other things as well? As we have seen, we can already predict a good deal concerning the statistical nature of what a man will write down on paper, unless he is deliberately trying to behave eccentrically, and, even then, he cannot help conforming to habits of his own.
John Robinson Pierce (An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise (Dover Books on Mathematics))
Even when one restricts the notion of progress to conquering space and time, its human limitations are flagrant. Take one of Buckminster Fuller's favorite illustrations of the shrinkage of time and space, beginning with a sphere twenty feet in diameter, to represent transportation time-distance by walking. With the use of the horse, this sphere gets reduced in size to six feet, with the clipper ship, it becomes a basketball, with the railroad, a baseball, with the jet plane, a marble, and with the rocket, a pea. And if one could travel at the speed of light, one might add, to round off Fuller's idea, the earth would become, from the standpoint of bodily velocity, a molecule, so that one would be back at the starting point without having even the briefest sensation of having left. By so carrying Fuller's illustration to its theoretic extreme, one reduces this mechanical concept to its proper degree of human irrelevance. For like every other technical achievement, speed has a meaning only in relation to other human needs and purposes. Plainly, the effect of speeding transportation is to diminish the possibilities of direct human experience-even the experience of travel. A person who undertook to walk around the earth would actually, at the end of that long journey, have stored up rich memories of its geographic, climatic, esthetic, and human realities: these experiences retreat in direct ratio to speed, until at the climax of rapid movement, the traveller can have no experience at all: his world has become a static one, in which time and motion work no changes whatever. Not merely space but man shrinks. Because of the volume of jet travel and the rapid turnover of tourists, this means of transport has already ruined beyond repair many of the precious historic sites and cities that incited this mass visitation.
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
The new law that he predicted seemed to defy common sense. It was that the viscosity of a gas-the internal frictional that causes drag on a body moved through it-is independent of its pressure. One might expect a more compressed gas to exert a greater drag; even James was surprised at first that the theory said otherwise. But further thought showed that, at higher pressure, the effect on a moving body of being surrounded by more molecules is exactly counteracted by the screening effect they provide: each molecule travels, on average, a shorter distance before it collides with another one. A few years later, James and Katherine themselves did the experiment which showed the prediction to be correct.
Basil Mahon (The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell)
The first event, which looked back but also forward like a kind of historical hinge, was the centennial of the birth of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had discovered (five years earlier) the psychoactive molecule that came to be known as LSD. This was an unusual centennial in that the man being feted was very much in attendance. Entering his second century, Hofmann appeared in remarkably good shape, physically spry and mentally sharp, and he was able to take an active part in the festivities, which included a birthday ceremony followed by a three-day symposium. The symposium’s opening ceremony was on January 13, two days after Hofmann’s 100th birthday (he would live to be 102). Two thousand people packed the hall at the Basel Congress Center, rising to applaud as a stooped stick of a man in a dark suit and a necktie, barely five feet tall, slowly crossed the stage and took his seat. Two hundred journalists from around the world were in attendance, along with more than a thousand healers, seekers, mystics, psychiatrists, pharmacologists, consciousness researchers, and neuroscientists, most of them people whose lives had been profoundly altered by the remarkable molecule that this man had derived from a fungus half a century before. They had come to celebrate him and what his friend the Swiss poet and physician Walter Vogt called “the only joyous invention of the twentieth century.
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
Just before the Clear Air Turbulence went back into warp and its crew sat down at table, the ship expelled the limp corpse of Zallin. Where it had found a live man in a suit, it left a dead youth in shorts and a tattered shirt, tumbling and freezing while a thin shell of air molecules expanded around the body, like an image of departing life.
Iain M. Banks (Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1))
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.
William James (The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1)
blind belief in a variety of scientific teachings about infinitely small atoms and molecules and in all the infinitely great and infinitely remote worlds, their movements and origin, as well as from faith in the infallibility of the scientific law to which humanity is at present subjected: the historic law, the economic laws, the law of struggle and survival, and so on—if people only freed themselves from this terrible accumulation of futile exercises of our lower capacities of mind and memory called the 'Sciences', and from the innumerable divisions of all sorts of histories, anthropologies, homiletics, bacteriologics, jurisprudences, cosmographies, strategies—their name is legion—and freed themselves from all this harmful, stupifying ballast—the simple law of love, natural to man, accessible to all and solving all questions and perplexities, would of itself become clear and obligatory.
Leo Tolstoy (A Letter to a Hindu)
Somewhere I had had a trace of faith in free will, but this morning I felt sure that man possessed as much choice as the clockwork of my wristwatch or the fly that stopped on the edge of my saucer. The same powers were driving Hitler, Stalin, the Pope, the Rabbi of Gur, a molecule in the center of the earth, and a galaxy billions of lightyears distant from the Milky Way. Blind powers? Seeing powers? It did not matter any more. We were fated to play our little games and to be crushed.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (Shosha)