Ernst Mach Quotes

One of the questions that always puzzled human history is, what are we, and everything around us, made of.

The whole edifice of modern physics is built up on the fundamental hypothesis of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter.

A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

We might be allowed to... assert that because our only cognitions of matter are cognitions of force, matter in the scientific sense is force.

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

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

I do theoretical particle physics. We're trying to understand the most basic structure of matter. And the way you do that is you have to look at really small distances. And to get to small distances, you need high energies.

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

But even physics cannot be defined from an atomic topography.

The atoms may be compared to the letters of the alphabet, which can be put together into innumerable ways to form words. So the atoms are combined in equal variety to form what are called molecules.

In each atom, in each corpuscle, is life. Life is what you worship as God ... and earth is only an atom in the universe of worlds.

Now I know what the atom looks like.

Now the smallest Particles of Matter may cohere by the strongest Attractions, and compose bigger Particles of weaker Virture.... There are therefore Agents in Nature able to make the Particles of Bodies stick together by very strong Attraction. And it is the Business of experimental Philosophy to find them out.

If Atomes are as small, as small can bee,They must in quantity of Matter all agree

The electron is first of all your concept of the electron.

Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does “life”, but not so mind.

I am a particle physicist, which is the nearest branch to nuclear physics. So in that sense I was the sort of right connection with the subject of nuclear energy and so on.

Apart from the body does the world exist? Has anyone seen the world without the body?

The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .

The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

What canst thou see elsewhere which thou canst not see here? Behold the heaven and the earth and all the elements; for of these are all things created.

Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular.

Every subatomic interaction consists of the annihilation of the original particles and the creation of new subatomic particles. The subatomic world is a continual dance of creation and annihilation, of mass changing into energy and energy changing into mass. Transient forms sparkle in and out of existence, creating a never-ending, forever newly created reality.

Our brains are too slow to register that every concrete object is winking in and out of existence at the quantum level thousands of times per second.