In Chemistry
In chemistry, pieces of terracotta are used as a heterogeneous catalyst to "crack" long-chain alkanes. This process is useful for obtaining more useful products, such as gasoline or petrol, from less useful ones, such as highly viscous long chain alkanes.
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“Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,—not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)