The theme of 4AoS is Big Stuff - Astronomy - and Small Stuff -
Macro and Microscopy - and anything else that takes my fancy in
between. The title, The Four Ages Of Sand, is taken from a
speech by the great Douglas Adams in 1998: "There are some
oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The
fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the
surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball
90 million miles away and think this is perfectly normal is
obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to
be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to
slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough,
quite a few of these have come from sand, so let's talk about
the four ages of sand..." We use sand to make glass, glass to
make lenses, and lenses to make telescopes. Through Astronomy,
we discovered the Universe was a very different place than we
expected, and so began the First Age of Sand. Next we used
lenses to make microscopes and