“As with many areas of science, humans went into it assuming that they pretty much knew what they were going to discover, and that refining their instruments would just make their existing simplistic picture clearer. And as usual, they were wrong.”
—Helen Czerski, on page 241 her book The Blue Machine (W.W. Norton, publishers, 2023)
Here’s video of the author discussing bits of what’s in the book:
This is one of the tiny fraction of books that keeps serving up surprises, clearly said, about things that will make most readers happily pay attention to things they suddenly realize are different and wider and deeper than they’d realized. This, for another example:
“Nature has always operated on the principle that our society is finally rediscovering: what you do is start with the poo. That’s the concentrated source of the materials relevant to life. If you can build everything you need out of waste, you’re never going to run out of raw materials. Nor do you have a waste-disposal problem – the only thing you might face is a lack-of-waste-to-dispose-of problem. Nature recycles, endlessly. Poo is one of the most important resources on Earth.”