Peter Atkins Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise.

Peter Atkins
One or two atoms can convert a fuel to a poison, change a color, render an inedible substance edible, or replace a pungent odor with a fragrant one. That changing a single atom can have such consequences is the wonder of the chemical world.

Peter Atkins
Chemistry stands at the pivot of science. On the one hand it deals with biology and provides explanations for the processes of life. On the other hand it mingles with physics and finds explanations for chemical phenomena in the fundamental processes and particles of the universe. Chemistry links the familiar with the fundamental.

Peter Atkins
Buttercups do not think, yet they are also built of mathematics.

Peter Atkins
One of the wonders of this world is that objects so small can have such consequences: any visible lump of matter — even the merest speck — contains more atoms than there are stars in our galaxy.

Peter Atkins
Quarks appear to be without spatial extent and to lack a deeper structure: they have character without extension and are substance without inside.

Peter Atkins
The stern and stony eye of science seeks answers that are not grounded in the fundamentality of purpose.

Peter Atkins
Dear Professor Rutherford, We students of our university physics club elect you our honorary president because you proved that atoms have balls.
10 October 1929, in USSR

Peter Atkins
Immediately south of nitrogen is phosphorus, which was first isolated by the distillation and treatment of urine — an indication of the lengths to which chemists are prepared to go, or perhaps only a sign of the obsessive, scatological origins of their vocation.

Peter Atkins
Each new atom brings something of the personality of its element to the molecule, and this conspiracy of atoms results in a molecule with properties that are richer than those of each atom alone.

Peter Atkins
I remember, I remember, When an atom was so small It really hardly paid you To think of one at all. It was so small that anywhere An atom safe could be And pass his time in molecules In elemental glee.

Peter Atkins
The kingdom is not an amorphous jumble of regions, but a closely organized state in which the character of one region is close to that of its neighbor. There are few sharp boundaries. Rather, the landscape is largely characterized by transitions...

Peter Atkins
Everything is driven by motiveless, purposeless decay.

Peter Atkins
Common sense drives us to accept quantum theory in place of classical physics as more consistent with common sense... When they are inspected, the explanations of classical physics fall apart, and they are seen to be mere superficial delusions, like film-sets.

Peter Atkins
While the [strong] force has mastery over the little nuclei of light atoms, at uranium, with a couple of hundred particles packed into the nucleus, it is losing control, and the nucleus tends to fall apart. Whether or not it does so in a controlled way determines the level of social benevolance of the outcome.

Peter Atkins
Nascent atoms are equipped with arms, with which they can combine with other atoms.

Peter Atkins
A great deal of the universe does not need any explanation. Elephants, for instance. Once molecules have learnt to compete and to create other molecules in their own image, elephants, and things resembling elephants, will in due course be found roaming the country side.... Some of the things resembling elephants will be men.

Peter Atkins
My aim is to argue that the universe can come into existence without intervention, and that there is no need to invoke the idea of a Supreme Being in one of its numerous manifestations.

Peter Atkins
We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.

Peter Atkins
This is the kingdom of the chemical elements, the substances from which everything tangible is made. It is not an extensive country, for it consists of only a hundred or so regions (as we shall often term the elements), yet it accounts for everything material in our actual world. From the hundred elements that are at the center of our story, all planets, rocks, vegetation, and animals are made. These elements are the basis of the air, the oceans, and the Earth itself. We stand on the elements, we eat the elements, we are the elements. Because our brains are made up of elements, even our opinions are, in a sense, properties of the elements and hence inhabitants of the kingdom.

Peter Atkins
I have presented the periodic table as a kind of travel guide to an imaginary country, of which the elements are the various regions. This kingdom has a geography: the elements lie in particular juxtaposition to one another, and they are used to produce goods, much as a prairie produces wheat and a lake produces fish. It also has a history. Indeed, it has three kinds of history: the elements were discovered much as the lands of the world were discovered; the kingdom was mapped, just as the world was mapped, and the relative positions of the elements came to take on a great significance; and the elements have their own cosmic history, which can be traced back to the stars.

Peter Atkins
The general disposition of the land is one of metals in the west, giving way, as you travel eastward, to a varied landscape of nonmetals, which terminates in largely inert elements at the eastern shoreline. To the south of the mainland, there is an offshore island, which we shall call the Southern Island. It consists entirely of metals of subtly modulated personality. North of the mainland, situated rather like Iceland off the northwestern edge of Europe, lies a single, isolated region-hydrogen. This simple but gifted element is an essential outpost of the kingdom, for despite its simplicity it is rich in chemical personality. It is also the most abundant element in the universe and the fuel of the stars.

Peter Atkins