Mark Brake > Quotes

“In fact, the last great, and often dark, wizard was Isaac Newton. Newton’s work had beauty, simplicity, and elegance. He is widely thought to have made the greatest work of science ever created. Newton was the 17th century British natural philosopher who first uncovered the laws of physics that govern the cosmos. He made up new branches of mathematics, conquered the composition of light, and divined the laws of gravity and motion, which hold sway across the entire universe. Newton ushered in an age, the Newtonian Age, based on the notion that all things in the cosmos were open to rational understanding.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“Up until the year 1850, scarcely 10,000 tons of gold had been mined in all human history. One polar bear weighs around a ton, so it’s the same weight of gold as 10,000 polar bears. That might sound like a lot, but this is all of human history we’re talking about.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“In our own universe, the study of alchemy has run a parallel path to its magical counterpart. The goals of alchemy were the creation of an elixir of immortality; the synthesis of an alkahest, or universal solvent, and chrysopoeia—the transmutation of base metals into noble ones, particularly gold. There is little doubt that alchemy, practiced throughout Europe, Egypt, and Asia, played a major role in the creation of early modern science, and especially medicine and chemistry. But perhaps what’s not so well known is the fact that contemporary scientists have realized the dream of chrysopoeia. For, somewhere in the unfeasibly huge cosmos, base metal elements are slowly being transformed into gold.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“By the mid-1670s, Newton had shied away from the international stage of science. He swore never to publish another scientific paper. Instead, in the isolation of Cambridge, Newton threw himself into his alchemy. But Newton wasn’t looking to make himself rich. He simply wanted to know the mind of God himself.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“But alchemists didn’t seek the Stone simply out of greed. Gold symbolized the highest state of matter. It personified human renewal and regeneration. A ‘golden’ person was resplendent with spiritual beauty, and would always triumph over the latent and lurking power of evil. The basest metal, lead, represented the sinful and unrepentant person, who was easily overpowered by the forces of darkness.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“Galileo’s most shattering discovery was the main four moons of Jupiter. They were proof of a focus of gravitation other than Earth.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“Let’s look at the backstory of the elements. The Ancient Greeks, among others, believed that the Earth was made up of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Aristotle believed in a divine, but essentially dull and dormant cosmos. He imagined a two-tier, geocentric universe. The Earth, mutable and corruptible, was placed at the center. The sublunary sphere, essentially from the moon to the Earth, was subject to the transmutations of the four elements. This sphere alone was subject to the horrors of change, death, and decay.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“British Royal Air Force Pigeon Corps.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“Today, there are 86 known metals. But in ancient times, only seven metals were known: gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, tin, and mercury. We know them now as the Metals of Antiquity, and they would have been familiar to the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Of these seven metals, gold was the one that captured the human imagination and continued to do so for thousands of years. Gold doesn’t tarnish. It keeps its color. And it doesn’t crumble. Gold seemed indestructible to ancient cultures. And yet it could also be easily worked. A single ounce of gold can be beaten to a thin sheet of gold metal 90 meters square.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“The medieval church had supported the geocentric system. It placed man midway, between the inert clay of the Earth’s core and the divine spirit. Man could either follow his base nature down to Hell, at the center of the Earth, or follow his soul and spirit, up through the celestial spheres to the heavens, so the system of planets became tied up with the medieval drama of Christian life and death.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“By imagining the strange worlds of science fiction, we come to see our own conditions of life in a new perspective.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Science Fiction: The Influence of Film and Fiction on the Science and Culture of Our Times

“Early on, advocates of big bang cosmology realized that the universe is evolutionary. In the words of one famous cosmologist, George Gamov, “We conclude that the relative abundances of atomic species represent the most ancient archaeological document pertaining to the history of the universe.” In other words, the periodic table is evidence of the evolution of matter, and atoms can testify to the history of the cosmos. But early versions of big bang cosmology held that all the elements of the universe were fused in one fell swoop. As Gamov puts it, “These abundances …” meaning the ratio of the elements (heaps of hydrogen, hardly any gold—that kind of thing), “… must have been established during the earliest stages of expansion, when the temperature of the primordial matter was still sufficiently high to permit nuclear transformations to run through the entire range of chemical elements.” It was a neat idea, but very wrong. Only hydrogen, helium, and a dash of lithium could have formed in the big bang. All of the elements heavier than lithium were made much later, by being fused in evolving and exploding stars. How do we know this? Because at the same time some scholars were working on the big bang theory, others were trying to ditch the big bang altogether. Its association with thermonuclear devices made it seem hasty, and its implied mysterious origins tainted it with creationism. And so, a rival camp of cosmologists developed an alternate theory: the Steady State. The Steady State held that the universe had always existed. And always will. Matter is created out of the vacuum of space itself. Steady State theorists, working against the big bang and its flaws, were obliged to wonder where in the cosmos the chemical elements might have been cooked up, if not in the first few minutes of the universe. Their answer: in the furnaces of the very stars themselves. They found a series of nuclear chain reactions at work in the stars. First, they discovered how fusion had made elements heavier than carbon. Then, they detailed eight fusion reactions through which stars convert light elements into heavy ones, to be recycled into space through stellar winds and supernovae. And so, it’s the inside of stars where the alchemist’s dream comes true. Every gram of gold began billions of years ago, forged out of the inside of an exploding star in a supernova. The gold particles lost into space from the explosion mixed with rocks and dust to form part of the early Earth. They’ve been lying in wait ever since.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“The basest metal, lead, represented the sinful and unrepentant person, who was easily overpowered by the forces of darkness.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“Newton’s alchemy was an occult way to investigate natural philosophy. His practice of alchemy was early modern chemistry. Newton was experimenting with strange spirituous substances, and looking to transform materials from one form into another.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“Chinese, these were metal, wood, earth, and through further fusion”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“His private manuscripts show that, in the year he became a professor at Cambridge, Newton also bought two furnaces, a hotchpotch of chemicals, and a curious collection of books. Newton had found alchemy. Alchemy at the time had been outlawed. In these desperate days of confusion and crisis, the government feared that frauds would corrupt the economy with bogus gold. And, if you got caught practicing alchemy, the punishment was swift and severe. Defrocked alchemists were habitually hanged on a gilded scaffold. And sometimes they were made to wear suits of tinsel as they were hanged, to make it even more of a public spectacle.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“But in 1936 a huge archive of Newton’s private manuscripts was put up for auction at Sotheby’s, in London. The papers had been kept from the public for over two centuries. One hundred lots of the manuscripts were bought by the famous British economist, John Maynard Keynes, who found that many of Newton’s papers were written in a secret cypher. And for six years, Keynes struggled to decipher them. He hoped they would reveal the private thoughts of the founder of modern science. But what the code really revealed was another, far darker, side to Newton’s work. For, in the manuscripts, Keynes found a Newton unknown to the rest of the world—a Newton obsessed with religion, and a purveyor of practices of heresy and the occult.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“Ancient alchemical texts often mention the chemical colors of red and white. Some scholars think that, like the base metals of silver and gold, red and white represented two different aspects of human nature.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“In the Harry Potter Universe, alchemy is a branch of magic. It’s an ancient science, which deals with the study of the four classical elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Magical alchemy also concerns itself with the transmutation of substances. So, it’s linked to chemistry, potion-making, and the magic of transformation. Dating back to antiquity, alchemy is fused with philosophy, and mixed up with metaphysical and mystical conjecture. Even in the 20th century, there were still some members of wizard kind who actively studied magical alchemy. And, should there have been sufficient demand, alchemy was taught at Hogwarts, to those sixth and seventh year students who chose it.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“In Latin, they run Sunday to Saturday as follows: Solis (sun/Sunday), Lunae (moon/Monday), Martis (Mars/Tuesday), Mercurii (Mercury/Wednesday), Iovis (Jupiter/Thursday), Veneris (Venus/Friday), and Saturni (Saturn/Saturday). As you can probably see, even in English, some of the planetary days remain: Sunday, Monday, and Saturday, still bearing the mark of sun, moon, and Saturn respectively in their names.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“That battle was won with Galileo’s discovery of these new worlds. It sparked the Scientific Revolution. It marked the paradigm shift of the old universe into the new. The cozy old geocentric cosmos was about man. The new universe of Copernicus and Galileo was decentralized, dark, and infinite. This is what sits behind the study of Jupiter’s moons in the Hogwarts curriculum, and this branch of astronomy places the wizards in the progressive camp in the battle of the cosmologies.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“Mówi się, że trzech rzeczy nie da się ukryć: słońca, księżyca i prawdy. Prawda rzadko jest czysta i nigdy nie jest łatwa.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“So, the big bang didn’t happen in an already established space. Space was enmeshed in the big bang. The same goes for place. The big bang didn’t happen in a specific place. It happened precisely where you are, and all other places at the same time. And finally, the big bang wasn’t an explosion in a pre-existing space. Not in the way we normally think about explosions. Stuff didn’t kaboom out into space, but stayed where it was, as the surrounding space expanded.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!

“Alchemy was medieval matter theory. It was a science that sought answers to the most basic questions, such as, “What is the Earth? What is the cosmos made of? What are the constituents of matter?” Newton looked into the most ancient of texts in search of his answers. He believed that the Ancients understood great truths about nature and the cosmos. This wisdom had been lost over time, but Newton believed himself to be God’s emissary on this Earth.”
― Mark Brake, The Science of Harry Potter: The Spellbinding Science Behind the Magic, Gadgets, Potions, and More!