Quotes of the Times

Mose Allison

“	She was a devil with the face of an angel, She was sweet and cruel, cruel and sweet, As home-made sin. . . .”

	–	Mose Allison, Lost Mind

Ernest Hemingway

“	He slipped into the familiar lie he made his bread and butter by.”

	–	Ernest Hemingway, The Short, Happy Life of Francis MacComber

Dashiell Hammet

“	I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.”

	–	Dashiell Hammet, Opening sentence of Red Harvest

Ron Reagan, Jr.

“	There is a refrigerator that will tell you how much milk is left in the carton. What are we, idiots?”

	–	Ron Reagan Jr., on CNET’s TV.COM

Wendell Berry

“	There is no connection between food and health [in the U.S.]. People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are healed by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.”

	–	Wendell Berry

Arthur Lawrence Kraus

“	Every atom in your body was once inside an exploding star . . .”

	–	Arthur Lawrence Kraus, author of Beyond Startrek on the Lee Rogers radio show on KSFO Radio 560,San Francisco, 11/3/97

“We are the dust of long dead stars.”

Excerpts from interview of Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of England by Claudia Dreifus, New York Times, April 26, 1998

Rees: I have a day job at Cambridge where I interpret astornomy data, rather than observe. Other people do the gazing.

What I do is to try to understand how our universe has evolved from simple beginnings to the complex cosmos we see around us, of which we are a remarkable part ourselves.

Q: When it comes to astrophysics, many of us are perplexed because the cosmos seems too complex to understand. Why should the ordinary Joe or Jane know their astrophysics?

A: Because there’s a fascination with our origins and astrophysics is the key to it. If we are to understand an everyday question like “Where did the atoms we are made of come from?” we must understand the stars. Did the creator magically turn 92 different knobs to make the different elements? Or is there a reason why the earth contains a lot of carbon, oxygen and iron, but not much gold and uranium?

The explanation is that all the atoms were once inside a star. When our Milky Way galaxy was first formed about 10 billion years ago, it contained the simplest atoms: hydrogen and helium.

Then, the first stars were formed and the nuclear fuel that kept those stars shining converted hydrogen into helium through nuclear fusion and then converted helium into other atoms: carbon, oxygen and the rest of the periodic table.

Later, the stars ran out of fuel, they exploded, threw back all that debris into interstellar space and it all eventually condensed into new stars. One of which was our sun.”

Q: So when the poets sing, “You are the sun and the stars and the moon,” they are being literal?

A: We are the dust of long dead stars. Or, if you want, to be less romantic, we are nuclear waste.

Sometimes people ask me, “Are we presumptuous to think we can understand anything as big as a star, or a galaxy, or the Big Bang?”

The response I give is that what makes things hard to understand is not how big they are but how complicated. Inside, a star, everything is broken down to its simplest constituents. Ditto, in the Big Bang.

On the other hand it is much, much more difficult to understand the simplest living organism. The most wonderful thing we know about in the universe is life, and that’s the most complicated emergent phenomena we know of.

I’m always amazed when we study these simple beginnings, one has not just understood how the chemical elements have been made but how they’ve forged themselves into something complicated enough to develop into life. . . .