Sam Kean Quotes

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality.

Also unlike a planet, an electron—if excited by heat or light—can leap from its low-energy shell to an empty, high-energy shell. The electron cannot stay in the high-energy state for long, so it soon crashes back down. But this isn’t a simple back-and-forth motion, because as it crashes, the electron jettisons energy by emitting light.

This hinted at something that no one had ever suspected -- that the brain tracks moving things more easily that still things. We have a built-in bias toward detecting action. Why? Because it's probably more critical for animals to spot moving things (predators, prey, falling trees) than static things, which can wait. In fact, our vision is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all. To see something stationary, our brains have to scribble our eyes subtly over its surface. Experiments have even proven that if you artificially stabilize an image on the retina with a combination of special contact lenses and microelectronics, the image will vanish.

Germans at the time believed, a little oddly, that dyes killed germs by turning the germs’ vital organs the wrong color.

Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius.