Atomic Quotes (6 quotes)
Dalton transformed the atomic concept from a philosophical speculation into a scientific theory—framed to explain quantitative observations, suggesting new tests and experiments, and capable of being given quantitative form through the establishment of relative masses of atomic particles.
Development of Concepts of Physics. In Clifford A. Pickover, Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them (2008), 175.
The atomic explosion of August 6, 1945, shook me seismically. Thenceforth, the atom was my favorite food for thought. Many of the landscapes painted in this period express the great fear inspired in me by the announcement of that explosion.
In Salvador Dali and Harold J. Salemson, (trans.), 'How to Pray to God Without Believing in Him', The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí: as Told to André Parinaud (1976), 216. Quoted and cited in Michael R. Taylor, 'God and the Atom: Salvador Dalí’s Mystical Manifesto and the Contested Origins of Nuclear Painting', Avant-garde Studies (Fall 2016), No. 2, 10.
The famous principle of indeterminacy is not as negative as it appears. It limits the applicability of classical concepts to atomic events in order to make room for new phenomena such as the wave-particle duality. The uncertainty principle has made our understanding richer, not poorer; it permits us to include atomic reality in the framework of classical concepts. To quote from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
In Scientific American as quoted in epigraph, in Barbara Lovett Cline, The Questioners: Physicists and the Quantum Theory (1965), 235. Weisskopf was replying to James R Newman’s statement beginning “In this century the professional philosophers…” on this site’s webpage of James R. Newman Quotations.
The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena. The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model.
In The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics (1975), 132.
The United States pledges before you—and therefore before the world—its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma—to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.
From address to the General Assembly of the United Nations (8 Dec 1953).
We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.
In Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (1922), 45 (proposition 3.021).
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
