“I have broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter.”

— Ernest Rutherford

As quoted by Richard Reeves, A Force of Nature The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford (2008) citing Ernest Rutherford Atom Man http://www.nzedge.com/ernest-rutherford/

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

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I have broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter." by Ernest Rutherford?

Ernest Rutherford 16

New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist 1871–1937

Related quotes

“The German army is a machine, and machines can be broken!”

Konstantin Rokossovsky (1896–1968) Soviet and Polish military commander

Quoted in "Current Biography" - Page 562 - by H.W. Wilson Company - 1945

“This shows the lengths that hard science will go to to banish the ghost from the machine.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: B. F. Skinner actually put forward – and this is a measure of scientific desperation over consciousness – the idea that consciousness was a weird vibrational by-product of the vocal cords. That we did not actually think. We thought we thought because of this weird vibration caused by the vocal cords. This shows the lengths that hard science will go to to banish the ghost from the machine.

“For all those beaten, for the broken heads,
The fosterless, the simple, the oppressed,
The ghosts in the burning city of our time…”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Litany for Dictatorships (1935)

“There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you. The only thing that matters is your name.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 11 (p. 121)

“Maybe the ghosts have a glass ceiling? Break through that glass ceiling ghosts! I plan to.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

Ghost Hunters. October 31, 2006.
In reference to moving up the World Wrestling Entertainment roster, despite a lack of a conventional wrestling physique.
Ghost Hunters

“At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter,”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Context: As was sure, sooner or later, to happen, Adams one day met Charles Sumner on the street, and instantly stopped to greet him. As though eight years of broken ties were the natural course of friendship, Sumner at once, after an exclamation of surprise, dropped back into the relation of hero to the school boy. Adams enjoyed accepting it. He was then thirty years old and Sumner was fifty-seven; he had seen more of the world than Sumner ever dreamed of, and he felt a sort of amused curiosity to be treated once more as a child. At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter, and in this case it bristled with thorns.