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The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet QUOTES

The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet QUOTES

1 " That we have iodine in our thyroid glands proves that our bodies were fashioned from supernova material. "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

2 " By the 1680s, Venice’s canals were freezing solid in winter, something no one alive had ever witnessed. "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

3 " How many of your friends know that there’s a “sun inside the Sun”? Or that a bizarre, newly found zone beneath the solar surface, the tachocline, is solely responsible for its violence? Or that we just experienced the oddest solar cycle in more than two hundred years—which has apparently influenced global warming in a major way? "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

4 " Today it’s just “the Sun.” Familiarity is the enemy of awe, and for the most part people walk the busy streets with no upward glance. In fact, one of the common bits of advice about the Sun is that we shouldn’t look at it. "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

5 " That we have iodine in our thyroid glands proves that our bodies were fashioned from supernova material. The iron in our blood came from the cores of two previous star generations. The Sun gives off a bit of peculiar yellow light from fluorescing sodium vapor, an element inherited from its father, the type O or B blue star. "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

6 " We, of course, have the advantage of hindsight. Who can say which of today’s widely repeated seeming truisms about the big bang, string theory, or the universe’s origins will seem ludicrous a century hence? "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

7 " The 1856 standard textbook, Olmsted’s School Astronomy, informed students that, according to no less an authority than William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus, the Sun was inhabited by humanlike creatures who lived on its surface. "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

8 " The process by which a boring cloud of plain-vanilla hydrogen gas becomes a blinding ball of white fire is epic in purpose and scale. The result, a stable star such as the Sun with a fourteen-billion-year life span, destined to create puppies and pomegranates, certainly deserves its own holiday. Yet no nation celebrates the Sun’s birth. We do, theoretically, honor its existence each Sunday. In practice, most use that time to sleep as late as possible and thus minimize any awareness of it. "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

9 " good judgment comes only from experience, and experience comes only from bad judgment. "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

10 " In January 2000, on the newly minted prime-time TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, contestant Dan Blonsky reached the final question: “The Earth is approximately how many miles away from the Sun?” He had four rounded-off answers from which to choose: 9.3 million, 39 million, 93 million, and 193 million. He was moments away from being financially set for life. The audience sat, tensely silent. Only one other contestant in game show history had ever won that much money. Blonsky’s eyes went from one choice to another and back again. Captain Cook would have slapped his head. "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

11 " By exchanging the burning-coal idea for the notion of nuclear fusion, science was really trading an amazing wrong idea for an amazing right one. Given the total power emitted by the Sun, which delivers nearly a kilowatt of energy to each square yard of Earth’s sunlit surface every second, and the formula E = mc2, it’s easy to calculate how much of the Sun’s body gets continuously consumed and turned into light. The truth is a little disconcerting: the Sun loses four million tons of itself each second. "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

12 " You've been doing this all your life? Do you still enjoy it?" I asked.
The room was very warm, and he wiped his balding red-headed brow. Hi seyes lit up as he said, "This is a dream job. i get to see what the Sun's doing every day! "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

13 " Reacting with our deep skin tissue, sunlight produces the vitamin D that is the greatest anticancer agent ever discovered. "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

14 " No, the Sun is not like us. We are sustained, modified, and influenced by it. We are made of Sun stuff. But it is an alien entity. Touchingly, we are like symbiotic organisms that watch their magnificent long-lived host with appreciation and also concern - because its death must automatically mean their own. "

― Bob Berman , The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet