“It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.”
“Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.”
“In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.”
“Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.”
“Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.”
“Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.”
“There’s something satisfying, I think,’ Evans said, ‘about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed.”
“1905. In that year, Einstein published three papers that revolutionized physics. In the same year he was turned down for two teaching jobs.”
“The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year. In another two billion years it will have receded so far that it won’t keep us steady and we will have to come up with some other solution, but in the meantime you should think of it as much more than just a pleasant feature in the night sky.”
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