A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

  "The weak nuclear force . . ." Ferris, The Whole Shebang , p. 297.

  "The grip of the strong force reaches out . . ." Asimov, Atom , p. 258.

  "he wasted the second half of his life." Snow, The Physicists , p. 89.

  CHAPTER 10 GETTING THE LEAD OUT

  "Among the many symptoms associated with overexposure . . ." McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab , p. 88.

  "These men probably went insane . . ." McGrayne, p. 92.

  "In fact, Midgley knew only too well . . ." McGrayne, p. 92.

  "One leak from a refrigerator at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio . . ." McGrayne, p. 97.

  "One pound of CFCs can capture . . ." Biddle, p. 62.

  "A single CFC molecule . . ." Science , "The Ascent of Atmospheric Sciences," October 13, 2000, p. 299.

  "His death was itself memorably unusual." Nature , September 27, 2001, p. 364.

  "Up to this time, the oldest reliable dates . . ." Libby, "Radiocarbon Dating," from Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1960.

  "After eight half-lives . . ." Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age, p. 58.

  "every raw radiocarbon date you read today . . ." Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 174.

  "it is like miscounting by a dollar . . ." Flannery, The Future Eaters , p. 151.

  "just around the time that people first came to the Americas . . ." Flannery, The Eternal Frontier , pp. 174-75.

  "whether syphilis originated in the New World . . ." Science , "Can Genes Solve the Syphilis Mystery?" May 11, 2001, p. 109.

  "Unfortunately, he now met yet another formidable impediment . . ." Lewis, The Dating Game , p. 204.

  "led him to create a sterile laboratory . . ." Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma , p. 58.

  "a figure that stands unchanged 50 years later . . ." McGrayne, p. 173.

  "a doctor who had no specialized training . . ." McGrayne, p. 94.

  "about 90 percent of it appeared to come from automobile exhaust pipes . . ." Nation , "The Secret History of Lead," March 20, 2000.

  "The notion became the foundation of ice core studies . . ." Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma , p. 60.

  "Ethyl executives allegedly offered to endow a chair . . ." Nation , "The Secret History of Lead," March 20, 2000.

  "Almost immediately lead levels in the blood of Americans . . ." McGrayne, p. 169.

  "those of us alive today have about 625 times more lead in our blood . . ." Nation , March 20, 2000.

  "The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow . . ." Green, Water, Ice and Stone , p. 258.

  "forty-four years after most of Europe . . ." McGrayne, p. 191.

  "Ethyl continued to contend . . ." McGrayne, p. 191.

  "devouring ozone long after you have shuffled off." Biddle, pp. 110-11.

  "Worse, we are still introducing huge amounts of CFCs . . ." Biddle, p. 63.

  "Two recent popular books . . ." The books are Mysteries of Terra Firma and The Dating Game , both of which make his name "Claire."

  "astounding error of thinking Patterson was a woman . . ." Nature , "The Rocky Road to Dating the Earth," January 4, 2001, p. 20.

  CHAPTER 11 MUSTER MARK'S QUARKS

  "In 1911, a British scientist named C. T. R. Wilson . . ." Cropper, p. 325.

  "if I could remember the names of these particles . . ." Quoted in Cropper, p. 403.

  "can do forty-seven thousand laps around a four-mile tunnel . . ." Discover , "Gluons," July 2000, p. 68.

  "Even the most sluggish . . ." Guth, p. 121.

  "In 1998, Japanese observers reported . . ." Economist , "Heavy Stuff," June 13, 1998, p. 82; and National Geographic , "Unveiling the Universe, October 1999, p. 36.

  "Breaking up atoms . . ." Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either , p. 48.

  "CERN's new Large Hadron Collider . . ." Economist , "Cause for ConCERN," October 28, 2000, p. 75.

  "dotted along the circumference . . ." Letter from Jeff Guinn.

  "A proposed neutrino observatory at the old Homestake Mine . . ." Science , "U.S. Researchers Go for Scientific Gold Mine," June 15, 2001, p. 1979.

  "A particle accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois . . ." Science , February 8, 2002, p. 942.

  "Today the particle count is well over 150 . . ." Guth, p. 120, and Feynman, p. 39.

  "Some people think there are particles called tachyons . . ." Nature , September 27, 2001, p. 354.

  "which are themselves universes at the next level . . ." Sagan, p. 221.

  "The charged pion and antipion decay . . ." Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles , p. 165.

  "to restore some economy to the multitude of hadrons . . ." Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles , p. 167.

  "wanted to call these new basic particles partons . . ." Von Baeyer, p. 17.

  "the Standard Model . . ." Economist , "New Realities?" October 7, 2000, p. 95; and Nature , "The Mass Question," February 28, 2002, pp. 969-70.

  "Bosons . . . are particles that produce and carry forces . . ." Scientific American , "Uncovering Supersymmetry," July 2002, p. 74.

  "It has too many arbitrary parameters . . ." Quoted on the PBS video Creation of the Universe , 1985. Also quoted, with slightly different numbers, in Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way , pp. 298-99.

  "the notional Higgs boson . . ." CERN website document "The Mass Mystery," undated.

  "So we are stuck with a theory . . ." Feynman, p. 39.

  "all those little things like quarks . . ." Science News , September 22, 2001, p. 185.

  "tiny enough to pass for point particles . . ." Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory , p. 214.

  "The heterotic string consists of a closed string . . ." Kaku, Hyperspace , p. 158.

  "String theory has further spawned . . ." Scientific American , "The Universe's Unseen Dimensions," August 2000, pp. 62-69; and Science News , "When Branes Collide," September 22, 2001, pp. 184-85.

  "The ekpyrotic process begins far in the indefinite past . . ." New York Times , "Before the Big Bang, There Was ... What?" May 22, 2001, p. F1.

  "to discriminate between the legitimately weird and the outright crackpot." Nature , September 27, 2001, p. 354.

  "The question came interestingly to a head . . ." New York Times website, "Are They a) Geniuses or b) Jokers?: French Physicists' Cosmic Theory Creates a Big Bang of Its Own," November 9, 2002; and Economist , "Publish and Perish," November 16, 2002, p. 75.

  "Karl Popper . . . once suggested . . ." Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory , p. 230.

  "we do not seem to be coming to the end . . ." Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory , p. 234.

  "Hubble calculated that the universe was about . . ." U.S. News and World Report , "How Old Is the Universe?" August 25, 1997, p. 34.

  "a new age for the universe . . ." Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either , p. 91.

  "there erupted a long-running dispute . . ." Overbye, p. 268.

  "a mountain of theory built on a molehill of evidence." Economist , "Queerer Than We Can Suppose," January 5, 2002, p. 58.

  "may reflect the paucity of the data . . ." National Geographic , "Unveiling the Universe," October 1999, p. 25.

  "what they really mean . . ." Goldsmith, The Astronomers , p. 82.

  "the best bets these days for the age of the universe . . ." U.S. News and World Report , "How Old Is the Universe?" August 25, 1997, p. 34.

  "two-thirds of the universe is still missing . . ." Economist , "Dark for Dark Business," January 5, 2002, p. 51.

  "The theory is that empty space isn't so empty at all . . ." PBS Nova , "Runaway Universe," Transcript from program first broadcast November 21, 2000.

  "Einstein's cosmological constant . . ." Economist , "Dark for Dark Business," January 5, 2002, p. 51.

  CHAPTER 12 THE EARTH MOVES

  "invited the reader to join him in a tolerant chuckle . . ." Hapgood, Earth's Shifting Crust , p. 29.

  "they posited ancient 'land bridges' . . ." Simpson, p. 9
8.

  "Even land bridges couldn't explain some things." Gould, Ever Since Darwin , p. 163.

  "numerous grave theoretical difficulties." Encylopaedia Britannica , 1964, vol. 6, p. 418.

  "students might actually come to believe them." Lewis, The Dating Game , p. 182.

  "about half of those present . . ." Hapgood, p. 31.

  "I feel the hypothesis is a fantastic one." Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma , p. 147.

  "Interestingly, oil company geologists . . ." McPhee, Basin and Range , p. 175.

  "Aboard this vessel was a fancy new depth sounder . . ." McPhee, Basin and Range , p. 187.

  "seamounts that he called guyots . . ." Harrington, p. 208.

  "probably the most significant paper . . ." Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma , pp. 131-32.

  "Well into the 1970s . . ." Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma , p. 141.

  "one American geologist in eight . . ." McPhee, Basin and Range , p. 198.

  "Today we know that Earth's surface . . ." Simpson, p. 113.

  "The connections between modern landmasses . . ." McPhee, Assembling California , pp. 202-8.

  "at about the speed a fingernail grows . . ." Vogel, Naked Earth , p. 19.

  "one-tenth of 1 percent of the Earth's history." Margulis and Sagan, Microscosmos , p. 44.

  "an important part of the planet's organic well-being." Trefil, Meditations at 10,000 Feet , p. 181.

  "the history of rocks and the history of life." Science, "Inconstant Ancient Seas and Life's Path," November 8, 2002, p. 1165.

  "the whole earth suddenly made sense." McPhee, Rising from the Plains , p. 158.

  "a habit of appearing inconveniently . . ." Simpson, p. 115.

  "many surface features that tectonics can't explain." Scientific American , "Sculpting the Earth from Inside Out," March 2001.

  "Wegener never lived to see his ideas vindicated." Kunzig, The Restless Sea , p. 51.

  "a bright young fellow named Walter Alvarez . . ." Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous , p. 7.

  CHAPTER 13 BANG!

  "a lot of strangely deformed rock . . ." Raymond R. Anderson, Geological Society of America: GSA Special Paper 302, "The Manson Impact Structure: A Late Cretaceous Meteor Crater in the Iowa Subsurface," Spring 1996.

  "Virtually the whole town turned out . . ." Des Moines Register , June 30, 1979.

  "Very occasionally we get people coming in and asking . . ." Anna Schlapkohl, interview by author, Manson, Iowa, June 18, 2001.

  "G. K. Gilbert of Columbia University . . ." Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice , p. 38.

  "Gilbert conducted these experiments . . ." Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous , p. 37.

  "only slightly more than a dozen of these things . . ." Transcript from BBC Horizon documentary "New Asteroid Danger," p. 4, first transmitted March 18, 1999.

  "He called them asteroids--Latin for 'starlike . . .' " Science News , "A Rocky Bicentennial," July 28, 2001, pp. 61-63.

  "it was finally tracked down in 2000 . . ." Ferris, Seeing in the Dark , p. 150.

  "twenty-six thousand asteroids had been named and identified . . ." Science News , "A Rocky Bicentennial," July 28, 2001, pp. 61-63.

  "cruising at sixty-six thousand miles an hour . . ." Ferris, Seeing in the Dark , p. 147.

  "all of which are capable of colliding . . ." Transcript from BBC Horizon documentary "New Asteroid Danger," p. 5, first transmitted March 18, 1999.

  "such near misses probably happen . . ." New Yorker , "Is This the End?" January 27, 1997, pp. 44-52.

  "some thirty thousand metric tons of 'cosmic spherules' . . ." Vernon, Beneath Our Feet , p. 191.

  "Well, they were very charming . . ." Frank Asaro, telephone interview by author, March 10, 2002.

  "an article in Popular Astronomy magazine . . ." Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma , p. 184.

  "the dinosaurs may have been dealt a death blow . . ." Peebles, Asteroids: A History , p. 170.

  "an earlier event known as the Frasnian extinction." Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice , p. 107.

  "They're more like stamp collectors . . ." Quoted by Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth , p. 142.

  "even while conceding in a newspaper interview . . ." Boston Globe , "Dinosaur Extinction Theory Backed," December 16, 1985.

  "continued to believe that the extinction of the dinosaurs . . ." Peebles, p. 175.

  "evaluate Manure Management Plans . . ." Iowa Department of Natural Resources Publication, Iowa Geology 1999: Number 24.

  "Suddenly we were at the center of things . . ." Ray Anderson and Brian Witzke, interview by author, Iowa City, June 15, 2001.

  "One of those moments came . . ." Boston Globe , "Dinosaur Extinction Theory Backed," December 16, 1985.

  "The formation had been found by Pemex . . ." Peebles, pp. 177-78; and Washington Post , "Incoming," April 19, 1998.

  "I remember harboring some strong initial doubts . . ." Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack , p. 162.

  "Jupiter will swallow these comets up . . ." Quoted by Peebles, p. 196.

  "One fragment, known as Nucleus G . . ." Peebles, p. 202.

  "Shoemaker was killed instantly . . ." Peebles, p. 204.

  "nearly every standing thing would be flattened . . ." Anderson, Iowa Department of Natural Resources: Iowa Geology 1999 , "Iowa's Mansion Impact Structure."

  "fleeing would mean 'selecting a slow death over a quick one . . .' " Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice , p. 209.

  "concluded that it affected Earth's climate for about ten thousand years . . ." Arizona Republic , "Impact Theory Gains New Supporters," March 3, 2001.

  "our missiles are not designed for space work . . ." Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice , p. 215.

  "even a year's warning would probably be insufficient . . ." New York Times magazine, "The Asteroids Are Coming! The Asteroids Are Coming!" July 28, 1996, pp. 17-19.

  "Shoemaker-Levy 9 had been orbiting Jupiter . . ." Ferris, Seeing in the Dark , p. 168.

  CHAPTER 14 THE FIRE BELOW

  "It was a dumb place to look for bones . . ." Mike Voorhies, interview by author, Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park, Nebraska, June 13, 2001.

  "At first they thought the animals were buried alive . . ." National Geographic , "Ancient Ashfall Creates Pompeii of Prehistoric Animals," January 1981, p. 66.

  "far better than we understand the interior of the earth." Feynman, p. 60.

  "The distance from the surface of Earth . . ." Williams and Montaigne, Surviving Galeras , p. 78.

  "A modest fellow, he never referred to the scale . . ." Ozima, The Earth , p. 49.

  "It rises exponentially . . ." Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, p. 33.

  "sixty thousand people were dead . . ." Officer and Page, p. 52.

  "the city waiting to die . . ." McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World , p. 21.

  "the potential economic cost . . ." McGuire, p. 130.

  "collapsed scaffolding erected around the Capitol Building . . ." Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either , p. 158.

  "became known, all but inevitably, as the Mohole . . ." Vogel, p. 37.

  "using a strand of spaghetti . . ." Valley News , "Drilling the Ocean Floor for Earth's Deep Secrets," August 21, 1995.

  "about 0.3 percent of the planet's volume . . ." Schopf, Cradle of Life , p. 73.

  "We also know a little bit about the mantle . . ." McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , pp. 16-18.

  "Scientists are generally agreed . . ." Scientific American , "Sculpting the Earth from Inside Out," March 2001, pp. 40-47; and New Scientist , "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" supplement, October 14, 2000, p. 1.

  "By all the laws of geophysics . . ." Earth , "Mystery in the High Sierra," June 1996, p. 16.

  "The rocks are viscous . . ." Vogel, p. 31.

  "The movements occur not just laterally . . ." Science , "Much About Motion in the Mantle," February 1, 2002, p. 982.

  "an English vicar named Osmond Fisher presciently suggested . . ." Tudge, The Time B
efore History , p. 43.

  "then had suddenly found out about wind." Vogel, p. 53.

  "there are two sets of data . . ." Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either , p. 146.

  "82 percent of the Earth's volume . . ." Nature , "The Earth's Mantle," August 2, 2001, pp. 501-6.

  "something over three million times . . ." Drury, p. 50.

  "during the age of the dinosaurs . . ." New Scientist , "Dynamo Support," March 10, 2001, p. 27.

  "37 million years appears to be the longest stretch . . ." New Scientist , "Dynamo Support," March 10, 2001, p. 27.

  "the greatest unanswered question . . ." Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either , p. 150.

  "Geologists and geophysicists rarely go . . ." Vogel, p. 139.

  "The seismologists resolutely based their conclusions . . ." Fisher et al., Volcanoes , p. 24.

  "It was the biggest landslide in human history . . ." Thompson, Volcano Cowboys , p. 118.

  "the force of five hundred Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs," Williams and Montaigne, p. 7.

  "Fifty-seven people were killed." Fisher et al., p. 12.

  "only shake my head in wonder . . ." Williams and Montaigne, p. 151.

  "An airliner . . . reported being pelted with rocks." Thompson, p. 123.

  "Yet Yakima had no volcano emergency procedures." Fisher et al., p. 16.

  CHAPTER 15 DANGEROUS BEAUTY

  "In 1943, at Parícutin in Mexico . . ." Smith, The Weather , p. 112.

  "you wouldn't be able to get within a thousand kilometers . . ." BBC Horizon documentary "Crater of Death," first broadcast May 6, 2001.

  "a bang that reverberated around the world . . ." Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice , p. 152.

  "The last supervolcano eruption on Earth . . ." McGuire, p. 104.

  "for the next twenty thousand years . . ." McGuire, p. 107.

  "you're standing on the largest active volcano in the world . . ." Paul Doss, interview with author, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, June 16, 2001.

  "devastatingly evident on the night of August 17, 1959 . . ." Smith and Siegel, pp. 5-6.

  "as little as a single molecule . . ." Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve , p. 12.

  "scientists were finding even hardier microbes . . ." Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes , p. 275.

  "As NASA scientist Jay Bergstralh has put it . . ." PBS NewsHour transcript, August 20, 2002.