Between being blasted out of the ground in a quarry and ending up inside a smartphone, this grain of silicon will have circumnavigated the world numerous times. It will have been heated to more than 1,000°C and then cooled, not once or twice but three times. It will have been transformed from an amorphous mass into one of the purest crystalline structures in the universe. It will have been zapped with lasers powered by a form of light that you can’t see and doesn’t survive exposure to the atmosphere.
