“There is no such thing as a photon. Only a comedy of errors and historical incidents led to its popularity among physicists and optical scientists.”
Willis E. Lamb, 1995

“Those scientists who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas.”
Max Planck

“The nature of light is a subject of no material importance to the concerns of life or to the practice of the arts, but it is in many other respects extremely interesting.”
Thomas Young

“By convention [nomos] sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.”
Democritus

“The atoms become like a moth, seeking out the region of higher laser intensity.”
Steven Chu

“There is only one thing worse than coming home from the lab to a sink full of dirty dishes, and that is not going to the lab at all!”
Chien-Shiung Wu

“Of course, we have to eat while we work, and we like pepperoni pizza, but we have to be careful to keep the optical system clean. Each cooling cycle for the sodium atoms takes 38 seconds, and that gives us just enough time to take a bite of pizza, change hands and flip up one of the mirrors in the optical system to prepare for the next cooling cycle. It takes some practice.”
Lene Vestergaard Hau

“An atom swerves to the very smallest extent in order that the heavy bodies, living things, and chance may come into existence and that what is in our power may not perish.”
Plutarch on Epicurus

“History is the short trudge from Adam to atom.”
Leonard L. Levinson

“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.”
Jack London

“It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.”
George Wald

“Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.”
Kahlil Gibran

“It is more likely that more than a century will pass before we know the structure of the chemical atoms as thoroughly as we do our solar system.”
Johannes Stark

“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.”
Democritus

“Now where there are no parts, there neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible. And these monads are the true atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things.”
Gottfried Leibniz

“The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?”
James C. Maxwell

“The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.”
Werner Heisenberg

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
Muriel Rukeyser

“You may have heard the world is made up of atoms and molecules, but it's really made up of stories. When you sit with an individual that's been here, you can give quantitative data a qualitative overlay.”
William Turner

“We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.”
Samuel Butler

“When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.”
Niels Bohr

“That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.”
Jonathan Swift

“I think in principle it can be built. In practice maybe.”
Paul Kwiat