Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World QUOTES

1 " ...If we can achieve this, then one day whole rooms, buildings, perhaps even bridges may generate their own energy, funnel it to where it is needed, detect damage, and self-heal. If this seems like science fiction, bear in mind that it is only what living materials do already. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

2 " In a very real way, then, materials are a reflection of who we are, a multi-scale expression of our human need and desires. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

3 " It is often said that there are very few places left on earth that have yet to be discovered. But those who say this are usually referring to places that exist at the human scale. Take a magnifying glass to any part of your house and you will find a whole new world to explore. Use a powerful microscope and you will find another, complete with a zoo of living organisms of the most fantastic nature. Alternatively, use a telescope and a whole universe of possibilities will open up before you. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

4 " We may like to think of ourselves as civilized, but that civilization is in large part bestowed by material wealth. Without this stuff, we would quickly be confronted by the same basic struggle for survival that animals are faced with. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

5 " Some say that eating chocolate is better than kissing, and scientists have dutifully tested this hypothesis by carrying out a set of experiments. In 2007, a team led by Dr. David Lewis recruited pairs of passionate lovers, whose brain activity and heart rate were monitored first while they kissed each other and then while they ate chocolate (separately). The researchers found that although kissing set the heart pounding, the effect did not last as long as when the participants ate chocolate. The study also showed that when the chocolate started melting, all regions of the brain received a boost far more intense and longer lasting than the brain activity measured while kissing. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

6 " The appreciation of wine was based solely on the way it tasted. The invention of drinking glasses meant that the color, transparency, and clarity of wine became important, too. We are used to seeing what we drink, but this was new to the Romans, and they loved it. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

7 " For, in the end, Brearley did manage to create cutlery from stainless steel, and it’s the transparent protective layer of chromium oxide that makes the spoon tasteless, since your tongue never actually touches the metal and your saliva cannot react with it; it has meant that we are one of the first generations who have not had to taste our cutlery. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

8 " what allows us to behave as humans are our clothes, our homes, our cities, our stuff, which we animate through our customs and language. (This becomes clear if you ever visit a disaster zone.) The material world is not just a display of our technology and culture, it is part of us. We invented it, we made it, and in turn it makes us who we are. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

9 " studies of “crispness” have shown that the sound created by certain foods is as important to our enjoyment of them as their taste. This has inspired some chefs to create dishes with added sound effects. Some potato chip manufacturers, meanwhile, have increased not just the crunchiness of their chips but the noisiness of the chip bag itself. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

10 " These atom substitutions happen naturally inside other crystals too. A crystal of aluminum oxide is colorless if pure but becomes blue when it contains impurities of iron atoms: it is the gemstone called sapphire. Exactly the same aluminum oxide crystal containing impurities of chromium is the gem called ruby. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

11 " When light from the sun enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it hits all sorts of molecules (mostly nitrogen and oxygen molecules) on its way to Earth and bounces off them like a pinball. This is called scattering, which means that on a clear day, if you look at any part of the sky, the light you see has been bouncing around the atmosphere before coming into your eye. If all light was scattered equally, the sky would look white. But it doesn’t. The reason is that the shorter wavelengths of light are more likely to be scattered than the longer ones, which means that blues get bounced around the sky more than reds and yellows. So instead of seeing a white sky when we look up, we see a blue one. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

12 " These samurai swords were made from a special type of steel called tamahagane, which translates as “jewel steel,” made from the volcanic black sand of the Pacific (this consists mostly of an iron ore called magnetite, the original material for the needle of compasses). This steel is made in a huge clay vessel four feet tall, four feet wide, and twelve feet long called a tatara. The vessel is “fired”—hardened from molded clay into a ceramic—by lighting a fire inside it. Once fired, it is packed meticulously with layers of black sand and black charcoal, which are consumed in the ceramic furnace. The process takes about a week and requires constant attention from a team of four or five people, who make sure that the temperature of the fire is kept high enough by pumping air into the tatara using a manual bellows. At the end the tatara is broken open and the tamahagane steel is dug out of the ash and remnants of sand and charcoal. These lumps of discolored steel are very unprepossessing, but they have a whole range of carbon content, some of it very low and some of it high. The samurai innovation was to be able to distinguish high-carbon steel, which is hard but brittle, from low-carbon steel, which is tough but relatively soft. They did this purely by how it looked, how it felt in their hands, and how it sounded when struck. By separating the different types of steel, they could make sure that the low-carbon steel was used to make the center of the sword. This gave the sword an enormous toughness, almost a chewiness, meaning that the blades were unlikely to snap in combat. On the edge of the blades they welded the high-carbon steel, which was brittle but extremely hard and could therefore be made very sharp. By using the sharp high-carbon steel as a wrapper on top of the tough low-carbon steel they achieved what many thought impossible: a sword that could survive impact with other swords and armor while remaining sharp enough to slice a man’s head off. The best of both worlds. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

13 " It is important when proposing marriage that the diamond you offer, although physically identical to a synthetic one, was forged in the depths of the Earth a billion years ago. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

14 " Sadly the receipt will not survive long enough for Lazlo to read it. It is already fading, as the thermal paper on which it is printed degrades over time. The reason for this is that printing on thermal paper does not mean adding ink to it. Rather, the ink is already encapsulated within the paper, in the form of a so-called leuco dye and an acid. The act of printing requires only a spark to heat up the paper so that the acid and dye react with each other, converting the dye from a transparent state into a dark pigment. It is this cunning paper technology that ensures that cash registers never run out of ink. But over time the pigment reverts to its transparent state and so the ink fades, taking with it the evidence of curry and beer dinners. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

15 " This is essentially why gold is still valuable in the twenty-first century. If gathered together, all the gold ever mined would fit inside a large town house. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

16 " It is important to note,” he said, “that although diamond is culturally revered as the superior form of carbon, it is in fact incapable of deep expression, and unlike graphite no good art can come from diamond. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

17 " Chemistry was transformed by glass perhaps more than any other discipline. You only have to go to any chemistry lab to see that the transparency and inertness of the material make it perfect for mixing chemicals and monitoring what they do. Before the glass test tube was born, chemical reactions were performed in opaque beakers, so it was hard to see what was happening. With glass, and especially with a new glass called Pyrex that was immune to thermal shock, chemistry as a systematic discipline really got going. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

18 " In fact, the titanium dioxide does more than clean the concrete: it can also reduce the level of nitrogen oxide in the air, produced by cars, like a catalytic converter. Several studies have shown that this works, and "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

19 " The invention of the roll of film, made possible by the use of celluloid plastic, led directly to the technology of motion pictures. The idea that a picture could be made to “move” by sequentially showing small changes in the image had been known for hundreds of years, but without a flexible transparent material, the only way it could be made to work was using the rotating cylinder of a zoetrope. Celluloid changed everything, allowing a sequence of photographs to be taken on a roll of film and then played back fast enough for the picture to appear to move. This not only allowed a longer sequence of motion to be shown than with the zoetrope, but the moving image could be projected, and so the experience could be shared by the whole audience of a theater. This was the key insight of the Lumière brothers and led to the establishment of the cinema. "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

20 " The Roman love of glass as a material is perhaps best demonstrated by their imaginative new uses for it. For instance, they invented the glass window (the word means “wind eye”). "

― Mark Miodownik , Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World