Quotes About Atmosphere

There's an old man sitting next to me, making love to his tonic and gin.

A man's character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him.

It is not what a man does that is of final importance, but what he is in what he does. The atmosphere produced by a man, much more than his activities, has the lasting influence.

Cord followed up with, "I like it here, but it's beginning to feel creepy. Does anyone else think it's creepy?" "You're talking to a bunch of guys," Yul said. "No one here is going to validate your feelings." She tossed sand at him.

The landscape of the suburban night has much weird beauty if you just look.

Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today.

atmosphere, but she connected them anyway, as well as a power cable. Then she reached back behind her, all the way down to

But if you use shortwave, then you can bounce the information off the ionosphere. This works a good deal better when the sun is not in the sky, sluicing the atmosphere with wideband noise. So radio telegraphers, and the people who eavesdrop on them (what the Brits call the Y Service) are, alike, nocturnal beings.

She smelled good: not an easy thing to accomplish in 1714.

The complications, as always, had to do with avoiding collisions and respecting what was still called "air space" around habitats, even though it had no air in it and might more properly have been called "space space.

Even if we could get China and India to stop burning shit tomorrow, and crash their economies for the sake of Mother Earth," T.R. said, "it wouldn't undo what we've done, as a civilization, to the atmosphere since we first worked out how to turn fossil fuel into work.

in the informal atmosphere of the Physics Department, appointments were viewed with a certain Heisenbergian skepticism, as though being in the right place at the right time would involve breaking a natural law and was therefore impossible to begin with.

The place was famous for always having 'six comely maidens' working there," I said, with air quotes, "'serving the customers ale and aught.'" "What's aught?" asked Tristan. "Whatever you want it to be," I said.

Some molecules - ammonia, carbon dioxide, water - show up everywhere in the universe, whether life is present or not. But others pop up especially in the presence of life itself. Among the biomarkers in Earth's atmosphere are ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol sprays, vapor from mineral solvents, escaped coolants from refrigerators and air conditioners, and smog from the burning of fossil fuels. No other way to read that list: sure signs of the absence of intelligence.

On Venus you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in seven seconds, just by holding it out to the air. (Yes, I did the math.)

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted aurora near the poles of both Saturn and Jupiter. And on Earth, the aurora borealis and australis (the northern and southern lights) serve as intermittent reminders of how nice it is to have a protective atmosphere.

How about methane? It too is chemically unstable, and yes, some of it is anthropogenic, but as we've seen, methane has nonliving agents as well.

Asteroids are craggy chunks of rock. Comets are balls of dirt, ice, and frozen gases. And meteors are, quite simply, whatever falls through and burns up in Earth's atmosphere from outer space. Asteroids

These early, single-celled organisms unwittingly transformed Earth's carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into one with sufficient oxygen to allow aerobic organisms to emerge and dominate the oceans and land.

These same oxygen atoms, normally found in pairs (O2), also combined in threes to form ozone (O3) in the upper atmosphere, which serves as a shield that protects Earth's surface from most of the Sun's molecule-hostile ultraviolet photons.

single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth's entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln

Twinkling happens when the light from a distant point travels through that atmosphere; its light beam dances ever so slightly in random directions many times—sometimes thousands of times—each second.

METEOR These are "shooting stars"—objects that burn up in Earth's atmosphere as they fall, leaving an ethereal streak of light. Most meteors are the size of a grain of sand.

Interplanetary space is so not-empty that Earth, during its 30 kilometer-per-second orbital journey, plows through hundreds of tons of meteors per day—most of them no larger than a grain of sand. Nearly all of them burn in Earth's upper atmosphere, slamming into the air with so much energy that the debris vaporizes on contact.