Helen Czerski Quotes

[E]ven the ocean scientists don't really know all the little stories, the places where it's mattered in history... [S]o I went looking for those.

This book is about linking the little things we see every day with the big world we live in.

[A]s they're starting that swim upwards they... unfluff their feathers and... release... a coat of bubbles... [T]hose bubbles... are inducing . It's just like the same reason a golf ball has dimples, the bubbles are reducing the drag on the penguin and a penguin that is producing bubbles can travel 50% faster... So it stands a much better chance of getting past the leopard seals now, onto the land.

[B]eing at sea during the , when it arrived in the UK... back in 2013. I was on the in the North Atlantic and the swell... the during that storm was 10 meters during the middle of it.

[T]here are these very famous images in of s swimming, and they've always got these trailing bubbles. ...[N]o one really thought about it until a few years ago at the University of Bangor, a couple of fluid dynamicists... had a bit of think, and it turns out that what the penguins do is really... cool! ...They are constantly preening. The feathers are the most important thing a penguin has because they are its insulation and they are a large part of how hydrodynamic it is. How easy it swims through the water. ...Before the penguin goes down to dive, and they can be quite long dives, the penguins all fluff up their feathers and trap gas... bubbles underneath.

In the past, information was treasured... These days we live on the shore of an ocean of knowledge... with regular s that threaten out sanity.

I did my degree in physics and... the telling of the history and the philosophy... is built into the telling of the subject, partly because of quantum mechanics, and partly because some of these ideas in physics are so big, you almost can't not discuss the philosophy of it... [T]he... mind blowing moment when Einstein presents general relativity and... unites these things, or these moments where Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is being worked out... [Y]ou've got to go and see why it's called that... [T]hese stories are built into physics, and in ocean science it's not really the same, and it's... not the same across the biology and chemistry and physics of the ocean, because they tend to be taught... separately...

No one can understand every... detail of our complex world, but the basic principles are fantastically valuable tools...

And then they go down, and they go hunting for fish... [I]t comes time to go back up to the surface and hop out onto the ice past the s.

[P]eople can experience the ocean in lots of ways, and... that's the important point. It's the experience of the ocean in some sense, so... it's not just a computer game...

This organism lives, and it dies, and quite often when it dies, the broken fragments... drift down... and... can build up... on the floor of the ocean, and over geological time these beautiful little platelets of calcium carbonate become squashed into rocks of calcium... [A]s techtonic plates move around and seas come and go, those rocks can get lifted up and so this... is what the White Cliffs of Dover are made of...

I come from in the north of England... a long way from the coast. ...I learned to scuba dive at Scripps. I learned to sail in . I hadn't done any of that before, so I was about as much a landlubber as you can get, but I was up for the adventure... That's the reason I'm doing what I'm doing... because it not only involves very interesting physics, but you are right in the middle of... experiencing it while it's happening...

Science is always trying to prove itself wrong, because that's the quickest route to finding what's actually going on.

We live on the edge, perched on the boundary between planet Earth and the rest of the Universe. ...Every human civilization has seen the stars, but no one has touched them. Our home on Earth is the opposite: messy... full of things... we touch and tweak... The physical world is full of startling variety... But this diversity isn't random. Our world is full of patterns.

Once I understood. Once I looked at the ocean differently... I was cross. Why had no on ever told me about this? Because this is clearly the biggest story on Earth!