Quotes from Bob Berman

That we have iodine in our thyroid glands proves that our bodies were fashioned from supernova material.

Atoms have substantial, chewy centers made of protons and neutrons stuck together by the most powerful force in the universe, which, in the great poetic tradition of physics, is officially called the strong force. from The Sun's Heartbeat

By the 1680s, Venice's canals were freezing solid in winter, something no one alive had ever witnessed.

How many of your friends know that there's a "sun inside the Sun"? Or that a bizarre, newly found zone beneath the solar surface, the tachocline, is solely responsible for its violence? Or that we just experienced the oddest solar cycle in more than two hundred years—which has apparently influenced global warming in a major way?

Today it's just "the Sun." Familiarity is the enemy of awe, and for the most part people walk the busy streets with no upward glance. In fact, one of the common bits of advice about the Sun is that we shouldn't look at it.

That we have iodine in our thyroid glands proves that our bodies were fashioned from supernova material. The iron in our blood came from the cores of two previous star generations. The Sun gives off a bit of peculiar yellow light from fluorescing sodium vapor, an element inherited from its father, the type O or B blue star.

We, of course, have the advantage of hindsight. Who can say which of today's widely repeated seeming truisms about the big bang, string theory, or the universe's origins will seem ludicrous a century hence?

The 1856 standard textbook, Olmsted's School Astronomy, informed students that, according to no less an authority than William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus, the Sun was inhabited by humanlike creatures who lived on its surface.

good judgment comes only from experience, and experience comes only from bad judgment.

You've been doing this all your life? Do you still enjoy it?" I asked. The room was very warm, and he wiped his balding red-headed brow. Hi seyes lit up as he said, "This is a dream job. i get to see what the Sun's doing every day!

Reacting with our deep skin tissue, sunlight produces the vitamin D that is the greatest anticancer agent ever discovered.

No, the Sun is not like us. We are sustained, modified, and influenced by it. We are made of Sun stuff. But it is an alien entity. Touchingly, we are like symbiotic organisms that watch their magnificent long-lived host with appreciation and also concern - because its death must automatically mean their own.