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And one last one for the night. This one comes not from an OCR scan, but from an old My Clippings Kindle file from the first ebook I ever read on a dedicated ereader back in 2009.
So strong are electromagnetic forces that a child's magnet easily lifts a paper clip off a tabletop in spite of Earth's formidable gravitational tug. Want a more interesting example? If you managed to extricate all the electrons from a cubic millimeter of atoms in the nose of the space shuttle, and if you affixed them all to the base of the launchpad, then the attractive force would inhibit the launch. All engines would fire and the shuttle wouldn't budge. And if the Apollo astronauts had brought back to Earth all electrons from a thimbleful of lunar dust (while leaving behind on the Moon the atoms from which they came), then their force of attraction would exceed the gravitational attraction between Earth and the Moon in its orbit.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958- ), American Astrophysicist. Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries.
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