“A person's lifeworm is a tangle of atomic worldlines. A braid. The dotty little atoms trace out smooth lines in spacetime: you are the pattern that these lines make up. there is no one single atom that is exclusively yours. I breathe an atom out, you breathe it in. Your garbage helps my tomatoes grow. And so the little spacetime threads weave us all together. The human race is a single vast tapestry, linked by our shared food and air. There are larger links as well: sperm, egg and umblilicus. Each family tree is an organic whole. Your spacetime body tapers back to the threads of mother's egg and father's sperm. And children, if you have them, are forever rooted in your flesh.”

— Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 108

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Rudy Rucker 27

American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction… 1946

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“Yet the complexity of all this pales in comparison to the patterns of information processing in your brain. Your roughly 100 billion neurons are constantly generating electrical signals (“firing”), which involves shuffling around billions of trillions of atoms, notably sodium, potassium, and calcium ions. The trajectories of these atoms form an extremely elaborate braid through spacetime, whose complex intertwining corresponds to storing and processing information in a way that somehow gives rise to our familiar sensation of self-awareness. There’s broad consensus in the scientific community that we still don’t understand how this works, so it’s fair to say that we humans don’t yet fully understand what we are. However, in broad brush, we might say this: You’re a pattern in spacetime. A mathematical pattern. Specifically, you’re a braid in spacetime—indeed, one of the most elaborate braids known.”

Max Tegmark (1967) Swedish-American cosmologist

Life Is A Braid In Spacetime http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime

“The air in a man's lungs 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived — Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

The Reader's Digest (1964) Vol. 84; also quoted in Structure and Plan (1974) by Glen A. Love, p. 154

“There’s as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. We are, each of us, a little universe.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

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“The reason that I call my doctrine logical atomism is because the atoms that I wish to arrive at as the sort of last residue in analysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will be what I call "particulars" – such things as little patches of color or sounds, momentary things – and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

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“We are the gods of the atoms that make up ourselves but we are also the atoms of the gods that make up the universe.”

Manly P. Hall (1901–1990) Canadian writer and mystic

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“If you continue investigating, you will find that there is nothing anywhere, not even a single atom, that has a verifiable existence.”

Dilgo Khyentse (1910–1991) Bhutanese Buddhist Lama

Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones (1992)

“can you sense twirling atoms
within the quivering air
it is the frequency of care
cast upon the human race
by anonymous surveyors of fate”

Marcin Malek (1975) Polish writer

Source: We'll go asleep: Poems and Ballads, "Here comes time of plague", pg. 62

“You are part of every atom in the world, and every atom is part of you.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

[176, Larson's Book of World Religions and Alternative Spirituality, Bob Larson, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2004, 084236417X]
Attributed

“Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and one sister, should they let the human race die out?”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1950s, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), p. 47
Context: Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and one sister, should they let the human race die out? I do not know the answer, but I do not think it can be in the affirmative merely on the ground that incest is wicked.

“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

44 min 50 sec
Source: Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Blues For a Red Planet [Episode 5]
Context: The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together.

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