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before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere, and that since that time lead levels had climbed steadily and dangerously.
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Bill Bryson |
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Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as 8 degrees Celsius in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions.
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Bill Bryson |
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To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune.
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Bill Bryson |
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To get from "protoplasmal primordial atomic globule" (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while."
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Bill Bryson |
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The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms. Not
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Bill Bryson |
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To me that was just a miracle. That has been my position with science ever since. Excited,
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Bill Bryson |
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it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.
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Bill Bryson |
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three minutes, 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe.
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Bill Bryson |
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All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0.
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Bill Bryson |
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that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
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Bill Bryson |
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coloured temperature image of the first photons ever created, representing the most ancient light in the universe, which are detectable on Earth as a faint, steady background noise or--more familiarly to most of us--as part of the static on TV pictures.
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Bill Bryson |
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Seven skulls vividly convey the long road of human evolution. From left they are: Adapis (50 million years ago), Proconsul (23-15 million years), Australopithecus africanus (3 million years), Homo habilis (2 million years), Homo erectus (1 million years), early Homo sapiens (92,000 years) and Cro-Magnon (20,000 years ago).
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Bill Bryson |
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It is the patchiness of the record that makes each new find look so sudden and distinct from all the others.
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Bill Bryson |
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Finally, but perhaps above all, human nature is a factor in all this. Scientists have a natural tendency to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature.
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Bill Bryson |
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As John Reader understatedly observes in the book Missing Links, "It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer." All"
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Bill Bryson |
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Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will ever visit the edge of our own solar system--ever.
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Bill Bryson |
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we can't see even into the Oort cloud, so we don't actually know that it is there. Its existence is probable but entirely hypothetical.1 About
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Bill Bryson |
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Pluto is about 40 AUs from us, the heart of the Oort cloud about fifty thousand. In a word, it is remote. But
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Bill Bryson |
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Just reaching the centre of our own galaxy would take far longer than we have existed as beings.
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Bill Bryson |
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published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn't believe in plate tectonics. Today
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Bill Bryson |
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space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound.
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Bill Bryson |
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There is actually a certain value in not finding anything," he said. "It helps cosmologists to work out the rate at which galaxies are evolving."
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Bill Bryson |
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The current best estimate for the Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes,
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Bill Bryson |
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like physics before it," Woese wrote, "has moved to a level where the objects of interest and their interactions often cannot be perceived through direct observation." In"
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Bill Bryson |
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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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what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time." Of"
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Bill Bryson |
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Vesto Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, was the first person to notice that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us--evidence that the universe was not, as everyone had long assumed, static.
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Bill Bryson |
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Astronomers today believe there are perhaps 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe.
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Bill Bryson |
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isotopes and a type of phosphate called apatite, which together provide strong evidence that the rock once contained colonies of living things.
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Bill Bryson |
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The red shift gives the speed at which galaxies are retiring, but doesn't tell us how far away they are to begin with.
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Bill Bryson |
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Annie Jump Cannon (left) and Henrietta Leavitt, whose unsung labours and incisive deductions made Hubble's breakthroughs possible.
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Bill Bryson |
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an atmosphere ultraviolet rays from the sun, even from a weak sun, would have tended to break apart any incipient bonds made by molecules. And yet right there"--she tapped the stromatolites--"you have organisms almost at the surface. It's a puzzle."
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Bill Bryson |
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3.5 billion years ago, when the Moon was much closer, volcanic eruptions commonplace (because of the thinness of the crust), meteor impacts routine and the air thick with acidic vapours. Remarkably, it was in such an unpromising environment that life first got going.
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Bill Bryson |
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two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life. They lived, they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn't show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging level of existence.
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Bill Bryson |
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Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one-tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. But
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Bill Bryson |
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Balchen happened to be at the wheel." This was breathtakingly disingenuous. In fact, Balchen had been flying for hours and very probably saved all their lives with his skillful landing. The"
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Bill Bryson |
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New Zealand, meanwhile, is part of the immense Indian Ocean plate even though it is nowhere near the Indian Ocean.
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Bill Bryson |
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Kazakhstan, it turns out, was once attached to Norway and New England.
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Bill Bryson |
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It would be hard to believe that the continuous movement of tectonic plates has no effect on the development of life on earth.
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Bill Bryson |
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All science is either physics or stamp collecting,
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Bill Bryson |
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even a modest dilution of the ocean's salt content--from increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet, for instance--could disrupt the cycle disastrously. The
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Bill Bryson |
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There is a critical threshold where the natural biosphere stops buffering us from the effects of our emissions and actually starts to amplify them.
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Bill Bryson |
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at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, designed and built the world's first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it.
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Bill Bryson |
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When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy. The
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Bill Bryson |