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In 1684 Dr Halley came to visit at Cambridge [and] after they had some time together the Dr asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the Planets supposing the force of attraction towards the Sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it. This was a reference to a piece of mathematics known as the inverse square law, which Halley was convinced lay at the heart of the explanation, though he wasn't..
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Bill Bryson |
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We have been spoiled by artists' renderings into imagining a clarity of resolution that doesn't exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in Christy's photograph is faint and fuzzy--a piece of cosmic lint--and its moon is not the romantically backlit, crisply delineated companion orb you would get in a National Geographic painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness. Such was the fuzziness, in fact, that it ..
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Bill Bryson |
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Finally, in 1926, Heisenberg came up with a celebrated compromise, producing a new discipline that came to be known as quantum mechanics. At the heart of it was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves. The uncertainty around which the theory is built is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where i..
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Bill Bryson |
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Good lord, look at you!" he cried, delighted at my grubbiness. "What have you been doing? You're filthy!" He looked me up and down admiringly, then said in a more solemn tone: "You haven't been screwing hogs again, have you, Bryson?" "Ha ha ha." "They're not clean animals, you know, no matter how attractive they may look after a month on the trail. And don't forget we're not in Tennessee anymore. It's probably not even legal here - at least..
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Bill Bryson |
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Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery7: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.
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Bill Bryson |
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Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called "strange quarks," which could, theoretically, interact with other subatomic particles and propagate uncontrollably. If you are reading this, that hasn't happened. Finding"
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Bill Bryson |
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Sometimes the world just isn't ready for a good idea.
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Bill Bryson |
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A supernova occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time more brightly than all the stars in its galaxy. "It's like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once, supernovae are extremely rare. A star can burn for billions of years, but it dies just once and quickly, and only a few dying stars explode. Mo..
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Bill Bryson |
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That is the problem with Scotland, I find. You never know whether the next person you meet is going to offer you his bone marrow or nut you with his forehead. Afterward
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Bill Bryson |
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The story of Kelly is easily told. He was a murderous thug who deserved to be hanged and was. He came from a family of rough Irish settlers, who made their living by stealing livestock and waylaying innocent passers-by. Like most bushrangers he was at pains to present himself as a champion of the oppressed, though in fact there wasn't a shred of nobility in his character or his deeds. He killed several people, often in cold blood, sometimes..
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Bill Bryson |
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In breve, e come sempre, in Shakespeare un lettore attento puo trovare sostegno per quasi qualsiasi posizione voglia prendere. (O come lo stesso Shakespeare ha scritto in una battuta citata spesso a sproposito: <>.)
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Bill Bryson |
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Intrebarea care se naste in mod firesc este urmatoarea: ce s-ar intampla daca ar exploda o stea prin apropiere? Cel mai apropiat vecin stelar al nostru, dupa cum am vazut, este Alpha Centauri, la 4,3 ani-lumina departare. Imi imaginasem ca, daca s-ar produce o explozie acolo, atunci am avea 4,3 ani in care sa privim lumina acestui eveniment magnific traversand cerul, ca si cum ar curge dintr-o uriasa cutie rasturnata. Cum ar fi daca am avea..
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science
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Bill Bryson |
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Percy Bysshe (the only poet named for the sound of a match hitting water),
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Bill Bryson |
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For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.
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humor
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Bill Bryson |
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Life, in short, just wants to be.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
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Bill Bryson |
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As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
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Bill Bryson |
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Stephen Hawking has observed with a touch of understandable excitement, that one cannot "predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!"
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Bill Bryson |
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Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.
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Bill Bryson |
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Space, let me repeat, is enormous. The average distance between stars out there is 20 million million miles. Even at speeds approaching those of light, these are fantastically challenging distances for any traveling individual. Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in A..
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Bill Bryson |
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An is indisputably correct before just four words beginning with 'h': hour, honest, honour and heir.
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Bill Bryson |
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Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit--just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship. Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await th..
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Bill Bryson |
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amoral, immoral. Amoral describes matters in which questions of morality do not arise or are disregarded; immoral applies to things that are evil.
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Bill Bryson |
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The parking lot was almost empty, except for an old bus from which a load of senior citizens were disembarking. The bus was from the Calvary Baptist Church in someplace like Firecracker, Georgia, or Bareassed, Alabama. The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn't hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. Why is it, I wondered, ..
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Bill Bryson |
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Speakers from the Mediterranean region, for instance, like to put their faces very close, relatively speaking, to those they are addressing. A common scene when people from southern Europe and northern Europe are conversing, as at a cocktail party, is for the latter to spend the entire conversation stealthily retreating, to try to gain some space, and for the former to keep advancing to close the gap. Neither speaker may even be aware of it..
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Bill Bryson |
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The transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A
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Bill Bryson |
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Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife edge. In
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Bill Bryson |
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Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.
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walking
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Bill Bryson |
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Every second a hundred bolts of lightning streak to Earth across the globe as the electric charges that build up within storm clouds are attracted by the positively charged ground. Earth experiences about 40,000 thunderstorms a day.
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Bill Bryson |
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The names of Britain's 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the improbable, from the deft to the daft. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners--this is a basic requirement of most British institutions--and ideally ..
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Bill Bryson |
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So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.
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Bill Bryson |
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Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious elan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life. No-one knew where this ethereal essence lay, but two things seemed probable: that you could enliven it with a jolt of electricity (a notion Mary Shelley exploited to full effect in her novel Frankenstein); and that it existed in some substances but not others, which is why we ended up with two branches of chem..
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Bill Bryson |
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To say that Windermere is popular with boaters is to flirt recklessly with understatement.
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Bill Bryson |
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disturb, perturb. They can often be used interchangeably, but generally the first is better applied to physical agitation, the second to mental agitation.
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Bill Bryson |
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avenge, revenge. Generally, avenge indicates the settling of a score or the redressing of an injustice. It is more dispassionate than revenge, which indicates retaliation taken largely for the sake of personal satisfaction.
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Bill Bryson |
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Travelling faster than a bullet, an incoming meteor would be moving much too swiftly to be seen, much less to provoke alarm. (Credit
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Bill Bryson |
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Moreover, wool wasn't sheared in the early days, but painfully plucked. It is little wonder that sheep are such skittish animals when humans are around.
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Bill Bryson |
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Goldilocks effect"--that everything is just right. (For the record, these three possible universes are known respectively as closed, open and flat.) Now,"
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Bill Bryson |
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It's a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their s..
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Bill Bryson |
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Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American. We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet's other citizens. Once day - and don't expect it to be a distant day - many of those six billion or so le..
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Bill Bryson |
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further research has shown that there is or may well be a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders46 - heart disease, asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, several types of mental disorders, many cancers, even, it has been suggested (in Science no less), obesity.
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Bill Bryson |
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If we were randomly inserted into the universe," Sagan wrote, "the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion."
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Bill Bryson |
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Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it--not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them.
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Bill Bryson |
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growth. Often used contrarily by economists and those who write about them: 'It now looks as if growth will remain stagnant until spring' (Observer); '... with the economy moving into a negative growth phase' (The Times). Growth obviously indicates expansion. If a thing is shrinking or standing still, growth simply isn't the word for it.
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Bill Bryson |