Stephen Petrey

“Thinking of the hour as a consistent measure was not a familiar concept for most people, while the minute and second didn’t exist as common units. (The division of the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds comes from the Babylonians, who used a base-60, or sexagecimal, system of counting for their astronomy. The ancient Greeks later adopted this and divided circular astronomical maps into 360 divisions, which were later transposed on to clock faces.)”
― James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants

“Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.

But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!.

Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“Thinking about thinking is the core process of the creative arts, but it tells us very little about how we think the way we do, and nothing of why the creative arts originated in the first place.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth