Peter Atkins QUOTES

1 " [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. "

― Peter Atkins

2 " 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. "

― Peter Atkins

3 " [Religion is] a fantasy [and is] completely empty of any explanatory content. It is also evil. "

― Peter Atkins

4 " 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. "

― Peter Atkins

5 " I regard teaching religion as purveying lies. "

― Peter Atkins

6 " 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 Atkins

7 " 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? "

― Peter Atkins

8 " 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. "

― Peter Atkins

9 " [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. "

― Peter Atkins

10 " Creationism, though not a science, is of interest to science. Just as a dead frog pinned to a dissecting board is a legitimate object of study (and once done in schools when real science, rather than its sociological shadow, the scientific method, was studied), so Creationism can be pinned down and studied. Instead of the frog’s entrails, we need to study the psychological and cultural viscera of faith’s attack on reason. What drives individuals away from rational investigation? What drives whole groups of individuals to embrace faith, and specifically this peculiar distortion of faith, in place of the intellectual appreciation of the cosmos? How is it that faith can overpower intellect? Maybe it is fear; maybe it is cultural conditioning; maybe it is simple mental laziness; whatever, it is something not particularly admirable in the psyche. "

― Peter Atkins , On Being: A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence

11 " In preparation for our journey in which we shall nose around among the myths that a collaboration of ignorance and deep concern have jointly inspired, I would like to establish in broad terms my vision of the nature and limitations, if any, of the scientific method. I suspect that few would disagree that science is competent when it comes to the fabrication of novel stuff and novel applications of stuff in general. That, I believe, is not an issue to delay us. Nor shall I linger on the argument about whether these novel stuffs, including better medicines, better and more abundant foods, better fabrics, better modes of communication and transport, better modes of entertainment, and so on, weighed against the social costs, including better ways of killing, injuring our environment, and accidentally or intentionally maiming, add overall to the sum of human happiness. I focus instead on the ability of the scientific method to illuminate matters of great human concern and drive out ignorance while retaining wonder. "

― Peter Atkins , On Being: A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence

12 " Closely allied with the contribution of chemists to the alleviation of disease is their involvement at a molecular level. Biology became chemistry half a century ago when the structure of DNA was discovered (in 1953). Molecular biology, which in large measure has sprung from that discovery, is chemistry applied to the functioning of organisms. Chemists, often disguised as molecular biologists, have opened the door to understanding life and its principal characteristic, inheritance, at a most fundamental level, and have thereby opened up great regions of the molecular world to rational investigation. They have also transformed forensic medicine, brought criminals to justice, and transformed anthropology. "

― Peter Atkins , Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction

13 " The first law is essentially based on the conservation of energy, the fact that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Conservation laws—laws that state that a certain property does not change—have a very deep origin, which is one reason why scientists, and thermodynamicists in particular, get so excited when nothing happens. There is a celebrated theorem, Noether’s theorem, proposed by the German mathematician Emmy Noether (1882–1935), which states that to every conservation law there corresponds a symmetry. Thus, conservation laws are based on various aspects of the shape of the universe we inhabit. In the particular case of the conservation of energy, the symmetry is that of the shape of time. Energy is conserved because time is uniform: time flows steadily, it does not bunch up and run faster then spread out and run slowly. Time is a uniformly structured coordinate. If time were to bunch up and spread out, energy would not be conserved. Thus, the first law of thermodynamics is based on a very deep aspect of our universe and the early thermodynamicists were unwittingly probing its shape. "

― Peter Atkins , The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction

14 " 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

15 " We are within a whisper of arriving at the first law. Suppose we have a closed system and use it to do some work or allow a release of energy as heat. Its internal energy falls. We then leave the system isolated from its surroundings for as long as we like, and later return to it. We invariably find that its capacity to do work—its internal energy—has not been restored to its original value. In other words,
the internal energy of an isolated system is constant.

That is the first law of thermodynamics, or at least one statement of it, for the law comes in many equivalent forms. Another universal law of nature, this time of human nature, is that the prospect of wealth motivates deceit. Wealth—and untold benefits to humanity—would accrue to an untold extent if the first law were found to be false under certain conditions. It would be found to be false if work could be generated by an adiabatic, closed system without a diminution of its internal energy. In other words, if we could achieve perpetual motion, work produced without consumption of fuel. Despite enormous efforts, perpetual motion has never been achieved. There have been claims galore, of course, but all of them have involved a degree of deception. Patent offices are now closed to the consideration of all such machines, for the first law is regarded as unbreakable and reports of its transgression not worth the time or effort to pursue. There are certain instances in science, and certainly in technology, where a closed mind is probably justified. "

― Peter Atkins , The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " 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

19 " The second law has a reputation for being recondite, notoriously difficult, and a litmus test of scientific literacy. Indeed, the novelist and former chemist C. P. Snow is famous for having asserted in his The Two Cultures that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is equivalent to never having read a work by Shakespeare. I actually have serious doubts about whether Snow understood the law himself, but I concur with his sentiments. The second law is of central importance in the whole of science, and hence in our rational understanding of the universe, because it provides a foundation for understanding why any change occurs. Thus, not only is it a basis for understanding why engines run and chemical reactions occur, but it is also a foundation for understanding those most exquisite consequences of chemical reactions, the acts of literary, artistic, and musical creativity that enhance our culture. "

― Peter Atkins , The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction

20 " The shift of chemistry’s attention to the processes of life has come at a time when the traditional branches of chemistry—organic, inorganic, and physical—have reached a stage of considerable maturity and are ready to tackle the awesomely complex network of processes going on inside organisms: human bodies in particular. The approach to the treatment, more importantly the prevention, of disease has been put on a rational basis by the discoveries that chemists continue to make. If you plan to enter this field, then genomics and proteomics will turn out to be of crucial importance to your work. This is truly a region of chemistry where you can feel confident about standing on the shoulders of the giants who have preceded you and know that you are attacking disease at its roots. "

― Peter Atkins , Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction

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