A Quote by Sam Kean

The noble gases, which reside on the East Coast of the periodic table, are its aristocrats - detached and aloof, never bothering to interact with the rabble of common elements that make up the vast majority of the world.

Sam Kean

Quote Topics

Aloof Bothering Coast Common Detached East East Coast Elements Gases Interact Majority Make Make Up Never Noble Periodic Periodic Table Rabble Table Up Vast Vast Majority Which World

Quote Author

Sam Kean
American - Writer

Everywhere in the universe, the periodic table has the same basic structure. Even if an alien civilization's table weren't plotted out in the castle-with-turrets shape we humans favor, their spiral or pyramidal or whatever-shaped periodic table would naturally pause after 118 elements.

Sam Kean

We need less memorization - I never memorized the periodic table of the elements - I've never used it, and I'm a physicist! I can look it up.

Michio Kaku

I didn't grow up in one place, so I never had a certain mentality. I have some aspects of growing up in Texas, but I also have a lot of East Coast family. I would have loved to grow up on the East Coast.

Debby Ryan

If you memorize the periodic table it will speed you up if you're a chemist, but by and large, the reason you have a periodic table is so that you can store that information outside of your body. That way it frees up some part of your brain to do something else...

Bill Nye

the table of elements does not contain one of the most powerful elements that make up our world, and that is the element of surprise.

Daniel Handler

If studying the periodic table taught me nothing else, it's that the credulity of human beings for periodic table panaceas is pretty much boundless.

Sam Kean

It doesn't bother me that I'm not a household word on the East Coast. Baton Rouge, Raleigh, Minneapolis - I'm so popular in these cities where you've never imagined an East Coast comedian working.

Elayne Boosler

The body tends to treat elements in the same column of the periodic table as equivalents.

Sam Kean

Atoms of Element 118 fill an outer shell with electrons, creating a special type of element called a noble gas. Noble gases are natural turning points on the table, ending one row and pointing to the next.

Sam Kean

One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy and the question of which element or elements will replace carbon as king.

Sam Kean

Cities are responsible for the vast majority of the creation of the economy. They're also places into which we pour the vast majority of resources, the vast majority of energy and the places where a huge percentage of the decisions about how systems are built and how products designed, etc., happen.

Alex Steffen

I still have a vivid memory of my excitement when I first saw a chart of the periodic table of elements.

Joe Murray

Many different elements can form isomers, but only a few elements on the periodic table, like hafnium, can form isomers that last more than fractions of a second - and might therefore be turned into weapons.

Sam Kean

Despite its obscurity, probably no element on the periodic table has as colorful a history as antimony. Money, madness, poison, linguistics, charlatanism, sex - pretty much every theme that runs through the periodic table can be found in Element 51.

Sam Kean

I moved to the east coast when everybody else was going to the west coast. I (then) chased it back toward the west coast. I built my career up by doing small roles (which led) to principal roles and getting bumped into main character roles.