YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Miodownik

lines on the record: 36
first: 2024-07-12
most recent: 2024-07-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“of a smell camera in the future that we could take a snapshot of smells that are important to us and have them in our lives for later. I think that will happen. I do think it's going to, just like we develop photography for images.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think it's a smell, but therefore it's a sort of a volatile vapor. And I think that it's the sort of smell of my family, I suppose. I think if you, that sounds a weird thing to say, but I think there's so much that knits you together about home is about the smell of home. And one of the sadnesses for me is that when my parents died, who are incredibly influential in my life, and of course everyone's parents are important. But it's not just them, it's their home. It's that going home and everything that represents is a huge part of the smell landscape of home. And it's gone now, like the house has gone, they're gone. And I couldn't capture it. I can't find it again. I've never, even though I can smell my grandfather's flat occasionally, I can't smell my parents' home occasionally. And it disturbs me.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, even though they're invisible, and we just, in a sense, as soon as they release them into the air, we sort of forget about them. We have to kind of par bar the new era of humans has to be that we take responsibility for the atmosphere and the gases that we release into it and what they're doing there. And I think we have just as a species we just haven't got our heads around it yet. But that is the future. This century has to be about that. And it's an exciting one. I mean, there's lots of opportunities there. And I think we can do it. It's just that it's because it's invisible. It's very hard to persuade people that it should be one of our priorities. And I think that is a part of the reason for writing the book is to go, just because things are invisible doesn't mean they're not important. They're really important. And we need to start seeing the invisible more clearly.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“gas we have a problem with and that as we get more powerful as a species we we you know we need to start realizing that there are limitations to our power that we have to either address or we have to kind of get cleverer at with these gases and helium is another one so you know we really rely on helium if you go it's it's it's a fun gas in terms of like um party balloons but really actually it's absolutely vital for our medical system and we use it in all sorts of diagnostic equipment to cool it down and without helium and without cheap helium so people might say well you know you can always the price will just go up if we if we just you know release it into the atmosphere it will but thing is then healthcare goes up and so the price of healthcare goes up and also its availability to the billions of people around the world becomes less available so it's our we've got to start”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, so yeah, I point out there's some gases that we have become profligate with. And Carm Dark Side is an example, right? Even though it's actually in very tiny proportions in the atmosphere, we just sort of feel like we can just do what we want with it and it doesn't really matter. And of course, we're finding out that actually it does matter. And climate change is a result of that, but isn't the only gas that we've been doing that with. Nitrogen's another one and ammonia and that is having a huge amount of impact on air pollution. So the nitrous oxide as well. And that's coming from the way in which we behave around the nitrogen gas we take from the atmosphere to make fertilizer put onto the land and then we just don't deal with it very well when it comes back out again. And I wanted to sort of say, look, our control of our problem with carbon dioxide is not the only...”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, yeah, also to give it a sort of, yeah, because a bubbling, fizzing, hopefully. I mean, they're my drawings of the dreams. And they vary in quality. But at least they kind of are me. And I felt like, yeah, these are the dreams I have. And I'm sure, I mean, some people say they don't dream, but I think it's true that everyone dreams that they just don't remember them. And the dreams, again, are such an important part of our sort of subconscious life. And they're also invisible, right? So this parallel between these invisible worlds that are important to us dictate a lot of what happens to us or how we feel about the world. And yet our sort of constantly pushed to the edge. I wanted to address that in the book.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“is still there in our subconscious, and I wanted to make the link between the subconscious world where you're constantly smelling stuff and you're constantly reacting to the gases in your world, but you don't consciously think about it. But they are directing the action and it does come from a much earlier time in your life, and I wanted to do justice to that in the book, and I was wondering how to do it without going into psychoanalysis, and I didn't feel, of course, that was my area at all. So I just start drawing my dreams as I was writing the book. And I wanted to give some graphical kind of form to that. As soon as you get into the gas world, it feels to me that dreams and the subconscious float to the surface. And I wanted to just say, you know, I think the ghost and the spirits and the dreams and all that stuff, that's all washing around this irrational side of our lives. And that irrational side is not to be denied is an important part being human.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I really wanted to be a recurring theme of, because I think that one of the ways, the reason why we understand the world is not just because we're curious, but we're emotionally... I think Where does that come from? And I think a lot of that in many people's lives comes from their parents, that and their family, that the early forms of how you navigate the world, you come out of the womb, your sense of smell is very dominant, and that's how you can't see, right? And your sense of smell and taste, which are related, they are how you navigate your early few months and survive. And then as you grow up in the world, this olive factory sense is combined with these early memories of your parents and who they are and how they behave towards you and your other family. It's just this sort of soup of memory and emotion that we live later on in our lives.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally different part of the gas world that I think is equally important because if you lose your sense of smellers, many people experience during the COVID pandemic, you lose a whole part of your Emotional life and it's a huge loss, but also food tastes much worse and that's the other amazing thing people may not realize is that most of the taste of food is the smell of it retronasally you put in your mouth it gives off a scent inside your mouth as you chew it that goes up the back of your retronasal passage into your olive factory bulb and that you smell it there and that's another evolutionary thing to work out whether what you're eating is edible or is poisonous and and but it's also part of pleasure huge part of pleasure and makes you eat any pleasure out of eating you you start to kind of waste away I mean you don't feel like eating so yeah it's an incredibly complex and wonderful part of the book I think and it was hard to do justice to it because it's you know in its right you know people have written whole books”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking for food, if you think about it, like to know where you found the strawberries last time is a really important thing to know to basically survive. And so that then goes on into our modern life. So if I go into an old flat, I will sell certain smells in there that will remind me of my grandfather's flat. And when I smell them, I instantly have an instant memory of being a child in my grandfather's flat. And I cannot control that. It's so important. It's so emotionally overrides everything else I'm thinking at that time. Similarly, people must, you know, they can smell a previous girlfriend or boyfriend who wore a particular perfume and they suddenly smell it on a bus. And they're back to that relationship. So the relationship between emotions, this cell sensors in our oil factory bulb, this is a...”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“materials give off gases. And in the case of a strawberry, it's these tiny volatile carbon molecules that come off it. And we have evolved sensors in our olive factory bulb to tell whether those little molecules which now are a gas and therefore we can go up our nose, we've evolved sensors to work out, oh, that's a ripe strawberry. So I want to eat it. Or it's not a ripe strawberry, so I'm not going to eat it. So there's been an evolutionary pressure for us to text certain gases or certain scents in the air, and they're very small pots. And then, of course, because of that, they're very important to us. In fact, the element factory bill goes straight into the brain, and it's not heavily processed on the way. So it's actually connected to things like locations, which sort of make sense.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, smells this really interesting one, isn't it? Because on the one hand, you can't smell oxygen and you can't smell carbon dioxide and you can't smell nitrogen. I mean, these are the things you're breathing every day. And you would have thought, oh, it'd be quite useful to know where there's loads of oxygen because I rely on it. But you don't. You can't. And it turns out the reason probably is that we evolved not to have to need to do it. It wasn't an evolutionary pressure to work out how to do it. So the question then is, why do we smell certain gases? And why did we develop sensors and detectors in our physiology, basically our olive factory bulb, to do so? And I guess one of the reasons is to find food. So certain foods smell. And what does that mean to say they smell? Because they're not a gas, like a lovely loaf of bread is not a gas or a lovely strawberry is not a gas. But it turns out, of course, that most...”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Used to the pressure that's acting on us now all the time, but if you take us out of that in the case of the can and go into outer space where it's close to a vacuum, we will just explode and that's a kind of it's an amazing thought and again it illustrates just how important a life support system is for us on this planet and the atmosphere and of course when you see people exploring space humans and spacesuits you realize that that engineering is all about trying to keep an atmosphere inside near the body that will not otherwise without which they will die very very quickly within a few seconds”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And of course, you can't see that, and you don't want to look either because the steam is constantly coming out. It's a dangerous gas, but it's full of steam. And what that means is it's displaced all the air. So inside that can is just steam. If you then plunge that can into water, what will happen is the steam will condense almost immediately and create a vacuum. And now the vacuum will be inside the can, but on the outside of the can is still all the gases around us a hundred kilometers of the atmosphere is all pressing down on that can and it will just crush into a tiny ball and you won't believe it i mean it's really extraordinary to see like it'll just the can will just crush and you haven't you haven't exerted any force on it at all it's just that the steam has gone from a gas to a liquid and you suddenly get a real understanding of what it is that we are constantly under pressure we live under the bottom of the sea of a hundred kilometers of gas”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not being a curious person seems to me to be really heartbreaking because that's how we got to be humans. And it's a part of our DNA, I suppose. So it's a bit like exercise. You need to sort of practice curiosity. And as you get older, of course, you might think, well, I know about the world and I've accrued all this information. Perhaps I don't need to know anything more. But I really don't feel that myself at all and the pleasure of reading the book was to kind of go, oh my God, they did that experiment. I wonder if I can do that experiment. And then, of course, I have a go at it. And I suddenly realized how hard it is to control that particular gas. And I try and encourage the reader to really have a go at these things. Obviously, in a safe way. But there is this experiment that I show about steam that anyone can do, which is that if you take a can and a drinks can, a metal can, and you basically put it on a hob so it's boiling water inside a small amount of water, the whole can fills with steel.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I do in the book try to kind of get people to be experimenters or encourage people because I think that that curiosity is an intrinsic part of humans is something you have to cultivate in your life, a bit like a sentence.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“our passion, and so it's not hard to find stories incredible. In fact, the biggest problem with the book is actually cutting it down to a manageable size for someone to read because there are so many amazing stories of inventors, like this woman Nelly Bly, who read the book by Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days, which was all about steam technology and how the railways had opened up the world for travel. And could you get around the world in 80 days? That was a fictional account. She did it. She was the first person to do it. And she did it in 72 days. And she did it with style and a plomb. And it's just, you know, it's, humans are just interesting. And so it's a pleasure to find their stories. The hard thing is just to sort of not stuff them all in the book so it becomes unreadable.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Search of fusion, you know, to try and control these plasmas, these hot plasmas and failing at the moment. It's still a long way away from being able to do that. So I think in terms of engineering, we've got a long way to go with gases, even though we've sort of, yeah, we've done some good stuff. The stories around them, you know, I think that where humans science and engineering are human activities, right? Ultimately, it's about humans and their curiosity and our desire to kind of, yeah, work out how we can live in a different way. And our dreams, you know, it's another thing I explore in the book. It's like, you know, we want to pursue our dreams and we do those quite a lot of those are through gas technologies, like getting to the moon is all about understanding how rockets work and how to get there and back. So gases and dreams,”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think science obviously is about asking questions about how the world works and the universe works and then pursuing those questions. A rational way doing experiments and trying to come up with answers. And I think that humans are just curious beings and we naturally do that. We do that even when we don't call it science. People do science all the time without kind of calling it science. And I think that's probably what happened in the early experimental stage of all these technologies like the musicians. Musicians are scientists a lot of the time they're playing around with their instruments, working out, oh, if you do that reliably, I get this incredible note. So I think experimenting with gases because they're part of our life, because we breathe, and because we sort of light fires, which is another gas technology, we naturally experiment. Then try to work out, wow, can we control it? That's the engineering bit. Can you control this thing reliably? And that has turned out to be much harder. And I think we're still in.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People don't really understand how they work, they just know it works, but then the science of gases really explains that what you're doing with an explosive is you're just making a lot of gas in a very small space. And because you make a lot of gas in a very small space, that has to expand. It does expand. And in expanding, it will just blow everything in its path away. So as soon as you start making gases, it's dangerous. And I think still today, if you, you know, there's really not a week that goes by without some big gas explosion somewhere in the world in a major city, London, Paris, New York, Tokyo. Gases are so part of our fabric of our cities, but they go wrong all the time, even despite our prowess of engineering. We find it very hard to stop that danger turning into a disaster.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think because they are hard to control, because the atoms involved in a gas, as I was saying right at the beginning, they are autonomous, right? They're just going to go where they want to go. They've got a certain amount of energy, and off they zip. They can be pressurized into a small vessel. That's what pneumatics is. But then when you release that pressure, the forces involved are very large. You can do that either by making a presser vessel, so that's the early days of steam engines. And in order to use that pressure to push a piston, which is to make a pump work or in the end to make steam engines work. But if it goes wrong, then you're harnessing this great force. And of course, humans, many, many, many people died in development steam. And then, of course, when explosions come along,”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's been this incredible engine of civilization around the world for good and evil. And only recently, most people, again, in our history, would have been very familiar with looking out to sea and seeing lots of sailboats. It's only recently that with the invention of steam, which is another gas technology, and then more recently diesel engines, that the sailboat is”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the wind which is a really neat trick, then actually it becomes the way of exploring the globe. And of course, of course, we celebrate these days, you know, the first people to sail around the world and these were Spanish explorers. And Columbus is very famous for selling from Europe to America and making Europeans aware for the first time that there was this continent of North America. All of these people were expert on understanding the winds and manipulating their sails to get them where they wanted to go and get home again. And so, I mean, of course, it's impossible to underestimate sailing as a way in which the whole of technology was developed, but also trade. Trade and the way in which different cultures mixed. So there was the whole trade of spices and very shamefully the trade of slaves.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pacific, these tiny islands all the way through to Easter Island. They breathe the air, they listen to the air, they could navigate the seas and get to islands that were over the horizon long, long way by just knowing when the right winds were blowing and they would take them there. And of course if you go back to the idea, of course there are wind gods and of course the fact that these winds were so important was associated with gods and they could do two things. They could destroy you and kill you, blow you off course and so early sailors were very fearful of angering these gods and also the winds could rescue you and take you home and so you had to kind of please them and understand them and give sacrifices to them. And then so as wind technology in terms of sailing becomes more mainstream and people understand how to have sales and control the wind and actually sail into the world.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, so again, back to early humans, the first boats, first they start fishing and you start realizing you can sort of float on things and make fishing easier. And then you realize, of course, okay, well, we can actually go places in these boats and we can carry a lot more than we could on our backs or on a donkey. And so boats become this really important piece of technology. And they're rowed by oars. But then the tides and the winds you have to navigate them and it's either a problem or you work out it's in your favor. And the winds of course blow in a regular pattern around the earth and they really understood that. And when I say they, I'm talking about thousands of years ago really, really listened and felt the winds. It was as part of their DNA, these early sailors. The Polynesians in particular, the people who first explored all of the...”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suddenly, we get the pneumatic tar, and it really is. I mean, today, you know, you might be surprised to know, but of course, you know, you're riding around on air. That's what's holding you up. And that's all down to this valve, which these early musicians invented because they were just annoyed.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hugely, so makes cycling really joyously lightweight and wonderful. And secondly, it means that it's much more efficient. So you've got a way to kind of cushion yourself. It's basically suspension. And the first people use the pneumatic tyre were ridiculed and they were like, oh, you're idiots. You're going to get a puncher really soon. But it turned out actually that you could protect against punctures. And in fact, they won all the races. That's what made the pneumatic tyre really cement its position in the bicycle was that the early adopters won all the bicycle races. And so, yeah, the nomadic tire comes into being. And then, of course, it's ready and waiting for the car industry. See, without the pneumatic tyre, cars just can't come into being. They're just too heavy and clunky. And then suddenly...”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On a beach, if you get a shell, you can make it into a musical instrument. So these were part of early technology and musical instruments and pomp and ceremony and war, right? No one went to war without blowing a trumpet. But these musicians were like, I'm so fed up. I'm so fed up with having to change this instrument back and forth in order to make it longer and shorter to get these notes my king wants. I'm going to make a valve that will basically allow me to control the effective length of the instrument. And so the valves on the trumpets and the horns that you see in instruments today, they were all developed by engineer inventors who were also musicians. And as soon as they came into being, then people who were developing the bicycle were like, whoa, this solves a big problem for us. We can make a pneumatic tire, and that means we can ride around on air, and that does two things for us. It kind of says, firstly, it lightens the tone.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the valve, I mean, this is one of those pits of engineering which is to control gases from coming out of a pressure vessel. So if you pump up your tyres, obviously the gas is going to come straight out again unless you can stop it. And it's a wonderful piece of engineering that you can push gas in, but it won't come out. And the discovery of that valve was not actually to make the bicycle possible in the first place, but was actually some musicians who were very frustrated in playing the trumpet at royal occasions. And in order to get different notes, they had to constantly change the connections to their trumpets to make them longer or shorter to get the different notes. And of course, brass instruments are gas technology, right? And very associated would go way back to one of the earliest instrument, the horn, for instance, is something you naturally pick up if you see a horn of an animal and you blow through it, you can get a noise or on.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who never do that? And so a small wispy thing that suddenly appears in my room or a door that slams when I'm alone in a dark house, you know, I get the jitters too. I think that's not a bad thing. And I also try to attribute that to the climate change kind of conundrum, which is that people can't get their head around climate change. They're constantly denying that it's happening. And I think it's because they're a rational part of their mind is taking over there.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For these in every language of the world, so it's a very important part of folklore. And this is where the idea of fairies comes from. And all of these kind of very strange parts of our culture are associated with these gas phenomena, suddenly getting cold and attributing it to a ghost coming in the room or a door slamming. All of these are gas phenomena, which we can now explain. But you asked me whether I, having kind of got my head around them all, if I also feel scared of the dark, and I have to say that I do. And I think that that's the other thing I tried to kind of get to grips with in the book, which is that we humans, we're both logical deep thinkers, and we're also kind of flighty, irrational thinkers. And depending on what your state of mind is, you will go to the irrational, at least I will anyway.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well in the book I sort of want to tell the story of how early on in our evolution as humans there's a lot of gas phenomena that are naturally occurring and scientifically explainable but we didn't understand them as a species and we attributed them to spirits and that's really where the word come from these strange spirits of ghosts and they are a very real part of most generations that came before us and they're embedded in religion as well understanding things like a strange mist that kind of arises in bog areas which is what a will o' the wisp is and then suddenly goes into flame is something that people just struggled with for thousands of years and instead of sort of saying okay well that probably is explainable which they didn't have the science to explain they say okay these things are called will o' the wisps or jack o' lanterns and in fact there's a there's a name”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're infuriated, but when they're in your tire all safely tucked up in there, you ignore them. So it's a funny one to kind of highlight, but I wanted us to sort of do justice to them because they are a wonderful state of matter.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think gases are these, there are life support system. I mean, it's an obvious thing to say that without oxygen, we die very quickly. But without all the other gases in the atmosphere, life on the Earth is not habitable, including carbon dioxide. And it's a complex relationship between the gases that we have in our lives, so the ones that are in our tyres of our cars, the ones that are in hospital canisters that keep you and your loved ones alive in those emergency moments. And as soon as you take them away, you know, honestly, the whole of our kind of modern lives just falls apart. And I wanted to kind of just show people just how much we rely on gases and how fascinating they are. And the fact they're invisible and mostly you don't notice them at all, partly because they act physically invisible when they hiss out of your tyre.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're breathing now, or the nitrogen you're breathing now, or the argon, it turns out that you're breathing now. And they fly around our world. And the reason they don't fly off into space, most of them, there's a few that do, is because they are subject still to the laws of gravity, and it's the gravitational pull on those atoms that keeps the atmosphere around this earth on the earth rather than flying into space. And that's without that we would not be here.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a good question, isn't it? So obviously, you know, everything is made of atoms in our world, like, you know, a teacup or a table or a laptop. And those are atoms that are stuck together with bonds that are pretty rigid. And that's called solids. If you let those bonds kind of be a bit looser and they sort of swap around constantly changing partners, the matter itself, all these atoms, it starts to slosh around a bit and it's sort of fluid. And that is a liquid. And if you say to those atoms or you give them enough energy, which is what it turns out to mostly be about, okay, you can't bond with anything now. You just have to sort of run around the universe on your own. That's a gas. And so gases are kind of one of the freest forms of matter. And they, you know, it's atoms or individual molecules. It can be helium. It can be hydrogen. It can be the oxygen.”
2024-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Invisible Science of Gas, with Mark Miodownik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT