Peter Atkins > Quotes

“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. Would not that same 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?

...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. 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. 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. 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 Atkins, Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision

“[Religious belief is] outmoded and ridiculous. [Belief in gods was a] worn out but once useful crutch in mankind's journey towards truth. We consider the time has come for that crutch to be abandoned.

It is 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.

Religion utterly failed to provide an explanation of the biosphere other than that 'God made it all'. Then Darwin thundered over the horizon and in a few decades of observation and thought . . . arrived at an answer.

I regard teaching religion as purveying lies. I came here today to de-corrupt you all.”
― P.W. Atkins

“I regard teaching religion as purveying lies.”
― P.W. Atkins

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Peter Atkins, Life Is Short And So Is This Book

“If the elements are the alphabets of chemistry, then the compounds are its plays, its poems, and its novels.”
― Peter Atkins, Loretta Jones

“Taking care of yourself means finding a balance that works for you, then having the discipline to maintain that balance.”
― Peter Atkins, Life Is Short And So Is This Book

“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.”
― P.W. Atkins

“[Religion is] a fantasy [and is] completely empty of any explanatory content. It is also evil.”
― P.W. Atkins

“It is not possible to be intellectually honest and believe in gods. And it is not possible to believe in gods and be a true scientist.”
― P.W. Atkins

“Well it's fairly straightforward: there isn't one [a god]. And there's no evidence for one, no reason to believe that there is one, and so I don't believe that there is one. And I think that it is rather foolish that people do think that there is one.”
― P.W. Atkins

“The challenge of elucidating living processes -- including consciousness and all its baggage which we bundle together as 'the human spirit' -- is only one example of a challenge where hard work is paying off and science does not need to accept the false explanations peddled by religions.”
― P.W. Atkins

“With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die. - Abraham Lincoln”
― Peter Atkins, Life Is Short And So Is This Book

“Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. - Plato”
― Peter Atkins, Life Is Short And So Is This Book

“I’ve found you can choose to let all the things that go wrong in life depress you. Or, you can accept that things will go wrong, try to laugh, and then look at what you can do. There’s a Japanese proverb that gets right to the point: We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.”
― Peter Atkins, Life Is Short And So Is This Book

“Whereas chemistry reaches down into physics for its explanations (and through physics further down into mathematics for its quantitative formulation), it reaches upwards into biology for many of its most extraordinary applications. That”
― Peter Atkins, What is Chemistry?: A Very Short Introduction

“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. Would not that same 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?”
― P.W. Atkins

“When asked by Rod Liddle in the documentary The Trouble with Atheism "Give me your views on the existence, or otherwise, of God",Peter Atkins replied "Well it's fairly straightforward: there isn't one. And there's no evidence for one, no reason to believe that there is one, and so I don't believe that there is one. And I think that it is rather foolish that people do think that there is one.”
― Peter Atkins

“Life, at root, is molecular bumbling.”
― Peter Atkins

“Theologians could not even agree about the nature of their gods. These personages ranged from "blue touch-paper gods" who started everything and never interfered again, to "infinitely meddlesome gods who, as well as starting it off, police every elementary particle.”
― P.W. Atkins

“[Religious belief is] outmoded and ridiculous. [Belief in gods was a] worn out but once useful crutch in mankind's journey towards truth. We consider the time has come for that crutch to be abandoned.”
― P.W. Atkins

“Metal atoms are bound together by metallic bonding. That is not just a tautology. The clue to its nature is the fact that all the metals lie towards the left-hand side of the Periodic Table where, as we have seen, the atoms of the elements have only a few electrons in their outermost cloud layers and which are readily lost. To envisage metallic bonding, think of all these outermost electrons as slipping off the parent atom and congregating in a sea that pervades the whole slab of atoms. The cations that are left behind lie in this sea and interact favourably with it. As a result, all the cations are bound together in a solid mass. That mass is malleable because, like an actual sea, it can respond readily to a shift in the positions of the cations in the mass when they are struck by a hammer. The electrons also allow the metal to be drawn out into a wire, by responding immediately to the relocation of the cations. As the electrons in the sea are not pinned down to particular atoms, they are mobile and can migrate through the solid in response to an electric field. Metals are lustrous because the electrons of the sea can respond to the shaking caused by the electric field of an incident ray of light, and that oscillation of the sea in turn generates light that we perceive as reflection. When we gaze into the metal coating of a mirror, we are watching the waves in the metal’s electron sea.”
― Peter Atkins, Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction

“In broad terms, the Second Law asserts that things get worse. A bit more specifically, it acknowledges that matter and energy tend to disperse in disorder. Left to itself, matter crumbles and energy spreads. The chaotic motion of molecules of a gas results in them spreading through the container the gas occupies. The vigorous jostling of atoms in a hot lump of metal jostles the atoms in its cooler surroundings, the energy spreads away, and the metal cools. That’s all there is to natural change: spreading in disorder. The astonishing thing, though, is that this natural spreading can result in the emergence of exquisite form. If the spreading is captured in an engine, then bricks may be hoisted to build a cathedral. If the spreading occurs in a seed, then molecules may be hoisted to build an orchid. If the spreading occurs in your body, then random electrical and molecular currents in your brain may be organized into an opinion.

The spreading of matter and energy is the root of all change. Wherever change occurs, be it corrosion, corruption, growth, decay, flowering, artistic creation, exquisite creation, understanding, reproduction, cancer, fun, accident, quiet or boisterous enjoyment, travel, or just simple pointless motion it is an outward manifestation of this inner spring, the purposeless spreading of matter and energy in ever greater disorder. Like it or not, purposeless decay into disorder is the spring of all change, even when that change is exquisite or results in seemingly purposeful action.”
― Peter Atkins, On Being: A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence

“One of the most powerful tools for discovering structure is ‘X-ray diffraction’ or, because it is always applied to crystals of the substance of interest, ‘X-ray crystallography’. The technique has been a gushing fountain of Nobel prizes, starting with Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays (awarded in 1901, the first physics prize), then William and his son Laurence Bragg in 1915, Peter Debye in 1936, and continuing with Dorothy Hodgkin (1964), and culminating with Maurice Wilkins (but not Rosalind Franklin) in 1962, which provided the foundation of James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s formulation of the double-helix structure of DNA, with all its huge implications for understanding inheritance, tackling disease, and capturing criminals (a prize shared with Wilkins in 1962). If there is one technique that is responsible for blending biology into chemistry, then this is it. Another striking feature of this list is that the prize has been awarded in all three scientific categories: chemistry, physics, and physiology and medicine, such is the range of the technique and the illumination it has brought.”
― Peter Atkins, Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction

“Perhaps nowhere is modern chemistry more important than in the development of new drugs to fight disease, ameliorate pain, and enhance the experience of life. Genomics, the identification of genes and their complex interplay in governing the production of proteins, is central to current and future advances in pharmacogenomics, the study of how genetic information modifies an individual's response to drugs and offering the prospect of personalized medicine, where a cocktail of drugs is tailored to an individual's genetic composition.

Even more elaborate than genomics is proteomics, the study of an organism's entire complement of proteins, the entities that lie at the workface of life and where most drugs act. Here computational chemistry is in essential alliance with medical chemistry, for if a protein implicated in a disease can be identified, and it is desired to terminate its action, then computer modelling of possible molecules that can invade and block its active site is the first step in rational drug discovery. This too is another route to the efficiencies and effectiveness of personalized medicine.”
― Peter Atkins, Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction

“Thermodynamics, like much of the rest of science, takes terms with an everyday meaning and sharpens them—some would say, hijacks them—so that they take on an exact and unambiguous meaning. We shall see that happening throughout this introduction to thermodynamics. It starts as soon as we enter its doors. The part of the universe that is at the centre of attention in thermodynamics is called the system. A system may be a block of iron, a beaker of water, an engine, a human body. It may even be a circumscribed part of each of those entities. The rest of the universe is called the surroundings. The surroundings are where we stand to make observations on the system and infer its properties. Quite often, the actual surroundings consist of a water bath maintained at constant temperature, but that is a more controllable approximation to the true surroundings, the rest of the world. The system and its surroundings jointly make up the universe. Whereas for us the universe is everything, for a less profligate thermodynamicist it might consist of a beaker of water (the system) immersed in a water bath (the surroundings).”
― Peter Atkins, The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction

“When we encounter tiny groups of atoms, interesting questions and special rules come into play. Take water, for instance: what is the smallest possible ice cube? It has been discovered that you need at least 275 water molecules in a cluster before it can show ice-like properties, with about 475 molecules before it becomes truly ice. That is a cube with about eight H2O molecules along each edge. The importance of this kind of knowledge is that it helps us model the process of cloud formation in the atmosphere as well as understand how liquids freeze.”
― Peter Atkins, Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction

“Like greater understanding coming from giants standing on the shoulders of earlier giants, the information in our genes has grown through the ages with information pitted against information, serendipitous junk waking up to discover that it is information, in an ever-changing arena. If you favour deep understanding without relinquishing wonder, or more positively and strongly, favour doubling wonder through deepening understanding, then bask in the illumination of that extraordinarily potent idea, that all living things have merely stumbled into their brief interlude of life. Not only are we stardust, we are the children of chaos.”
― Peter Atkins, On Being: A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence

“As far as relevant myths are concerned we are in the world of ‘eschatology’, the discourse on Last Things (from the Greek words eskhatos, last, and logia, discourse). Eschatological matters are of the highest importance to some, for they illuminate the whole point of being. The faithful take the view that matters of the First Importance are illuminated by the discussion of Last Things, for they, the latter, are the consummation of being and the apotheosis of existence; in short, things not to be sneezed at. To the more sceptical, there is the suspicion that nowhere else in speculative discourse has so much endless nonsense been written. The sceptical, I suspect, consider that if normal theological discourse and myths in general are the Himalaya of nonsense, then eschatology is the Martian Olympus Mons, towering miles above petty terrestrial Everests.”
― Peter Atkins, On Being: A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence

“The crucial consideration, however, is where reliable solutions to the world’s problems will come from if it is not further development of chemistry. Chemistry holds the key to the enhancement of almost every aspect of our daily lives, from the cradle to the grave and all points in between. It has provided the material foundation of all our comforts, not only in health but in illness too, and there is no reason to suppose that it has reached its zenith. It contributes to our communications, both virtual and physical, for it provides the materials along which our electrons and photons travel in the complex network of patterns and interactions that result in computation. Moreover, it develops our fuels, rendering them more efficiently combustible and through catalysis minimizing their noxious products, and helps in the migration from fossil fuels to renewable sources, such as in the development of photovoltaic substances. Chemistry is the only solution to the problems it causes in the environment, be it in earth, air, or water.”
― Peter Atkins, Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction

“Life is easy to identify but remarkably difficult to define. Too tight a definition excludes what looks like life and too loose captures too much. The capacity to self-replicate is a component of the definition, but not without its problems, as a mule is alive but sterile, and computer software can replicate itself, but we do not, in all honesty, think of it as being alive. It might be tempting to ascribe livingness to an entity that has emerged by evolution, but that would exclude the first living entity and any that we might synthesize from scratch in future. Organisms are organized structures; but so is an integrated circuit. Organisms are organized structures built and sustained by the flux of energy through their interiors and its dissipation into the surroundings; but so are the patterns of convection that can arise in heated liquids and, indeed, the atmosphere, to give rise to the weather: think tornado and hurricane. All known organisms are built from compounds of carbon; but if we succeeded in building a replicating, conscious, self-sustaining, energy-dissipating entity from silicon, would we deny that it was alive? Is a virus alive?”
― Peter Atkins, On Being: A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence