Pandora's Star (Commonwealth Saga #1)
Rate it:
Open Preview
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading July 29, 2022
22%
Flag icon
He never did understand why people collected or even admired art; the greatest human artist could never hope to match what nature did with a single flower.
23%
Flag icon
“Go find the adult Silfen community, ask it what the fuck’s going on with the Dyson Pair.”
24%
Flag icon
It was something he’d learned on his wanderings years—decades—centuries ago. Not to interfere—not unless he was witness to some monstrous evil or brutality. He couldn’t be responsible for everyone.
Blake B
..
24%
Flag icon
School seemed optional, they mostly learned what their parents felt inclined to teach them.
24%
Flag icon
while the sun was just a sliver of gold above the horizon and mists lingered above the streams.
25%
Flag icon
As arboreal idylls went, it was heavenly.
25%
Flag icon
“All paths are one, Ozzie, they lead to themselves. To start is to finish.”
25%
Flag icon
Look to nature in the fullest of bloom, bend the sky and the ground to your bidding if you truly can, for what will be has also been. Fond farewells and fond joinings are all part of the endless turn of worlds upon worlds, and who are we to cry judge upon which is the jolliest of all.”
26%
Flag icon
“Like a priest will see heaven.”
26%
Flag icon
This note or highlight contains a spoiler
Of course, in an ideal world we’d be using mercury as the propellant fluid, but even that has handling problems, not to mention cost and sourcing for the kind of volume we’re looking at. So what we’ve wound up with is a very dense hydrocarbon, it’s almost pure crude oil, but the chemists have tweaked the molecular structure so it remains liquid over a huge temperature range.
Blake B
Hamilton: for future reference: You’re looking for a kinetically stable hydrocarbon with octahedral symmetry. Brominate the ethylene ketal of cyclo to give a tribrocyclo deriv. Then debro it with a purpose and non spontaneous Diels-Alder dimerization. C8H8: Cubane is the “crude oil” you’re after for your interim propellant until activation of Mercury as main source of propulsion