Under a Metal Sky
A Journey Through Minerals, Greed and Wonder
Philip Marsden
Having read it
★★★★☆
A decent and informative read about eleven key minerals that have played their part in the human journey with plenty of interesting facts and views sprinkled throughout; the final part, about soil, raises some good insights too.
A good passage
In recent years an ultrathin material has been developed out of tin which is just an atom thick. Known as stanene or ’2D tin’, it is billed as a ‘super-material’ that might even surpass graphene in the effect it will have on our lives. Electrical current can pass through stanene at room temperature with 100% efficiency, no resistance and no heat, pushing superconductivity to another level, allowing the scaling-up of quantum computing and a further miniaturising of technology.
A second good passage
Of all that we take from the earth – the ores and oils, copper and clay, gems and coal, bauxite and black shale – only water exceeds sand and gravel in volume. Fifty billion tonnes annually, destined to become concrete. With it, you could build a wall around the equator twenty-seven metres high and twenty-seven metres wide. It’s a geological process on a global scale: vast water-filled scrape-holes dug out in places like this, cities and bridges and tower blocks forming as features elsewhere. In time, those structures will collapse and pebbles of concrete will be washed to the sea, rolled as rounded clitter on the riverbed, ground back to constituent grains, pressed again into sediments.
A third good passage
Goethe became increasingly convinced that fathoming the natural world came not from identifying species and substances – the distinguishing of one thing from another – but from what links them. ‘It is evident, he wrote, ‘that all things in nature have a clear relationship to one another. Every creature is only a tone, a shade of one great harmony. From the early years of the industrial age, his words reach our own with an urgent clarity.
[...]
Chopping the world up into discrete chunks, dissecting it, was a growing tendency in eighteenth-century Europe. Examining details may reveal certain traits, but it misses something too. Goethe’s early interest in alchemy left him with notions that swam against the rising tide of the Scientific Revolution. He never lost his belief in the patterns that flowed between disciplines and was constantly struck by the beauty of such connections. Joy comes from a brief glimpse of unity; true understanding lies in the whole.