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

by Mark Miodownik

the vast number of stars and planets in the universe should provide abundant opportunities for other intelligent life to form and therefore a great likelihood of our having encountered it, and yet, given that we have not encountered it, that same vast number is precisely what shows how rare intelligent life is.

There is nothing special about our scale, about our cities, about our civilization, except that we have a material that allows us to transcend our scale—that material is glass.