Francis William Aston Quotes

Now I know what the atom looks like.

During the 20th century, we came to understand that the essence of all substances - their colour, texture, hardness and so forth - is set by their structure, on scales far smaller even than a microscope can see. Everything on Earth is made of atoms, which are, especially in living things, combined together in intricate molecular assemblages.

The infinite variety in the properties of the solid materials we find in the world is really the expression of the infinite variety of the ways in which the atoms and molecules can be tied together, and of the strength of those ties.

I do not want chemistry to degenerate into a religion; I do not want the chemist to believe in the existence of atoms as the Christian believes in the existence of Christ in the communion wafer.

All kinds of physical considerations become senseless when we try to apply them to distances smaller than 10 -13 centimeter.

I'm a science geek. I even have a T-shirt with a glow-in-the-dark chart of the periodic elements.

I'm not terribly science-y. I couldn't tell you what's the binomial equation or how many atoms in a mole.

If all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?

Each one of us is a set of shifting molecules, spinning in ecstasy.

There are as many atoms in one molecule of DNA as there are stars in a typical galaxy.

Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.

I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

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

Everything within a half-a-minute or a half-an-inch is gold, silver, bronze or nothing.

The distance from nothing to a little, is ten thousand times more, than from it to the highest degree in this life.

Physics and those parts of other fields that grow out of physics - chemistry, the structure of big molecules - in those domains, there is a lot of progress. In many other domains, there is very little progress in developing real scientific understanding.

Everything is made of atoms.

But it is necessary to insist more strongly than usual that what I am putting before you is a model-the Bohr model atom-because later I shall take you to a profounder level of representation in which the electron instead of being confined to a particular locality is distributed in a sort of probability haze all over the atom.

I got into nuclear science when I was about 10 years old I was fascinated by the stuff. I was fascinated by the reactions and the power inside these atoms that we had the capability to unlock.

The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.

Where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come united.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

Though an atom is invisible, unthinkable, yet in it are the whole power and potency of the universe.

That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off... and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.

There are as many atoms in each molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. This is true for dogs, and bears, and every living thing. We are, each of us, a little universe.