Skip to content

Atoms Quote by Sam Kean

Download Open image

““When you do the math and examine how much energy is produced per atomic union, you find that fusing anything to iron’s twenty-six protons costs energy. That means post-ferric fusion* does an energy-hungry star no good. Iron is the final peal of a star’s natural life.””

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.3 out of 5 (7 ratings)

Atoms Elements Energy Iron Natural life Stars

More by Sam Kean

“So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn’t touch. This gave them…

Image

So if big enough droplets fell far enough fast enough, someone floating right near the metallic hydrogen layer inside Jupiter maybe, just maybe, could…

Image

Mendeleev, unlike the squeamish Meyer, had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up. Look harder, you chemists and geologists, he…

Image

“Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special…

Image

“Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general.…

Image

“The irony is too rich not to point out. When arranging the different human races in tiers, from just below the angels to just…

Image

“Think of the most fussy science teacher you ever had. The one who docked your grade if the sixth decimal place in your answer…

Image

“For his part, Mendeleev scanned Lecoq de Boisbaudran’s data on gallium and told the experimentalist, with no justification, that he must have measured something…

Image

“Sir Isaac Newton famously said that he had achieved everything by standing on the shoulders of giants—the scientific men whose findings he built upon.…

Image

“If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected).…

Image

“Scarily, cadmium is not even the worst poison among the elements. It sits above mercury, a neurotoxin. And to the right of mercury sit…

Image

“Somehow, though, life turned that danger around, and this former poison became essential. It may sound trite, but this reversal always reminds me of…

Image

Explore all 58 Sam Kean quotes

More Atoms quotes

If the polymer chain assumes a helicoidal conformation in the crystalline state, and if it does not contain asymmetric carbon atoms, it can be…

Image

Physicist Isador Isaac Rabi, who won a Nobel Prize for inventing a technique that permitted scientists to probe the structure of atoms and molecules…

Richard Saul Wurman

Image

Pound St. Paul's Church into atoms, and consider any single atom; it is to be sure, good for nothing; but put all these atoms…

Image

A monkey is unaware that atoms exist. Likewise, our brainpower may not stretch to the deepest aspects of reality. The bedrock nature of space…

Image

[Decoding the human genome sequence] is the most significant undertaking that we have mounted so far in an organized way in all of science.…

Francis Collins

Image

Though an atom is invisible, unthinkable, yet in it are the whole power and potency of the universe.

Swami Vivekananda

Image

Traditional nationalism cannot survive the fissioning of the atom. One world or none.

Image

I am not sure why, but I have been obsessed by the Atom Bomb ever since it first happened.

Image

History is the short trudge from Adam to atom.

Image

“The dogma of the impossibility of determining the atomic constitution of substances, which until recently was advocated with such fervor by the most able…

Image

I have never seen what to me seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life. And yet-I am inclined to expect…

Image

“An atom is mostly made up of empty space. If you remove the empty space from every atom, the entire world's human population could…

Image

Browse all 830 Atoms quotes