atoms Quotes

Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity.

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

“The mechanistic world is imagined only as sight and touch imagine a world (as “moved”) --so as to be calculable-- thus causal unities are invented, “things” (atoms) whose effect remains constant (--transference of the false concept of subject to the concept of the atom).”

“In order to sustain the theory of a mechanistic world, therefore, we always have to stipulate to what extent we are employing two fictions: the concept of motion (taken from our sense language) and the concept of the atom (=unity, deriving from our psychical “experience”): the mechanistic theory presupposes a sense prejudice and a psychological prejudice.”

“We now know that neither the atoms nor the protons and neutrons within them are indivisible. So the question is: what are the truly elementary particles, the basic building blocks from which everything is made?′