Peter William Atkins
(10 Aug 1940 - )
English physical chemist and writer who joined the faculty of the University of Oxford in 1965 and shortly afterwards began writing textbooks in his subject at high school, college and graduate levels and became Editor of Oxford Chemistry series. Later, he turned to topics accessible to the layman, including Creation Revisited (1992), The Periodic Kingdom(1995), Galileo's Finger (2003) and Four Laws That Drive the Universe (2007).
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Science Quotes by Peter William Atkins (21 quotes)
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 around the countryside ... Some of the things resembling elephants will be men.
— Peter William Atkins
The Creation (1981), 3.
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 William Atkins
In The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements (1995), Preface, viii.
Its a vacuous answer
To say that God made the world is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don't understand how the universe originated. A god, in so far as it is anything, is an admission of ignorance.
— Peter William Atkins
From Speech, Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. As quoted in 'Professor Says Science Rules Out Belief in God', The Telegraph (11 Sep 1996). As cited in John C. Weaver and John David Weaver, Christianity and Science (1973, 1984), 22.
Many consider that the conflict of religion and science is a temporary phase, and that in due course the two mighty rivers of human understanding will merge into an even mightier Amazon of comprehension. I take the opposite view, that reconciliation is impossible. I consider that Science is mightier than the Word, and that the river of religion will (or, at least, should) atrophy and die.
— Peter William Atkins
In 'Religion - The Antithesis to Science', Chemistry & Industry (Feb 1997).
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 William Atkins
In The Creation (1981), Preface, vii. As quoted and cited in Karl W. Giberson and Donald A. Yerxa, Species of Origins: America's Search for a Creation Story (2002), 126 and footnote, 146.
No other part of science has contributed as much to the liberation of the human spirit as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Yet, at the same time, few other parts of science are held to be so recondite. Mention of the Second Law raises visions of lumbering steam engines, intricate mathematics, and infinitely incomprehensible entropy. Not many would pass C.P. Snows test of general literacy, in which not knowing the Second Law is equivalent to not having read a work of Shakespeare.
— Peter William Atkins
In The Second Law (1984), Preface, vii.
Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny.
— Peter William Atkins
Essay collected in John Cornwell (ed.), 'The Limitless Power of Science', Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision (1995), 125.
Religion is the antithesis of science; science is competent to illuminate all the deep questions of existence, and does so in a manner that makes full use of, and respects the human intellect. I see neither need nor sign of any future reconciliation.
— Peter William Atkins
In 'Religion - The Antithesis to Science', Chemistry & Industry (Feb 1997).
Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation.
— Peter William Atkins
Essay collected in John Cornwell (ed.), 'The Limitless Power of Science', Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision (1995), 125.
Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can.
— Peter William Atkins
Essay collected in John Cornwell (ed.), 'The Limitless Power of Science', Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision (1995), 125.
Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking.
— Peter William Atkins
Essay collected in John Cornwell (ed.), 'The Limitless Power of Science', Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision (1995), 123.
That only Galileos physical finger is preserved but the descendants of his techniques thrive is also symbolic of the transitoriness of personal existence in contrast to the immortality of knowledge.
— Peter William Atkins
In Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science (2003), 1.
The complexity of the world is the outcome of huge numbers of sometimes conflicting simple events.
— Peter William Atkins
In 'Religion - The Antithesis to Science', Chemistry & Industry (Feb 1997).
The general disposition of the land [in the Periodic Kingdom] 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 William Atkins
In The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements (1995), 9.
The techniques and criteria of religion and science are so extraordinarily different. Science seeks simplicity publicly and encourages the overthrow of authority; religion accepts complexity privately and encourages deference to authority.
— Peter William Atkins
In 'Religion - The Antithesis to Science', Chemistry & Industry (Feb 1997).
There is an occasional glimmer of fertility [as compounds], the chemical equivalent of a blade of grass [in a desert]. So, gone
is the justification for inert. [Group 0 elements] are now known collectively as the noble gases, a name intended to imply a kind of chemical aloofness rather than a rigorous chastity.
— Peter William Atkins
In The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements (1995), 9.
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 William Atkins
In 'The Terrain', The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements (1995), 3.
Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith.
— Peter William Atkins
Essay collected in John Cornwell (ed.), 'The Limitless Power of Science', Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision (1995), 125.
To believe that the assertion that God is an explanation (of anything, let alone everything) is intellectually contemptible, for it amounts to an admission of ignorance packaged into the pretence of an explanation. To aver that God did it is worse than an admission of ignorance, for it shrouds ignorance in deceit.
— Peter William Atkins
In 'Religion - The Antithesis to Science', Chemistry & Industry (Feb 1997).
War and the steam engine joined forces and forged what was to become one of the most delicate of concepts. Sadi Carnot
formed the opinion that one cause of Frances defeat had been her industrial inferiority.
Carnot saw steam power as a universal motor.
Carnot was a visionary and sharp analyst of what was needed to improve the steam engine.
Carnots work
laid the foundations of [thermodynamics].
— Peter William Atkins
In The Second Law (1984), 1-2.
Would not [an] uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?
— Peter William Atkins
Essay collected in John Cornwell (ed.), 'The Limitless Power of Science', Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision (1995), 123.