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

by Mark Miodownik

completing a cycle that starts when the Earth’s mantle creates rock and stone through mountain building, which is then mined by humans and transformed back into our own artificial mountains of rock, made to our own design, where we live and work.

The size of the nucleus and the individual electrons is tiny compared to the overall size of the atom. If an atom were the size of an athletics stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a pea at its center, and the electrons would be the size of grains of sand in the surrounding stands.

One of the great attractions of glass is that its shiny bright appearance makes it seem clean even if it isn’t, a collective deception we all accept in order to avoid thinking too much about using the same glass that was in a stranger’s mouth perhaps only an hour before.

gold is the full-fat cream of the metal world.

In practice even the best carbon fiber thread could only lift a cat.