Best Nitrogen Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“In high altitude astronomical facilities we routinely discharged large amounts of nitrogen gas into closed spaces. We were never informed by the astronomy management team about the abnormally low oxygen environments that the use of liquid nitrogen creates, how long term exposure to it manifests itself in human health and the resulting abnormal mental behaviors.”

“One of my astronomy managers used to tell me that liquid nitrogen was harmless and was just liquid air. He would pour it onto his bare hands to demonstrate how safe he thought it was. I was later to realize that incompetence was a feature of high altitude astronomy.”

Hands Used Air Health Safe Safety Astronomy Thought Managers Osha Altitude Liquid High Incompetence One Realize Just Tell Nitrogen Later Feature Harmless Demonstrate Pour Bare Onto

Author:Steven Magee

“When I worked at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, we would routinely be engulfed in cold clouds of helium and nitrogen gas as we discharged it into the video camera systems daily. The management team never warned us that we were in a hazardous oxygen deprived environment during this activity that was known for its ability to adversely affect physical and mental health, and possibly bring on death by asphyxiation.”

“Asking someone else to drive your sports car is like asking someone else to kiss your girlfriend.”

Source: Wealth of Words

“Nitrogen gas has killed many workers and has maimed far more!”

Workers Gas More Many Far Killed Nitrogen Hypoxic Hypoxemia Maimed

Book:Toxic Altitude

Source: Toxic Altitude

“My memories of my time in high altitude astronomy indicate that there were no oxygen concentration monitors or alarms in the areas that liquid nitrogen was in use at the high altitude astronomical facilities where I had worked.”

“I regard breathing industrial gas to be as harmful as heavy smoking.”

Regard Heavy Smoking Gas Breath Carbon Dioxide Harmful Nitrogen Industrial Helium

Author:Steven Magee

“My memories of high altitude astronomy indicate that up to four liquid nitrogen flasks were left venting gas into a small indoor workshop and office area where workers were permanently stationed.”

Astronomy Osha Gas Altitude Mauna Kea Tmt Nitrogen Venting Cryogenic

Author:Steven Magee

“My memories of my time in high altitude astronomy indicate that there were no oxygen concentration monitors or alarms in the areas that liquid nitrogen was in use inside of the high altitude astronomical facilities where I had worked.”

Astronomy Osha Gas Altitude Mauna Kea Tmt Oxygen Liquid Nitrogen

Author:Steven Magee

“During my time in high altitude astronomy, I routinely witnessed workers breathing medical oxygen, industrial carbon dioxide, nitrogen and helium gas as part of their daily work routine.”

“I made the mistake of taking a past girlfriend up to Kitt Peak National Observatory to fill the instrument cryostat with liquid nitrogen. It was one of the largest cryostats at the facility and took a long time to fill. The entire time there was a huge plume of cold nitrogen gas coming out of it, visible for several feet. After we were finished, she started complaining of feeling sick to the point that she thought she was going to vomit. It lasted for several hours. A few years later she started showing signs and symptoms of fatigue and depression and was being medically treated for it. I always felt guilty that I exposed her to the nitrogen gas, as I had no idea how toxic it was because I had never been sent on an OSHA approved cryogenic liquid training course.”

Sick Girlfriend Osha Liquid Observatory Peak Nitrogen National Kitt Cryostat

Author:Steven Magee

“Nitrogen gas has killed and maimed many people.”

People Safety Astronomy Osha Gas Many Killed Worker Nitrogen Maimed

Author:Steven Magee

“Before artificial nitrogen fertilizer became widely available, the world's population was around 2 billion. When we no longer have it - or if we ever decide to stop using it - that may be the number to which our own naturally gravitates.”

Population Nitrogen Over Population

Book:Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

Source: Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

“When I worked in astronomy, I routinely observed young college and university students working with liquid nitrogen and breathing nitrogen gas as they discharged it into the indoor environment at high altitude.”

“A visiting student in La Palma was working with astronomical detector engineer and routinely breathing nitrogen gas. He later unexpectedly fainted, collapsed to the ground and went to hospital.”

Breathing Gas Student Engineer Astronomical Nitrogen La Detector Palma Fainted

Author:Steven Magee

“A small bubble of air remained unabsorbed... if there is any part of the phlogisticated air [nitrogen] of our atmosphere which differs from the rest, and cannot be reduced to nitrous acid, we may safely conclude that it is not more than 1/120 part of the whole. [Cavendish did not realize the significance of the remaining small bubble. Not until a century later were the air’s Noble Gases appreciated.]”

Science Air Noble Experiment Nitrogen Noble Gases

Author:Henry Cavendish

“My neurological doctor thought I had a brain tumor before I self-diagnosed and treated for ‘Magee's Disease’. He sent me through CT and MRI brain scanners looking for it. I later discovered I had ‘Altitude Hypersensitivity' and I was very reactive to altitudes above 1,000 feet, bringing on severe altitude sickness symptoms that were affecting the brain. I had been breathing oxygen, nitrogen, helium, carbon dioxide and mercury polluted air at high altitude during a decade of working in professional astronomy.”

Mercury Carbon Dioxide Nitrogen Altitude Hypersensitivity Altitude Sickness Helium Brain Tumor Magee S Disease Breathing Oxygen Polluted Air

Author:Steven Magee

“21. Take in a great breath of air and then blow it out. Contained in that single breath were at least three nitrogen atoms that were breathed by every human being who ever lived, including Jesus Christ, William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, and every president of the United States. This illustrates the fact that everything we do affects other people, positively or negatively. That’s why it is foolish to say, “Do your own thing if it doesn’t hurt anybody else.” Everything we do affects other people.”

Source: Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future

“England and all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat. As mouths multiply, food resources dwindle. Land is a limited quantity, and the land that will grow wheat is absolutely dependent on difficult and capricious natural phenomena... I hope to point a way out of the colossal dilemma. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty... The fixation of atmospheric nitrogen is one of the great discoveries, awaiting the genius of chemists.”

“When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.”

“The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz), teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. Nitrogen is nitrogen, it passes miraculously from the air into plants, from these into animals, and from animals into us; when its function in our body is exhausted, we eliminate it, but it still remains nitrogen, aseptic, innocent.”

Stills Matter Body Certain Animal Teach Cases Air Overcoming Function Importance Remains Trade Plant Noble Innocent Exhausted Chemist Auschwitz Revulsion Nitrogen

Book:The periodic table

Source: The periodic table

“I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know.”

Knows Done Talking Figures Chemicals Nitrogen

Book:Danger, Memory!: Two Plays

Source: Danger, Memory!: Two Plays

“Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.”

Grief Elements Cycles Carbon Diminish Nitrogen Carbon Cycle

Author:Peter Heller

“Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones out of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.”

Mind Doe Stories Body Turns Fall Black Details Bones Coffee Heat Soil Thrown Take Time Garbage Grind Fertile Steak It Takes Time Nitrogen Spinach Fertile Soil Eggshells Decomposition

Author:Natalie Goldberg

“From the results so far obtained it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the long-range atoms arising from collision of alpha particles with nitrogen are not nitrogen atoms but probably atoms of hydrogen, or atoms of mass 2. If this be the case, we must conclude that the nitrogen atom is disintegrated under the intense forces developed in a close collision with a swift alpha particle, and that the hydrogen atom which is liberated formed a constituent part of the nitrogen nucleus.”

Ifs Long Force Difficult Results Cases Mass Intense Conclusion Range Atoms Particles Liberated Constituents Collision Hydrogen Alphas Nucleus Nitrogen Hydrogen Atom

Author:Ernest Rutherford

“And how could I believe that Australian wine was automatically inferior to wine sourced from other regions on the planet when I had never drunk anything but liquid nitrogen?”

Believe I Believe Planets Wine Drunk Regions Inferiors Australian Liquid Nitrogen Liquid Nitrogen

Book:The Humans: A Novel

Source: The Humans: A Novel

“Each summer, for example, nitrogen and phosphate washing from farmlands in the Mississippi Valley enter the Gulf of Mexico, creating a massive algal bloom covering some 16,000 square kilometers. As the blooms die off, this area-roughly the size of New Jersey-is so deprived of oxygen that no fish survive.”

Source: Vital Signs 1999-2000: The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future

“Before the first atomic bomb test, scientists took the time to calculate whether the blast would ignite the nitrogen in Earth's atmosphere and incinerate us all. The risk was low and the test went off, but Rees wonders what the odds would have had to be to discourage the bomb makers.”

Firsts Earth Funny Science Wonder Technology Risk Lows Tests Scientist Atmosphere Bombs Makers Odds Discouraging Blast Atomic Bomb Ignite Nitrogen

Author:Dennis Overbye

“We need to go back to our relationship with nature and understand that those trees are our lungs. The earth is recycling as our body. The rivers are our circulation. This air is our breath. And the star stuff, the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen that comes from distant galaxies is actually the molecules of your body.”

Needs Body Earth Stars Stuff Air Tree Rivers Breaths Your Body Our Relationship Carbon Galaxy Lungs Molecules Recycling Circulation Hydrogen Nitrogen

Author:Deepak Chopra

“....oysters are the only food that never causes indigestion. Indeed, a man would have to eat sixteen dozen of these acephalous molluscs in order to gain the 315 grammes of nitrogen he requires daily.”

Men Order Causes Gains Dozen Sixteen Oysters Indigestion Nitrogen

Author:Jules Verne

“I believe that at the moment of death, that the soul is released in a molecular form, that actually goes into the - the fabric of the universe, the structure of hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen because we're electrically - we're galvanic, we're electrochemical.”

Believe Soul Moments Form Universe I Believe Structure Fabric Oxygen Hydrogen Nitrogen

Author:Dan Aykroyd

“Science probes; it does not prove. Imagine Newton's reaction to an objector of his law of gravity who argued that he could not establish a universal law because he had not observed every falling apple, much less proved the law of gravity - there might, after all, be an apple that levitates! Why should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry?”

“Too often, chefs just want to experiment - they want to use liquid nitrogen before they know how to use heat.”

Knows Want Use Know How Experiments Heat Chef Liquid Nitrogen Liquid Nitrogen

Author:Tom Colicchio

“We have an atmosphere that is roughly 21% oxygen. The rest of it is largely nitrogen. There's just enough carbon dioxide (CO2) to drive photosynthesis. That has been, throughout the history of our species, pretty stable. Until recently.”

Has Beens Enough Species Atmosphere Stable Carbon Oxygen Carbon Dioxide Co2 Nitrogen Photosynthesis

Author:Sylvia Earle

“The oxygen cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle, the water cycle - all of these are linked to the existence of life in the sea.”

Water Existence Sea Cycles Carbon Linked Oxygen Nitrogen Carbon Cycle Existence Of Life

Author:Sylvia Earle

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

Made Stars Blood Astronomy Teeth Apples Cosmos Iron Pie Carbon Interiors Dna Apple Pie Nitrogen Calcium

Book:Cosmos

Source: Cosmos

“All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail.”

Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

“You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren't created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

Ifs Way Kind Matter Enough Body Today Jesus Stars Forget Evolution Elements Died Your Body Nuclear Iron Carbon Oxygen Things That Matter Stardust Furnaces Nitrogen

Author:Lawrence M. Krauss

“Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make up the "organic" molecules that constitute living organisms on a planet, and the nuclei of these same elements interact to generate the light of its star. Then the organisms on the planet come to depend wholly on that starlight, as they must if life is to persist. So it is that all life on the Earth runs on sunlight. [Referring to photosynthesis]”

“I tell my students, with a feeling of pride that I hope they will share, that the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that make up ninety-nine per cent of our living substance were cooked in the deep interiors of earlier generations of dying stars. Gathered up from the ends of the universe, over billions of years, eventually they came to form, in part, the substance of our sun, its planets, and ourselves. Three billion years ago, life arose upon the earth. It is the only life in the solar system.”

“We have decisively changed the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the rate of extinction.”

Environment Changed Rate Cycles Carbon Extinction Nitrogen Carbon Cycle

Author:Rob Nixon

“For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.”

Trying May Sometimes Culture Realizing Advantage Western Breathe Atmosphere Criticize Oxygen Trash Liquid Western Culture Jupiter Windy Westerners Nitrogen Methane

Author:Neal Stephenson

“It's crazy, if you think about it. The God of the universe - the creator of nitrogen and pine needles, galaxies and E-minor - loves us with a radical, unconditional, self-sacrificing love. And what is our typical response? We go to church, sing songs, and try not to cuss.”

Ifs Thinking Trying Self Song Universe Church Sacrifice Crazy Response Creator Radical Minors Typical Galaxy Unconditional Needles Nitrogen

Book:Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God

Source: Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God

“And to use something as elegant as a tree? Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, makes complex sugars and foods, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. and then why don't we knock that down and write on it?”

Writing Self Use Water Nature Imagine Tree Design Food Color Seasons Down And Complexes Sugar Carbon Elegant Oxygen Knocking Fixing Assignments Replicate Nitrogen Distillation

Author:William McDonough

“Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?”

Should Years Simple Struggle Groups Example Mathematics Billions Motive Chemistry Professors Stable Organize Carbon Oxygen Compounds Hydrogen Nitrogen

Book:LILA An Inquriry into Morals

Source: LILA An Inquriry into Morals

“We sometimes freeze the specimen with liquid nitrogen, which is extremely cold, you know. This is another technique we use now - but the specimens are not alive.”

Knows Heart Sometimes Use Alive Cold Technique Liquid Freeze Cold Heart Nitrogen Liquid Nitrogen

Author:Lennart Nilsson

“In a certain sense I made a living for five or six years out of that one star [υ Sagittarii] and it is still a fascinating, not understood, star. It's the first star in which you could clearly demonstrate an enormous difference in chemical composition from the sun. It had almost no hydrogen. It was made largely of helium, and had much too much nitrogen and neon. It's still a mystery in many ways ... But it was the first star ever analysed that had a different composition, and I started that area of spectroscopy in the late thirties.”

“Nitrogen fertilizer is used on all crops produced in this country, but it is a key plant nutrient to produce corn a critical crop to Illinois farmers.”

Country Used Produce Keys Plant Critical Farmers Corn Corny Crops Illinois Nutrients Fertilizer Nitrogen

Author:John Shimkus

“I know Teddy Kennedy had fun at the Democratic convention when he said that I said that trees and vegetation caused 80 percent of the air pollution in this country. ... Well, now he was a little wrong about what I said. I didn't say 80 percent. I said 92 percent-93 percent, pardon me. And I didn't say air pollution, I said oxides of nitrogen. Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen. ... If we are totally successful and can eliminate all the manmade oxides of nitrogen, we'll still have 93 percent as much as we have in the air today.”

“Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.”

Years Different Three Animal Four Taught Materials Elements Years Ago Plant Substance Chemicals Carbon Oxygen Hydrogen Plants And Animals Nitrogen Four Elements

Book:Natural Science and Religion: Two Lectures Delivered to the Theological School of Yale College

Source: Natural Science and Religion: Two Lectures Delivered to the Theological School of Yale College

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Nitrogen Quotes