Temperatures can be raised with energy released during exothermic... reactions. Copper and are commonly located in close proximity... A mixture of ... ...and ... ...heated to only to 700 °C ...automatically reaches a temperature, through a heat producing chemical reaction, that is close to that for extracting copper. The addition of a flux, which in Egypt was a native salt called (), lowered the fusion point sufficiently for copper extraction. Silver can be smelted similarly.

I would like to say that in the end, our task should be, if we are speaking of metal, to process it to the highest depth so that we can trade with the most sophisticated products...

In answer to some of the questions that we had a few years ago when the Large Hadron Collider started up... "Could it destroy the world?" ...The most convincing answer to me as to why it couldn't, is because we have particles in outer space from cosmic rays and things like that, at much much higher energies than we could ever dream of creating in the lab. And so far they haven't done anything catastrophic to us and we're perfectly fine. So in terms of just reaching a higher and higher energy... it doesn't really matter what we do in the lab. We should be safe on earth from these high energy particles.

So they had to put a lot of effort into designing... the , which is a massive long block of very dense , which absorbs the energy. But even then there's so much energy that they can't just dump it directly on it, or the would make the thing explode. So they actually have to paint the beam in... a swirly pattern... to spread out the load of the heat from the beam on this huge graphite block.

Nowadays you wouldn't want to do that voluntarily, and you wouldn't want to do it without understanding the consequences, but there are some situations that you might want to do it in... [T]here's a very good reason for that, because if you take a much lower energy beam that the Large Hadron Collider beam, and you put it into water, or into the human body, or into tissue and you start it with the correct amount of energy, it will actually slow down and stop, and deposit almost all of its dose (or its energy) in one spot... [W]e call this the .

Sure, it’s illegal to melt down your nickels (for now), but the point is, “I won’t need to melt it down because once they change the way they make the nickel, the old nickels become even more valuable than before because scarcity sets in as they begin to remove them from circulation.

Electrical signals require electrons, which generate heat, which limits the amount of work a chip can perform and requires a lot of power for cooling. Light has neither limitation. If IBM’s estimations are correct, over the next eight years, its new chip design will accelerate supercomputer performance a thousandfold, taking us from our current 2.6 petaflops to an exaflop (that’s 10 to the 18th, or a quintillion operations per second) — or one hundred times faster than the human brain.

Most people now, when I say particle accelerator, think of... the bohemoth. This is the . It is almost 27 km in circumference, which is why the tunnel looks almost straight. It's about 100 meters underground, over the border between France and Switzerland. ...Inside these magnets here, these big blue long ones it's one of the coldest places in the universe at 1.9°K above . ...[I]t accelerates two beams of s, from inside the atom, in opposite directions at 99.99999% (that's the exact number) of the speed of light and smashes them into each other... [I]t is what I like to call an impressive shiny huge piece of kit that's bigger than everyone else's!

Electrical signals require electrons, which generate heat, which limits the amount of work a chip can perform and requires a lot of power for cooling. Light has neither limitation. If IBM's estimations are correct, over the next eight years, its new chip design will accelerate supercomputer performance a thousandfold, taking us from our current 2.6 petaflops to an exaflop (that's 10 to the 18th, or a quintillion operations per second) — or one hundred times faster than the human brain.

Now the radiation dose that the LHC beam could give you could kill you 76,000 times over, but the radiation dose you'd receive from a beam of say 200 MeV, a relatively modest proton beam, is much lower and can... be used to treat cancer... [W]e use this in... , which we're getting in the UK. We actually did pioneer it and... it hasn't quite come back onto the NHS yet...

The hammer shatters glass but forges steel.

On average, once every few hundred years the Earth is hit by an object about 70 meters in diameter; the resulting energy released is equivalent to the largest nuclear weapons explosion ever detonated. Every 10,000 years, we’re hit by a 200-meter object that might induce serious regional climatic effects. Every million years, an impact by a body over 2 kilometers in diameter occurs, equivalent to nearly a million megatons of TNT — an explosion that would work a global catastrophe, killing (unless unprecedented precautions were taken) a significant fraction of the human species. A million megatons of TNT is 100 times the explosive yield of all the nuclear weapons on the planet, if simultaneously blown up. Dwarfing even this, in a hundred million years or so, you can bet on something like the Cretaceous-Tertiary event, the impact of a world 10 kilometers across or bigger. The destructive energy latent in a large near-Earth asteroid dwarfs anything else the human species can get its hands on.

It is very possible that a proper understanding of string theory will make the space-time continuum melt away.... String theory is a miracle through and through.

The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy, as one of my critics labeled me, exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim.