Everything is Made of Atoms

Everything is made of atoms. That is the key hypothesis. The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics. This was not known from the beginning it took some experimenting and theorizing to suggest this hypothesis, but now it is accepted, and it is the most useful theory for producing new ideas in the field of biology.

Richard Phillips Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew L. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1989-01-01)

• atoms
• biology
• physics
• reductionism