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

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

41 " Despite the march of digital technologies, it is hard to believe that paper will completely disappear as a means of communication. For some messages we trust it above all other media. There is nothing that quite grips the stomach while simultaneously making your heart skip than a letter from your beloved arriving by post. Phone calls are fine and intimate, text messages and e-mails are instantaneous and gratifying, but to hold in your hands the very material that your beloved touched and to breathe in their sweetness from the paper is truly the stuff of love.

It is a communication of more than words. There is a permanence, a physical solidity to soothe those of an insecure nature. It can be read and reread over and over again. It physically takes up space in your life. The paper itself becomes a simulacrum of the loved one’s skin, it smells of their scent, and their writing is as much an expression of their unique nature as a fingerprint. A love letter is not faked, and is not cut and pasted.

What is it about paper that allows words to be expressed that might otherwise be kept secret? They are written in a private moment, and as such, paper lends itself to sensual love—the act of writing being one fundamentally of touch, of flow, of flourish, of sweet asides and little sketches, an individuality that is free from the mechanics of the keyboard. The ink becomes a kind of blood that demands honesty and expression, it pours on to the page, allowing thoughts to flow.

Letters make splitting up harder too, since like photographs they echo forever on the page. For one whose heart is broken this is a cruelty, and for those who have moved on it is a stinging rebuke of infidelity or, at the very least, a thorn of inconstancy in the side of their constructed personality. Paper, though, as a carbon-based material, has a bright solution for those wanting to be released from such torture: a match. "

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

42 " the difference between hard transparent diamond and soft black graphite is not to do with their atoms: in both cases, they are made of exactly the same pure element, carbon. It is by changing how they are arranged, by altering them from a cubic structure into layers of hexagonal sheets, that the radical differences in their material properties are brought about. These structures are not arbitrary—you cannot create any structure—but are governed by the rules of quantum mechanics, which treat atoms not as singular particles but as an expression of many waves of probability. (This is why it makes sense to refer to the atoms themselves as structures, as well as their formation when they bond with one another.) Some of these quantum structures create electrons that can move, and this results in a material that can conduct electricity. Graphite has such a structure, and so conducts electricity. Exactly the same atoms in a diamond but in a different structure do not allow the electrons to move so easily within the crystal, and so diamonds do not conduct electricity. It is also why they are transparent. This "

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

43 " Sugars are carbohydrates, which is to say that they are made of carbon (“carbo-”), hydrogen (“hydr-”), and oxygen (“-ate”) atoms. "

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