“But the collection closest to my heart was a singular collection of bus tickets. Whenever one took a bus in London in those days, one got a colored oblong of cardboard bearing letters and numbers. It was after getting an O 16 and an S 32 (my initials, also the symbols of oxygen and sulfur – and added to these, by a happy chance, their atomic weights, too) that I decided to make a collection of “chemical” bus tickets, to see how many of the ninety-two elements I could get. I was extraordinarily lucky, so it seemed to me (though there was nothing but chance involved), for the tickets accrued rapidly, and I soon had a whole collection (W 184, tungsten, gave me particular pleasure, partly because it provided my missing middle initial). There were, to be sure, some difficult ones: chlorine, irritatingly, had an atomic weight of 35.5, which was not a whole number, but, undismayed, I collected a Cl 355 and inked in a tiny decimal point. The single letters were easier to get – I soon had an H 1, a B 11, a C 12, an N 14, and an F 19, besides the original O 16. When I realized that atomic numbers were even more important than atomic weights, I started to collect these as well. Eventually, I had all the known elements, from H 1 to U 92. Every element became indissolubly associated with a number for me, and every number with an element. I loved carrying my little collection of chemical bus tickets with me; it gave me the sense that I had, in the space of a single cubic inch, the whole universe, its building blocks, in my pocket.”

Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks, Picador 2002, Seite 75/76.

Ich bin offensichtlich noch im ersten Drittel des Buches, aber ich leg euch das trotzdem schon ans Herz. Sehr dringlich. Vielleicht eher auf Deutsch, wenn man nicht, wie ich, auf jeder Seite ein paar Vokabeln nachschlagen möchte. Oder hat hier irgendjemand gewusst, dass lattice das Kristallgitter ist und galena das Bleierz? Ich nicht. Und jetzt entschuldigt mich, ich muss weiterlesen.