Just 3 Quotes: Matter
05.24.2021
3 quotes from 3 books. Sent weekly.
Enjoy!
—Mark
“Wrapping a present with paper gives it a crispness and pristineness that emphasize the newness and value of the present inside. Paper is strong enough to protect the present when it is sent through the mail, but so weak that even a baby can rip it open. That moment of opening transports the object inside from obscurity to celebrity in a few seconds. The unwrapping of a present is akin to the act of birth; a new life for the object begins.“
—Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World, by Mark Miodownik (2013)
“About half the nitrogen in you came out of a Haber-Bosch factory. Don't worry: Nitrogen is nitrogen, the atoms in Haber-Bosch ammonia are precisely the same as the atoms in the best natural manure, and they all come, one way or another, from the air you breathe—but half the nitrogen in your blood, your skin and hair, your proteins and DNA, is synthetic.”
—The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler, by Thomas Hager (2008)
“Dark matter behaves like ordinary matter in terms of its gravitational properties—it’s attractive and it clusters, but we don’t know what it’s made of. The stuff we do know about—protons, neutrons, ordinary atoms and molecules—appear to comprise only about 5 percent of the mass of the universe.”
—The Universe: Leading Scientists Explore the Origin, Mysteries, and Future of the Cosmos, edited by John Brockman (2012)