Science Quote by Johannes Stark

The sentence performs the early-20th-century pivot from atom-as-bedrock to atom-as-architecture, and it does so with the careful confidence of a scientist watching a worldview quietly collapse. Stark frames the shift as almost bureaucratic inevitability: “various phenomena” (a deliberately modest phrase) have “led to a recognition.” No drama, no thunderclap - just evidence doing its slow, humiliating work on old certainties.

The intent is to stabilize a revolution. By calling the atom an “individual,” Stark keeps one foot in the classical picture: discrete entities, countable, law-abiding. But he immediately undercuts that comfort by insisting the “individual” is “made up of several units.” The subtext is a cultural one as much as a scientific one: modernity was discovering that the supposed indivisibles - atoms, nations, even selves - were composites held together by forces you couldn’t see. That last phrase, “a selfcontained whole,” reads like a reassurance offered after unsettling news. Yes, the atom has parts; no, it’s not chaos.

Context matters. Stark was writing in an era when electrons had been identified and atomic models were in flux (Thomson’s “plum pudding,” Rutherford’s nucleus, the looming quantum overhaul). His language reflects a transitional moment: still mechanical in vocabulary (“units,” “whole”), not yet quantum in imagination. The rhetoric is containment: admit complexity, insist on coherence. It’s the scientific temperament trying to keep reality legible as it gets stranger.