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 discovered that life itself was very different to what we had believed.
Then we discovered something else we can make from sand: silicon chips. The computer is the basis of the next stage in our intellectual evolution; The Third Of Sand.
What else can we make from sand? Fibre-optics. Fibre-optics allowed us to connect computers together, and the Fourth Age Of Sand - the Internet - was born.