Carbon Graphite Quotes

Do you know how diamonds are made?" She gazed steadily at him, the light turning her green eyes transparent. He didn't wait for her to answer. "They're made of a single element - carbon. But, over millions of years, the carbon had to undergo incredible pressure-something like a minimum of four hundred pounds per square inch-and cook to at least seven hundred degrees. The amazing thing is that if there's not enough pressure or heat, instead of a diamond, plain old graphite is made. Imagine that-instead of the world's most indestructible and beautiful thing, you get just graphite. Something to make pencils with. Sure, pencils are nice and useful. But they aren't diamonds.

Can I ask about that pencil in your hair?” Roth tried again. “Of course,” she said. “It’s a number-two pencil. ‘Two’ signifies the lead hardness, although pencils don’t actually contain lead. They contain graphite, which is a carbon allotrope.” “No, I meant why a—” “A pencil instead of a pen? Because unlike ink, graphite is erasable. People make mistakes, Mr. Roth. A pencil allows one to clear the mistake and move on. Scientists expect mistakes, and because of it, we embrace failure.” Then she eyed his pen disapprovingly.

It is important to note,” he said, “that although diamond is culturally revered as the superior form of carbon, it is in fact incapable of deep expression, and unlike graphite no good art can come from diamond.

She discovered in a series of beautifully executed researches the fundamental distinction between carbons that turned on heating into graphite and those that did not. Further she related this difference to the chemical constitution of the molecules from which carbon was made. She was already a recognized authority in industrial physico-chemistry when she chose to abandon this work in favour of the far more difficult and more exciting fields of biophysics. {Bernal on the death of scientist Rosalind Franklin}

Only a simple black pencil will do for making a notation of a benchmark. Ink will run, be dissolved by the tree sap, be washed away by rain, dew, fog, and snow. Nothing as artificial as ink will do for recording eternity and immortality. Graphite is carbon that has been subjected to enormous pressure for millions of years and that might have become coal or diamonds. Instead, however, it has been transformed into something more precious than a diamond; it has become a pencil that can record all that it has seen… A pencil is a greater miracle than a diamond, although the chemical make-up of graphite and diamond is identical.

As we will see, this extraordinary amount of heat is wreaking enormous changes, but for now, don’t worry about the effects; just marvel at the magnitude: the extra carbon released to date, if it could be amassed in one place, would form a solid graphite column twenty-five meters in diameter that would stretch from here to the moon.

The human body contains enough carbon to provide 'lead' (which is really graphite) for about 9,000 pencils

the difference between hard transparent diamond and soft black graphite is not to do with their atoms: in both cases, they are made of exactly the same pure element, carbon. It is by changing how they are arranged, by altering them from a cubic structure into layers of hexagonal sheets, that the radical differences in their material properties are brought about. These structures are not arbitrary—you cannot create any structure—but are governed by the rules of quantum mechanics, which treat atoms not as singular particles but as an expression of many waves of probability. (This is why it makes sense to refer to the atoms themselves as structures, as well as their formation when they bond with one another.) Some of these quantum structures create electrons that can move, and this results in a material that can conduct electricity. Graphite has such a structure, and so conducts electricity. Exactly the same atoms in a diamond but in a different structure do not allow the electrons to move so easily within the crystal, and so diamonds do not conduct electricity. It is also why they are transparent. This

If you take a group of carbon atoms and connect them one way, you get graphite, which is soft and dark and perfect for making pencils. But if you take the same carbon atoms and connect them another way, you get diamond, which is hard and clear and great for making jewelry. There are two key ideas here. First, these properties of softness and darkness and hardness and clearness are not properties of the carbon atoms; they are properties of the collection of carbon atoms. Second, the properties depend on how the carbon atoms are connected. It’s the same with social groups. This phenomenon, of wholes having properties not present in the separate parts, is known as emergence, and the properties are known as emergent properties. Connect people in one way, and they are good to one another. Connect them in another way, and they are not.

Prospector Base was a cluster of five ten-meter-diameter inflatable domes, arranged in a tight pentagonal formation. Each dome touched two others on either side for mutual support against the fierce spring winds of the southern hemisphere. The void in the center of the pentagon was filled with a smaller dome, seven-and-a-half meters in diameter. The only equipment the central dome contained was the base water recycler unit. The recycler received wastewater from the galley, and from the shower and sink. Dubbed “the hall” by the EPSILON engineers, hatches connected the smaller central dome with each of the larger five domes that surrounded it. Each large dome was accessible to the others only via the hall. The larger dome closest to the landing party’s direction of travel possessed an airlock to the outside atmosphere. Known as the common room, it housed the main base computer, the communications equipment, the primary electrical supply panels, the CO2 scrubber, the oxygen generator and the backup oxygen supply tanks. The oxygen generator electrolyzed water collected from dehumidifiers located in all domes except the greenhouse and from the CO2 scrubber. It released molecular oxygen directly back into the air supply. The hydrogen it generated was directed to the carbon dioxide scrubber. By combining the Sabatier Reaction with the pyrolysis of waste product methane, the only reaction products were water—which was sent back to the oxygen generator—and graphite. The graphite was removed from a small steel reactor vessel once a week and stored in the shop where Dave and Luis intended to test the feasibility of carbon fiber manufacture. Excess heat generated by the water recycler, the oxygen generator, and the CO2 scrubber supplemented the heat output from the base heating system. The dome to the immediate left contained the crew sleeping quarters and a well-provisioned sick bay. The next dome housed the galley, food storage, and exercise equipment. The table in the galley doubled as the base conference table. The fourth large dome served as the greenhouse. It also housed the composting toilet and a shower. The final dome contained the shop, an assay bench, and a small smelter. The smelter was intended to develop proof-of-concept smelting processes for the various rare earth elements collected from the surrounding region. Subsequent Prospector missions would construct and operate a commercial smelter. A second manual airlock was attached to the shop dome to allow direct unloading of ore and loading of ingots for shipment to Earth.

had to prove a chain reaction was even possible. That’s what Enrico Fermi and his team were trying to do in the squash court under the football stands in Chicago. The black blocks were graphite, the mineral used to make pencil leads. Slid into holes in some of the blocks were small pieces of uranium. Fermi used graphite to slow down the speeding neutrons—he knew that neutrons would bounce off the carbon atoms that

A nuclear reactor requires two basic materials: a fissionable element such as uranium and a moderator. The function of a moderator, as its name implies, is to slow down the neutrons that come bursting out of a uranium atom when it fissions, increasing their chance of encountering and penetrating another atom of uranium and causing another fission. For CP-1—Chicago Pile No. 1—the moderator was graphite. For most of today’s power reactors, the moderator is water. Moderators slow down neutrons by giving them a target—for graphite, the nucleus of a carbon atom—to bounce off of repeatedly, losing energy with each bounce, much as billiard balls do.