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Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves.
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Bill Bryson |
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no small achievement when you consider the British climate, the fact that Blackpool is ugly, dirty and a long way from anywhere, that its sea is an open toilet, and its attractions nearly all cheap, provincial and dire.
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Bill Bryson |
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The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth's surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.
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Bill Bryson |
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Among the tiny atomic structures the plankton take to the grave with them are two very stable isotopes--oxygen-16 and oxygen-18.
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Bill Bryson |
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The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales - ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge.
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Bill Bryson |
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Of course, if we all spoke a common language things might work more smoothly, but there would be far less scope for amusement. In an article in Gentleman's Quarterly in 1987, Kenneth Turan described some of the misunderstandings that have occurred during the dubbing or subtitling of American movies in Europe. In one movie where a policeman tells a motorist to pull over, the Italian translator has him asking for a sweater (i.e., a pullover)...
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Bill Bryson |
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Comets develop their distinctive tails when their surface material begins to evaporate as they approach the Sun.
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Bill Bryson |
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If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here - and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life at all in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a trick we have only just begun to grasp.
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Bill Bryson |
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the mightiest and most extensive mountain range on Earth was--mostly--under water.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity - in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes - an interesting side branch.
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Bill Bryson |
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Sheepskin is a marvelously durable medium, though it has to be treated with some care. Whereas ink soaks into the fibers on paper, on sheepskin it stays on the surface, rather like chalk on a blackboard, and so can be rubbed away comparatively easily. "Sixteenth-century paper was of good quality, too," he went on. "It was made of rags and was virtually acid free, so it has lasted very well."
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Bill Bryson |
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Somehow, from this Gilbert concluded that the Moon's craters were indeed formed by impacts--in itself quite a radical notion for the time--but
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Bill Bryson |
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ocean floors everywhere were so comparatively youthful. None had ever been found to be older than about 175 million years, which was a puzzle because continental rocks were often billions of years old.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is a fortunate fluke for us that HIV, the AIDS agent, isn't among them - at least not yet. Any HIV the mosquito sucks up on its travels is dissolved by the mosquito's own metabolism. When the day comes that the virus mutates its way around this, we may be in real trouble.
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Bill Bryson |
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there are particles of matter and antimatter popping into existence and popping out again--and that these are pushing the universe outwards at an accelerating rate.
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Bill Bryson |
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Iowa, to be on the safe side, outlawed conversations in any language other than English in schools, at church, or even over the telephone. When people protested that they would have to give up church services in their own languages, Governor William L. Harding responded: "There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue."
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Bill Bryson |
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As we sit here, continents are adrift, like leaves on a pond. GPS tracking shows North America & Europe currently moving apart at the same rate your fingernail grows, or about two yards in a human lifetime.
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continents
gps
tectonic-plates
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Bill Bryson |
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Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place.
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Bill Bryson |
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Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides of Moon and Sun, but it is the merest smidgen).
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Bill Bryson |
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A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually lovely song, but its population numbers, never robust, gradually dwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether and went unseen for many years. Then, in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds.
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Bill Bryson |
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Fired by the oxygen of irrationality, America entered a period of grave intolerance, not just toward immigrants but toward any kind of antiestablishment behavior. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it illegal, among much else, to make critical remarks about government expenditure or even the YMCA.44 So low did standards of civil liberty fall that police routinely arrested not only almost anyone remotely suspected of sedition, but even those who ..
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Bill Bryson |
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980a885
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The Earth thus started off with vast supplies of heat inside it, and a rocky planet, like any other rock, takes a long time to cool down. Stones in a campfire may still be hot the morning after; a stone the size of the Earth can hold heat for billions of years.
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Bill Bryson |
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For us, the universe goes only as far as light has travelled in the billions of years since the universe was formed.
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Bill Bryson |
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future. As an adjective, the word is often used unnecessarily: 'He refused to say what his future plans were' (Daily Telegraph); 'The parties are prepared to say little about how they see their future prospects' (The Times). In both sentences, and nearly all others like them, future adds nothing and should be deleted.
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Bill Bryson |
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For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere. The current ice age--ice epoch really--started about forty million years ago, and has ranged from murderously bad to not bad at all.
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Bill Bryson |
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The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting--fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.
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Bill Bryson |
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Less than a decade after the Great Exhibition, iron as a structural material was finished--which makes it slightly odd that the most iconic structure of the entire century, about to rise over Paris, was made of that doomed material. I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same..
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Bill Bryson |
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Hutton noticed that if he used a pencil to connect points of equal height, it all became much more orderly. Indeed, one could instantly get a sense of the overall shape and slope of the mountain. He had invented contour lines.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is only the brevity of lifetimes that keeps us from appreciating the changes.
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Bill Bryson |
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When the Earth was only about a third of its eventual size, it was probably already beginning to form an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane and sulphur. Hardly the sort of stuff that we would associate with life, and yet from this noxious stew life formed. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. This was a good thing, because the Sun was significantly dimmer back then. Had we not had the benefit of a greenhouse eff..
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Bill Bryson |
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Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely. If it lands in fertile soil it will be soaked up by plants or reevaporated directly within hours or days. If it finds its way down to the groundwater, however, it may not see sunlight again for many years--thousands if it gets really deep. When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade. In ..
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Bill Bryson |
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Proteins can't exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow. And
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Bill Bryson |
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When they are not eating, rats are likely to be having sex. Rats have a lot of sex--up to twenty times a day. If a male rat can't find a female, he will happily--or at least willingly--find relief in a male.
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Bill Bryson |
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A man arriving for the Grand Final in Melbourne is surprised to find the seat beside his empty. Tickets for the Grand Final are sold out weeks in advance and empty seats unknown. So he says to the man on the other side of the seat: 'Excuse me, do you know why there is no one in this seat?' 'It was my wife's,' answers the second man, a touch wistfully, 'but I'm afraid she died.' 'Oh, that's terrible. I'm so sorry.' 'Yes, she never missed a m..
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Bill Bryson |
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The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology - and the economists in the penthouse.
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Bill Bryson |
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Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what.
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Bill Bryson |
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significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 million objects. Having such a fund of richness means that it can sometimes be taken for granted to a shocking degree, but
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Bill Bryson |
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He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of The New Yorker, "mildly unbalanced." He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan and Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, R..
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Bill Bryson |
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An upright hominid could see better, but could also be seen better. Even now as a species, we are almost preposterously vulnerable in the wild. Nearly every large animal you can care to name is stronger, faster, and toothier than us. Faced with attack, modern humans have only two advantages. We have a good brain, with which we can devise strategies, and we have hands with with we can fling or brandish hurtful objects. We are the only creatu..
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Bill Bryson |
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Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock.
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Bill Bryson |
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The household was so crowded that the secretary--a man named Pieper--had to share a bed with Marx. (Somehow, even so, Marx managed to put together enough private moments to seduce and impregnate the housekeeper, who bore him a son in the year of the Great Exhibition.)
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Bill Bryson |
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Noise is everywhere in America. Waitresses shout orders to the cook. Bus drivers shout at passengers. Checkin-in clerks bark: "Next in line!" Baristas at Starbucks shout: "Conchita, your order's ready!" (I prefer not to give them my real name.)"
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Bill Bryson |
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Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary. There is something in that. A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity,
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Bill Bryson |
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Karl Schimper, was actually the first to coin the term "ice age"
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Bill Bryson |