The air in a man's lungs contains 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breath… - Jacob Bronowski

The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. An example is Newton’s thinking of the likeness between the thrown apple and moon sailing majestically in the sky. Hence, the ‘discovery’ of the laws of gravity.

The [eighteenth] century settled down in two camps of Philistines: the literary Philistines and, largely to spite them, the scientific Philistines. It was the beginning of the mistaken opposition between them from which we still suffer.

I have chosen to talk about one of the founder fathers of twentieth-century physics, Niels Bohr, because in both these respects he was a consummate artist. He had no ready-made answers. He used to begin his lecture courses by saying to his students, ‘Every sentence that I utter should be regarded by you not as an assertion but as a question’. What he questioned was the structure of the world. And the people that he worked with, when young and old (he was still penetrating in his seventies), were others who were taking the world to pieces, thinking it out, and putting it together.