Interesting Quotes

Over the course of my perusings amongst various soft science books, I've kept a record of some of the interesting quotes I've come across. Here they are.

"To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you...Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you- indeed; don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single overarching impulse: to keep you you." - Bill Bryson

"They [atoms] are also fantastically durable. Becasue they are so long lived atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name." - Bill Bryson

"You can get some idea of the proportions [of atoms] if you bear in mind that one atom is to the width of a millimeter line as the thickness of a sheet of paper is to the height of the Empire State Building." - Bill Bryson

"As Cropper has put it if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be only about the size of a fly- but a fly many thousand of times heavier than the cathedral." - Bill Bryson

Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be "all things are made of atoms." - Bill Bryson

"The early morning’s thinnest sliver of light appeared silently. Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp." - Douglas Adams

"Consider one microgram of table salt, a spack just barely large enough for someone with keen eyesight to make out without a microscope. In that grain of salt there are about 10^16 sodium and chlorine atoms. This is a 1 followed by 16 zeros, 10 million billion atoms." - Carl Sagan

"Chlorine is a deaadly poison gas emplyed on European bttlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unposionous material, table salt." - Carl Sagan - Broca's Brain

"Francium is the rarest element on the planet. At any given time, it is thought, that only 15 atoms of it exist on the planet." - Bill Bryson

"Carbon is shamelessly permicious." - Bill Bryson