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A Short History of Nearly Everything QUOTES

A Short History of Nearly Everything QUOTES

141 " It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no “around” around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there—whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist. There is no past for it to emerge from. And "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

142 " Holmes laid out a continental drift theory that was in its fundamentals the theory that prevails today. It was still a radical proposition for the time and widely criticized, particularly in the United States, where resistance to drift lasted longer than elsewhere. One reviewer there fretted, without any evident sense of irony, that Holmes presented his arguments so clearly and compellingly that students might actually come to believe them. Elsewhere, "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

143 " What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones? "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

144 " The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms. "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

145 " The universe was vaster—vastly vaster—than anyone had ever supposed. "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

146 " It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is. "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

147 " The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand. And "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

148 " Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics. "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

149 " The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds. "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

150 " The distance from the surface of Earth to the middle is 6,370 kilometres, which isn’t so very far. It has been calculated that if you sunk a well to the centre and dropped a brick down it, it would take only forty-five minutes for it to hit the bottom "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

151 " For scientific convenience, the atmosphere is divided into four unequal layers: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and ionosphere (now often called the thermosphere). "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

152 " The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand. "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

153 " Water is strange stuff. It is formless and transparent, and yet we long to be beside it. It has no taste and yet we love the taste of it. We will travel great distances and pay small fortunes to see it in sunshine. And even though we know it is dangerous and drowns tens of thousands of people every year, we can’t wait to frolic in it. "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

154 " It turned out that under the western United States there was a huge cauldron of magma, a colossal volcanic hot spot, which erupted cataclysmically every 600,000 years or so. The last such eruption was just over 600,000 years ago. The hot spot is still there. These days we call it Yellowstone National Park. We "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

155 " The disputes are entertainingly surveyed in Charles Elliott’s The Potting-Shed Papers. "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

156 " Then much later—about four or five years ago—I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when 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. I had no idea, for example, why the oceans were salty but the Great Lakes weren’t. Didn’t have the faintest idea. I didn’t know if the oceans were growing more salty with time or less, and whether ocean salinity levels was something I should be concerned about or not. "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

157 " the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

158 " transits of Venus, as they are known, are an irregular occurrence. They come in pairs eight years apart, but then are absent for a century or more, "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

159 " Mrs. Mendeleyev hitchhiked with young Dmitri four thousand miles to St. Petersburg—that’s equivalent to travelling from London to Equatorial Guinea—and deposited him at the Institute of Pedagogy. "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything

160 " Mendeleyev was said to have modelled the table on the card game solitaire. "

― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything