A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson, 2004)I like knowing things, but I can’t focus on a subject for too long, because it starts to bore me. I want to know many things, not necessarily anything in full details. And Bill Bryson writes for people like me. Easy to read, fun, and makes you feel smarter!
Instead of writing about the book, I’ll just paste the parts I enjoyed, I usually make notes if something interests me in a book, and these are my notes,
Astronomy:“The distance from the surface of Earth to the center is 3,959 miles, which isn’t so very far. It has been calculated that if you sunk a well to the center and dropped a brick into it, it would take only forty-five minutes for it to hit the bottom (though at that point it would be weightless since all the Earth’s gravity would be above and around it rather than beneath it). Our own attempts to penetrate toward the middle have been modest indeed. One or two South African gold mines reach to a depth of two miles, but most mines on Earth go no more than about a quarter of a mile beneath the surface. If the planet were an apple, we wouldn’t yet have broken through the skin. Indeed, we haven’t even come close.”
“The eventual result was the inflation theory, which holds that a fraction of a moment after the dawn of creation, the universe underwent a sudden dramatic expansion. It inflated—in effect ran away with itself, doubling in size every 10-34seconds. The whole episode may have lasted no more than 10-30seconds—that’s one million million million million millionths of a second—but it changed the universe from something you could hold in your hand to something at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger. Inflation theory explains the ripples and eddies that make our universe possible.”
“The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds.”
“Astronomers today believe there are perhaps 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe. That’s a huge number, much bigger than merely saying it would lead you to suppose. If galaxies were frozen peas, it would be enough to fill a large auditorium—the old Boston Garden, say, or the Royal Albert Hall.”
“Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feet away.”
“Where would your head be if it were no longer in the universe? What would you find beyond? The answer, disappointingly, is that you can never get to the edge of the universe. That’s not because it would take too long to get there—though of course it would—but because even if you traveled outward and outward in a straight line, indefinitely and pugnaciously, you would never arrive at an outer boundary. Instead, you would come back to where you began (at which point, presumably, you would rather lose heart in the exercise and give up).”
Geology: “Four years later, Soviet scientists decided to try their luck on dry land. They chose a spot on Russia’s Kola Peninsula, near the Finnish border, and set to work with the hope of drilling to a depth of fifteen kilometers. The work proved harder than expected, but the Soviets were commendably persistent. When at last they gave up, nineteen years later, they had drilled to a depth of 12,262 meters, or about 7.6 miles. Bearing in mind that the crust of the Earth represents only about 0.3 percent of the planet’s volume and that the Kola hole had not cut even one-third of the way through the crust, we can hardly claim to have conquered the interior.”
Biology:“You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 x 1018joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. Everything has this kind of energy trapped within it. We’re just not very good at getting it out. Even a uranium bomb—the most energetic thing we have produced yet—releases less than 1 percent of the energy it could release if only we were more cunning.”
“…if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be only about the size of a fly—but a fly many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral.”
“If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains—about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils and fortifying minerals that seep out from every pore and fissure.”
“IT STARTS WITH a single cell. The first cell splits to become two and the two become four and so on. After just forty-seven doublings, you have ten thousand trillion (10,000,000,000,000,000) cells in your body and are ready to spring forth as a human being.”
“Every cell in nature is a thing of wonder. Even the simplest are far beyond the limits of human ingenuity. To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce.
But yeast cells are as nothing compared with human cells, which are not just more varied and complicated, but vastly more fascinating because of their complex interactions.”
“The good news is that the individual components of your brain cells are constantly renewed so that, as with the liver cells, no part of them is actually likely to be more than about a month old. Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn’t a single bit of any of us—not so much as a stray molecule—that was part of us nine years ago.”
“DNA exists for just one reason—to create more DNA—and you have a lot of it inside you: about six feet of it squeezed into almost every cell. Each length of DNA comprises some 3.2 billion letters of coding, enough to provide 103,480,000,000possible combinations, “guaranteed to be unique against all conceivable odds,” in the words of Christian de Duve. That’s a lot of possibility—a one followed by more than three billion zeroes. “It would take more than five thousand average-size books just to print that figure,” notes de Duve. Look at yourself in the mirror and reflect upon the fact that you are beholding ten thousand trillion cells, and that almost every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, and you begin to appreciate just how much of this stuff you carry around with you. If all your DNA were woven into a single fine strand, there would be enough of it to stretch from the Earth to the Moon and back not once or twice but again and again. Altogether, according to one calculation, you may have as much as twenty million kilometers of DNA bundled up inside you.”
Physics:“Rather,” as Timothy Ferris explains, “the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other . . . were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.” 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.
Animal Science:“According to one estimate, there could be as many as thirty million species of animals living in the sea”
Scientists:Isaac Newton "... built his own laboratory, the first at Cambridge, but then engaged in the most bizarre experiments. Once he inserted a bodkin—a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather—into his eye socket and rubbed it around “betwixt my eye and the bone as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could” just to see what would happen."
"Henry Edward Crampton spent fifty years, from 1906 to his death in 1956, quietly studying a genus of land snails in Polynesia called Partula. Over and over, year after year, Crampton measured to the tiniest degree—to eight decimal places—the whorls and arcs and gentle curves of numberless Partula, compiling the results into fastidiously detailed tables. A single line of text in a Crampton table could represent weeks of measurement and calculation."
"Born in 1821, Croll grew up poor, and his formal education lasted only to the age of thirteen. He worked at a variety of jobs—as a carpenter, insurance salesman, keeper of a temperance hotel—before taking a position as a janitor at Anderson’s (now the University of Strathclyde) in Glasgow. By somehow inducing his brother to do much of his work, he was able to pass many quiet evenings in the university library teaching himself physics, mechanics, astronomy, hydrostatics, and the other fashionable sciences of the day, and gradually began to produce a string of papers, with a particular emphasis on the motions of Earth and their effect on climate.
Happily this was precisely the sort of repetitive toil that suited Milankovitch’s temperament. For the next twenty years, even while on vacation, he worked ceaselessly with pencil and slide rule computing the tables of his cycles—work that now could be completed in a day or two with a computer."
4/5
