Bob Berman > Quotes

“But germs are the most common snowflake starters and lie at the heart of 85 percent of all flakes.2
So next time you gaze at a lovely snowstorm, inform your favorite germophobe or hypochondriac that living bacteria sit shivering in most of those untold billions of flakes. Then hand him or her a snow cone or organize a catch-a-snowflake-on-your-tongue party.
Once the ice-forming process is started, more molecules join the party, and the crystal grows. It can ultimately become either a snowflake or a rough granule of ice called by the odd name graupel. A snowflake contains ten quintillion water molecules. That’s ten million trillion. Ten snowflakes—which can fit on your thumb tip—have the same number of molecules as there are grains of sand on the earth. Or stars in the visible universe. How many flakes, how many molecules fashioned the snowy landscape I was observing as I drove east? It numbed the brain.”
― Bob Berman

“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

“So when nobody's watching, is the rainbow there? No, it is not. Your eyes are needed to complete the geometry. The triad of Sun, water droplets, and observer are all required for a rainbow. When no one is present, we can picture the situation as an infinity of potential rainbows, each slightly offset from the others with various color emphases (since bigger droplets produce more vivid rainbows but rob them of blue). Moreover, only when neurons in the retina and brain are stimulated by light's invisible magnetic and electrical pulses do they conjure the subjective experience of spectral colors. For both reasons, we are as necessary for rainbows as the Sun and the rain.”
― Bob Berman [The Sun's Heartbeat]

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I have just been to the home of my soul. (woman after the seeing a total eclipse of the Sun)”
― Bob Berman [The Sun's Heartbeat]

“Atoms have substantial, chewy centers made of protons and neutrons stuck together by the most powerful force in the universe, which, in the great poetic tradition of physics, is officially called the strong force.

from The Sun's Heartbeat”
― Bob Berman

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Bob Berman [The Sun's Heartbeat]

“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

“The scientific (not to mention philosophical and metaphysical) implications are astounding. Let's say some of the atoms in your body originally formed in an entangled manner with other particles soon after the big bang. Since then, both have been flying apart, and now they are separated by billions of light-years. Your atoms make up pieces of your brain, which is physically located in Peoria. Those other particles have become of an alien on a planet in the fashionable Aldebaran system.

Right now, some creature there is observing your twin's atoms in a lab. Bingo, they collapse to exhibit specific properties. Instantly, with no delay whatsoever, your own brain's atoms know this is happening five billion light-years away, and they, too, collapse into complementary objects. The effect is sudden and alters your thought processes, and you make a snap decision. You show up at your boss's party wearing an embarrassing, polka-dot tuxedo. You can't explain why you acted so oddly, but your life is ruined. This seems like science fiction, but EPR correlations are real.

First it means that the entire universe is a single entity in some fundamental way. It means there are no secrets between locations here and those far away, no matter how distant–and that the information "exchange" happens simultaneously, at infinite speed.”
― Bob Berman, Zoom: How Everything Moves: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees

“Most physicists now think that a human consciousness is required to make a photon or an electron’s “wave function” collapse so that it occupies a particular place as a particle. Otherwise it’s just a theoretical object with neither location nor motion.”
― Bob Berman, Zapped: From Infrared to X-rays, the Curious History of Invisible Light

“But like a pointillist painting, the true nature of this solar monument was clear only from a distance: the colosal horse-drawn chariot sitting like a mirage in the middle of the forlorn desert, still undisturbed and untouched by solar totality since the Mogul Empire.”
― Bob Berman [The Sun's Heartbeat]

“Swedish study has strongly linked sunlight deprivation”
― Bob Berman, The Sun's Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet

“Many folks already look to astronomy to help assess whether the cosmos is dumb versus divine. Unhelpfully, the universe does not generally oblige.”
― Bob Berman [The Sun's Heartbeat]

“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

“As the first humans acquired tools and an appreciation of minimalist cave art, they turned their attention to improving their lives and understanding the cosmos. Homo erectus erected the first blazing fire 500 000 years ago. After burgers went from raw to medium-well, a truly long time elapsed before the next human milestone: the bun. The first planting of grains and other crops, which occurred just 12 000 years ago, ended our million-year low-carb diet and freed us from being hunters. No longer plagued by the frustration of trying to sneak up on animals with bigger ears and faster legs, humans started staying put. Our nomadic days were ending.”
― Bob Berman [The Sun's Heartbeat]