A Short History of Nearly Everything
Page 52
"Hooke, who was well known . . ." Gjertsen, The Classics of Science , p. 219.
"betwixt my eye and the bone . . ." Quoted by Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way , p. 106.
"told no one about it for twenty-seven years." Durant and Durant, The Age of Louis XIV , p. 538.
"Even the great German mathematician Gottfried von Leibniz . . ." Durant and Durant, p. 546.
"one of the most inaccessible books ever written . . ." Cropper, The Great Physicists , p. 31.
"proportional to the mass of each . . ." Feynman, p. 69.
"Newton, as was his custom, contributed nothing." Calder, The Comet Is Coming! p. 39.
"He was to be paid instead . . ." Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits , p. 36.
"within a scantling." Wilford, The Mapmakers , p. 98.
"The Earth was forty-three kilometers stouter . . ." Asimov, Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos , p. 86.
"Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil . . ." Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way , p. 134.
"Mason and Dixon sent a note . . ." Jardine, p. 141.
"born in a coal mine . . ." Dictionary of National Biography , vol. 7, p. 1302.
"For convenience, Hutton had assumed . . ." Jungnickel and McCormmach, Cavendish , p. 449.
"it was Michell to whom he turned . . ." Calder, The Comet Is Coming! p. 71.
"to a 'degree bordering on disease.' " Jungnickel and McCormmach, p. 306.
"talk as it were into vacancy." Jungnickel and McCormmach, p. 305.
"foreshadowed 'the work of Kelvin and G. H. Darwin . . . ' " Crowther, Scientists of the Industrial Revolution , pp. 214-15.
"two 350-pound lead balls . . ." Dictionary of National Biography , vol. 3, p. 1261.
"six billion trillion metric tons . . ." Economist , "G Whiz," May 6, 2000, p. 82.
CHAPTER 5 THE STONE-BREAKERS
"Hutton was by all accounts . . ." Dictionary of National Biography , vol. 10, pp. 354-56.
"almost entirely innocent of rhetorical accomplishments . . ." Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology , p. 18.
"He became a leading member . . ." McPhee, Basin and Range , p. 99.
"quotations from French sources . . ." Gould, Time's Arrow , p. 66.
"A third volume was so unenticing . . ." Oldroyd, Thinking About the Earth , pp. 96-97.
"Even Charles Lyell . . ." Schneer (ed.), Toward a History of Geology , p. 128.
"In the winter of 1807 . . ." Geological Society papers: A Brief History of the Geological Society of London .
"The members met twice a month . . ." Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy , p. 25.
"(As even a Murchison supporter conceded . . . )" Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals , p. 28.
"In 1794, he was implicated . . ." Cadbury, Terrible Lizard , p. 39.
"known ever since as Parkinson's disease." Dictionary of National Biography , vol. 15, pp. 314-15.
"convinced that Scots were feckless drunks." Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 26.
"Once Mrs. Buckland found herself being shaken awake . . ." Annan, The Dons , p. 27.
"His other slight peculiarity . . ." Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 30.
"Often when lost in thought . . ." Desmond and Moore, Darwin , p. 202.
"but it was Lyell most people read . . ." Schneer, p. 139.
"and called for a new pack . . ." Clark, The Huxleys , p. 48.
"Never was there a dogma . . ." Quoted in Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack , p. 167.
"He failed to explain . . ." Hallam, Great Geological Controversies , p. 135.
"the refrigeration of the globe . . ." Gould, Ever Since Darwin , p. 151.
"He rejected the notion . . ." Stanley, Extinction , p. 5.
"one yet saw it partially through his eyes . . ." quoted in Schneer, p. 288.
"De la Beche is a dirty dog . . ." Quoted in Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy , p. 194.
"the perky name of J. J. d'Omalius d'Halloy." McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 190.
"to employ '-synchronous' for his endings . . ." Gjertsen, p. 305.
"in the 'tens of dozens.' " McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 50.
"Rocks are divided into quite separate units . . ." Powell, p. 200.
"I have seen grown men glow incandescent . . ." Fortey, Trilobite! p. 238.
"When Buckland speculated . . ." Cadbury, p. 149.
"The most well known early attempt . . ." Gould, Eight Little Piggies , p. 185.
"most thinking people accepted the idea . . ." Gould, Time's Arrow , p. 114.
"No geologist of any nationality . . ." Rudwick, p. 42.
"Even the Reverend Buckland . . ." Cadbury, p. 192.
"between 75,000 and 168,000 years old." Hallam, p. 105; and Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way , pp. 246-47.
"the geological processes that created the Weald . . ." Gjertsen, p. 335.
"The German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz . . ." Cropper, p. 78.
"and written (in French and English) a dozen papers . . ." Cropper, p. 79.
"At the age of twenty-two he returned to Glasgow . . ." Dictionary of National Biography , supplement 1901-1911, p. 508.
CHAPTER 6 SCIENCE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW
"who described it at a meeting . . ." Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and Their Discoveries, p. 4.
"the great French naturalist the Comte de Buffon . . ." Kastner, A Species of Eternity, p. 123.
"A Dutchman named Corneille de Pauw . . ." Kastner, p. 124.
". . . in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper . . ." Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 15.
"Jefferson for one couldn't abide the thought . . ." Simpson, Fossils and the History of Life , p. 7.
"On the evening of January 5, 1796 . . ." Harrington, Dance of the Continents , p. 175.
"The whys and wherefores . . ." Lewis, The Dating Game , pp. 17-18.
"Cuvier resolved the matter to his own satisfaction . . ." Barber, The Heyday of Natural History , p. 217.
"In 1806 the Lewis and Clark expedition . . ." Colbert, p. 5.
"the source for the famous tongue twister . . ." Cadbury, p. 3.
"The plesiosaur alone took her ten years . . ." Barber, p. 127.
"Mantell could see at once it was a fossilized tooth . . ." New Zealand Geographic , "Holy incisors! What a treasure!" April-June 2000, p. 17.
"the name was actually suggested to Buckland . . ." Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur , p. 31.
"Eventually he was forced to sell . . ." Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur , p. 34.
"the world's first theme park." Fortey, Life , p. 214.
"he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs . . ." Cadbury, p. 133.
"a freshly deceased rhinoceros filling the front hallway . . ." Cadbury, p. 200.
"some were no bigger than rabbits . . ." Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur , p. 5.
"the one thing they most emphatically were not . . ." Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies , p. 22.
"dinosaurs constitute not one but two orders . . ." Colbert, p. 33.
"He was the only person . . ." Nature , "Owen's Parthian Shot," July 12, 2001, p. 123.
"his father's 'lamentable coldness of heart.' " Cadbury, p. 321.
"Huxley was leafing through a new edition . . ." Clark, The Huxleys , p. 45.
"His deformed spine was removed . . ." Cadbury, p. 291.
"not quite as original as it appeared." Cadbury, pp. 261-62.
"he became the driving force . . ." Colbert, p. 30.
"Before Owen, museums were designed . . ." Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum , p. 24.
"to put informative labels on each display . . ." Thackray and Press, p. 98.
"lying everywhere like logs . . ." Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p. 97.
"repeatedly taking out and replacing his false teeth." Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur , pp. 99-100.
"it was an affront that he would never forget." Colbert, p. 73.
"increased the number of known dinosaur species .
. ." Colbert, p. 93.
"Nearly every dinosaur that the average person can name . . ." Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur , p. 90.
"Between them they managed to 'discover' . . ." Psihoyos and Knoebber, Hunting Dinosaurs , p. 16.
"obliterated by a German bomb in the Blitz . . ." Cadbury, p. 325.
"much of it was taken to New Zealand . . ." Newsletter of the Geological Society of New Zealand , "Gideon Mantell--the New Zealand connection," April 1992, and New Zealand Geographic , "Holy incisors! What a treasure!" April-June 2000, p. 17.
"hence the name." Colbert, p. 151.
"the Earth was 89 million years old . . ." Lewis, The Dating Game , p. 37.
"Such was the confusion . . ." Hallam, p. 173.
CHAPTER 7 ELEMENTAL MATTERS
"could make himself invisible." Ball, p. 125.
"An ounce of phosphorus retailed for six guineas" Durant and Durant, p. 516.
"and got credit for none of them." Strathern, p. 193.
"which is why we ended up with two branches of chemistry . . ." Davies, p. 14.
"perhaps $20 million in today's money." White, Rivals , p. 63.
"the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of his bosses." Brock, p. 92.
" jour de bonheur ... " Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus , p. 366.
"Lavoisier made some dismissive remarks . . ." Brock, pp. 95-96.
"failed to uncover a single one." Strathern, p. 239.
"taken away and melted down for scrap." Brock, p. 124.
"a highly pleasurable thrilling . . ." Cropper, p. 139.
"Theaters put on 'laughing gas evenings' . . ." Hamblyn, p. 76.
"(What Brown noticed . . . )" Silver, p. 201.
"for lukewarmness in the cause of liberty . . ." Dictionary of National Biography , vol. 19, p. 686.
"a diameter of 0.00000008 centimeters . . ." Asimov, The History of Physics , p. 501.
"Even water was variously rendered . . ." Boorse et al., p. 75.
"Later, for no special reason . . ." Ball, p. 139.
"Luck was not always with the Mendeleyevs." Brock, p. 312.
"a competent but not terribly outstanding chemist . . ." Brock, p. 111.
"this was an idea whose time had not quite yet come . . ." Carey, p. 155.
"chemistry really is just a matter of counting." Ball, p. 139.
"the most elegant organizational chart ever devised . . ." Krebs, p. 23.
"120 or so . . ." From a review in Nature , "Mind over Matter?" by Gautum R. Desiraju, September 26, 2002.
"purely speculative . . ." Heiserman, p. 33.
"Marie Curie dubbed the effect 'radioactivity.' " Bodanis, E = mc 2 , p. 75.
"He never accepted the revised figures . . ." Lewis, The Dating Game , p. 55.
"it is an unstable element." Strathern, p. 294.
"featured with pride the therapeutic effects . . ." Advertisement in Time magazine, January 3, 1927, p. 24.
"Radioactivity wasn't banned in consumer products until 1938." Biddle, p. 133.
"Her lab books are kept in lead-lined boxes . . ." Science , "We Are Made of Starstuff," May 4, 2001, p. 863.
CHAPTER 8 EINSTEIN'S UNIVERSE
"an average of slightly over one student a semester . . ." Cropper, p. 106.
"the thermodynamic principles of, well, nearly everything . . ." Cropper, p. 109.
"thermodynamics didn't apply simply to heat and energy . . ." Snow, The Physicists , p. 7.
"the Principia of thermodynamics . . ." Kevles, The Physicists , p. 33.
"he came to the United States with his family . . ." Kevles, pp. 27-28.
"The speed of light turned out to be the same . . ." Thorne, p. 65.
"probably the most famous negative result in the history of physics." Cropper, p. 208.
"the work of science was nearly at an end . . ." Nature , "Physics from the Inside," July 12, 2001, p. 121.
"were among the greatest in the history of physics . . ." Snow, The Physicists , p. 101.
"His very first paper . . ." Bodanis, E = mc 2 , p. 6.
"J. Willard Gibbs in Connecticut had done that work as well . . ." Boorse et al., The Atomic Scientists , p. 142.
"one of the most extraordinary scientific papers ever published . . ." Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way , p. 193.
"had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided . . ." Snow, The Physicists , p. 101.
"no less than 7 x 10 18 joules of potential energy ..." Thorne, p. 172.
"Even a uranium bomb . . ." Bodanis, E = mc 2 , p. 77.
"Oh, that's not necessary . . ." Nature , "In the Eye of the Beholder," March 21, 2002, p. 264.
"the highest intellectual achievement of humanity . . ." Boorse et al., p. 53.
"he was simply sitting in a chair . . ." Bodanis, E = mc 2 , p. 204.
"'Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity.' " Guth, p. 36.
"'Without it,' wrote Snow in 1979 . . ." Snow, The Physicists , p. 21.
"Crouch was hopelessly out of his depth . . ." Bodanis, E = mc 2 , p. 215.
"I am trying to think who the third person is." Quoted in Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 91; and Aczel, God's Equation , p. 146.
"the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become." Guth, p. 37.
"a baseball thrown at a hundred miles an hour . . ." Brockman and Matson, How Things Are , p. 263.
"we all commonly encounter other kinds of relativity . . ." Bodanis, E = mc 2 , p. 83.
"the ultimate sagging mattress . . ." Overbye, p. 55.
"In some sense, gravity does not exist . . ." Kaku, "The Theory of the Universe?" in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe , p. 161.
"Edwin enjoyed a wealth of physical endowments, too." Cropper, p. 423.
"At a single high school track meet . . ." Christianson, Edwin Hubble , p. 33.
"One Harvard computer, Annie Jump Cannon . . ." Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way , p. 258.
"elderly stars that have moved past their 'main sequence phase' . . ." Ferguson, Measuring the Universe , pp. 166-67.
"They could be used as 'standard candles' . . ." Ferguson, p. 166.
"was developing his seminal theory . . ." Moore, Fireside Astronomy , p. 63.
"In 1923 he showed that a puff of distant gossamer . . ." Overbye, p. 45; and Natural History , "Delusions of Centrality," December 2002-January 2003, pp. 28-32.
"no one had hit on the idea of the expanding universe before." Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell , pp. 71-72.
"In 1936 Hubble produced a popular book . . ." Overbye, p. 14.
"the whereabouts of the century's greatest astronomer . . ." Overbye, p. 28.
CHAPTER 9 THE MIGHTY ATOM
"All things are made of atoms." Feynman, p. 4.
"forty-five billion billion molecules." Gribbin, Almost Everyone's Guide to Science , p. 250.
"up to a billion for each of us" Davies, p. 127.
"Atoms, however, go on practically forever." Rees, p. 96.
"a paramecium swimming in a drop of water . . ." Feynman, pp. 4-5.
"We might as well attempt to introduce . . ." Boorstin, The Discoverers , p. 679.
"In 1826, the French chemist P. J. Pelletier . . ." Gjertsen, p. 260.
"a confused Pelletier, upon beholding the great man . . ." Holmyard, Makers of Chemistry , p. 222.
"forty thousand people viewed the coffin . . ." Dictionary of National Biography , vol. 5, p. 433.
"For a century after Dalton made his proposal . . ." Von Baeyer, Taming the Atom , p. 17.
"it was said to have played a part in the suicide . . ." Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles , p. 3.
"to raise a little flax and a lot of children . . ." Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles , p. 104.
"Had she taken a bullfighter . . ." Quoted in Cropper, p. 259.
"It was a feeling Rutherford would have understood." Cropper, p. 317.
"tell the students to work it out for
themselves." Wilson, Rutherford , p. 174.
"as far as he could see . . ." Wilson, Rutherford , p. 208.
"He was one of the first to see . . ." Wilson, Rutherford , p. 208.
"Why use radio?" Quoted in Cropper, p. 328.
"Every day I grow in girth." Snow, Variety of Men , p. 47.
"persuaded by a senior colleague that radio had little future." Cropper, p. 94.
"Some physicists thought that atoms might be cube shaped . . ." Asimov, The History of Physics , p. 551.
"The number of protons . . ." Guth, p. 90.
"Add a neutron or two and you get an isotope." Atkins, The Periodic Kingdom , p. 106.
"only one millionth of a billionth of the full volume . . ." Gribbin, Almost Everyone's Guide to Science , p. 35.
"a fly many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral." Cropper, p. 245.
"they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed" Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way , p. 288.
"Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience . . ." Feynman, p. 117.
"the delay in discovery was probably a very good thing . . ." Boorse et al., p. 338.
"(I do not even know what a matrix is . . . )" Cropper, p. 269.
"a matter of simply needing more precise instruments . . ." Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way , p. 288.
"at once everywhere and nowhere" David H. Freedman, from "Quantum Liaisons," Mysteries of Life and the Universe , p. 137.
"a person who wasn't outraged . . ." Overbye, p. 109.
"Don't try." Von Baeyer, p. 43.
"The cloud itself is essentially just a zone . . ." Ebbing, General Chemistry , p. 295.
"an area of the universe . . ." Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either , p. 62.
"things on a small scale . . ." Feynman, p. 33.
"matter could pop into existence . . ." Alan Lightman, "First Birth" in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe , p. 13.
"two identical pool balls . . ." Lawrence Joseph, "Is Science Common Sense?" in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe , pp. 42-43.
"Remarkably, the phenomenon was proved in 1997 . . ." Christian Science Monitor , "Spooky Action at a Distance," October 4, 2001.
"one cannot 'predict future events exactly . . .' " Hawking, A Brief History of Time , p. 61.
"Scientists have dealt with this problem . . ." David H. Freedman, from "Quantum Liaisons," in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe , p. 141.