A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition

by Bill Bryson

  3 can do 47,000 laps around a 7-kilometre tunnel in under a second: Discover, “Gluons,” July 2000, p.68.

  4 Even the most sluggish: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.121.

  5 In 1998, Japanese observers reported that neutrinos do have mass: Economist, “Heavy Stuff,” 13 June 1998, p.82; National Geographic, “Unveiling the Universe,” Oct. 1999, p.36.

  6 Breaking up atoms … is easy: Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p.48.

  7 CERN’s new Large Hadron Collider … will achieve 14 trillion volts of energy: Economist, “Cause for conCERN,” 28 Oct. 2000, p.75.

  8 “dotted along the circumference by a series of disappointed small towns”: letter from Jeff Guinn.

  9 A proposed neutrino observatory at the old Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota: Science, “U.S. Researchers Go for Scientific Gold Mine,” 15 June 2001, p.1979.

  10 A particle accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois … cost $260 million: Science, 8 Feb. 2002, p.942.

  11 Today the particle count is well over 150: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.120; Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.39.

  12 Some people think there are particles called tachyons: Nature, 27 Sept. 2001, p.354.

  13 “which are themselves universes at the next level and so on forever”: Sagan, Cosmos, pp.265–6.

  14 “The charged pion and antipion decay respectively”: Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, p.163.

  15 “to restore some economy to the multitude of hadrons”: Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, p.165.

  16 wanted to call these new basic particles partons: von Baeyer, Taming the Atom, p.17.

  17 Eventually out of all this emerged what is called the Standard Model: Economist, “New realities?,” 7 Oct. 2000, p.95; Nature, “The Mass Question,” 28 Feb. 2002, pp.969–70.

  18 Bosons … are particles that produce and carry forces: Scientific American, “Uncovering Supersymmetry,” July 2002, p.74.

  19 “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.298–9.

  20 the notional Higgs boson: CERN website document “The Mass Mystery,” undated.

  21 “So we are stuck with a theory”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.39.

  22 This postulates that all those little things like quarks: Science News, 22 Sept. 2001, p.185.

  23 tiny enough to pass for point particles: Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p.168.

  24 “The heterotic string consists of a closed string that has two types of vibrations”: Kaku, Hyperspace, p.158.

  25 String theory has further spawned something called M theory: Scientific American, “The Universe’s Unseen Dimensions,” Aug. 2000, pp.62–9; Science News, “When Branes Collide,” 22 Sept. 2001, pp.184–5.

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

  27 it is “almost impossible for the non-scientist to discriminate between the legitimately weird and the outright crackpot”: Nature, 27 Sept. 2001, p.354.

  28 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,” 9 Nov. 2002; Economist, “Publish and Perish,” 16 Nov. 2002, p.75.

  29 Karl Popper … once suggested that there may not in fact be an ultimate theory: Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p.184.

  30 “we do not seem to be coming to the end of our intellectual resources”: Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p.187.

  31 Hubble calculated that the universe was about two billion years old: US News and World Report, “How Old Is the Universe?,” 25 Aug. 1997, p.34.

  32 a new age for the universe of between seven billion and twenty billion years: Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p.91.

  33 In the years that followed there erupted a dispute that would run and run: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.268.

  34 In February 2003, a team from NASA: New York Times, “Cosmos Sits for Early Portrait, Gives up Secrets,” 12 Feb. 2003, p.1.

  35 “a mountain of theory built on a molehill of evidence”: Economist, “Queerer than we can suppose,” 5 Jan. 2002, p.58.

  36 “may reflect the paucity of the data rather than the excellence of the theory”: National Geographic, “Unveiling the Universe,” Oct. 1999, p.25.

  37 what they really mean: Goldsmith, The Astronomers, p.82.

  38 “two-thirds of the universe is still missing from the balance sheet”: Economist, “Dark for Dark Business,” 5 Jan. 2002, p.51.

  39 The theory is that empty space isn’t so empty at all: PBS Nova, “Runaway Universe,” transcript of programme first broadcast 21 Nov. 2000.

  40 the one thing that resolves all this is Einstein’s cosmological constant: Economist, “Dark for Dark Business,” 5 Jan. 2002, p.51.

  Chapter 12: The Earth Moves

  1 In a tone that all but invited the reader to join him in a tolerant chuckle: Hapgood, Earth’s Shifting Crust, p.29.

  2 they posited ancient “land bridges” wherever they were needed: Simpson, Fossils and the History of Life, p.98.

  3 Even land bridges couldn’t explain some things: Gould, Ever since Darwin, p.163.

  4 full of “numerous grave theoretical difficulties”: Encylopaedia Britannica, vol. 6, p.418.

  5 One reviewer there fretted … that students might actually come to believe them: Lewis, The Dating Game, p.182.

  6 about half of those present now embraced the idea of continental drift: Hapgood, Earth’s Shifting Crust, p.31.

  7 “I feel the hypothesis is a fantastic one”: Powell, Mysteries of Terra Frma, p.147.

  8 Interestingly, oil company geologists had known for years: McPhee, Basin and Range, p.175.

  9 Aboard this vessel was a fancy new depth sounder called a fathometer: McPhee, Basin and Range, p.187.

  10 seamounts that he called guyots after an earlier Princeton geologist: Harrington, Dance of the Continents, p.208.

  11 “probably the most significant paper in the earth sciences ever to be denied publication”: Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, pp.131–2.

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

  13 one American geologist in eight still didn’t believe in plate tectonics: McPhee, Basin and Range, p.198.

  14 Today we know that the Earth’s surface is made up of eight to twelve big plates: Simpson, Fossils and the History of Life, p.113.

  15 The connections … were found to be infinitely more complex than anyone had imagined: McPhee, Assembling California, pp.202–8.

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

  17 one-tenth of 1 per cent of the Earth’s history: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.44.

  18 It is thought … that tectonics is an important part of the planet’s organic well-being: Trefil, Meditations at 10,000 Feet, p.181.

  19 suggesting that there may well be a relationship between the history of rocks and the history of life: Science, “Inconstant Ancient Seas and Life’s Path,” 8 Nov. 2002, p.1165.

  20 “the whole earth suddenly made sense”: McPhee, Rising from the Plains, p.158.

  21 a habit of appearing inconveniently where they shouldn’t and failing to be where they ought: Simpson, Fossils and the History of Life, p.115.

  22 There are also many surface features that tectonics can’t explain: Scientific American, “Sculpting the Earth from Inside Out,” March 2001.

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

  24 One of his students was a bright young fellow named Walter Alvarez: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p.7.

  Chapter 13: Bang!

  1 In 1912, a man drilling a well for the town water suppl
y reported bringing up 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.

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

  3 “Very occasionally we get people coming in and asking where they should go to see the crater”: Interview with Schlapkohl, Manson, Iowa, 18 June 2001.

  4 The leading early investigator, G. K. Gilbert of Columbia University: Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p.38.

  5 Gilbert conducted these experiments not in a laboratory at Columbia but in a hotel room: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p.37.

  6 “At the time we started, only slightly more than a dozen of these things had ever been discovered”: transcript from BBC Horizon documentary, “New Asteroid Danger,” p.4; programme first transmitted 18 March 1999.

  7 He called them asteroids—Latin for “starlike”: Science News, “A Rocky Bicentennial,” 28 July 2001, pp.61–3.

  8 it was finally tracked down in 2000 after being missing for eighty-nine years: Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p.150.

  9 As of July 2001, 26,000 asteroids had been named and identified: Science News, “A Rocky Bicentennial,” 28 July 2001, pp.61–3.

  10 down which we are cruising at over 100,000 kilometres an hour: Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p.147.

  11 “all of which are capable of colliding with the Earth and all of which are moving on slightly different courses through the sky at different rates”: transcript from BBC Horizon documentary “New Asteroid Danger,” p.5; first transmitted 18 March 1999.

  12 such near misses probably happen two or three times a week and go unnoticed: New Yorker, “Is This the End?,” 27 Jan. 1997, pp.44–52.

  13 Every year the Earth accumulates some 30,000 tonnes of “cosmic spherules”: Vernon, Beneath our Feet, p.191.

  14 “Well, they were very charming, very persuasive”: telephone interview with Asaro, 10 March 2002.

  15 a Northwestern University astrophysicist named Ralph B. Baldwin had suggested such a possibility in an article in Popular Astronomy magazine: Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p.184.

  16 In 1956 a professor at Oregon State University, M. W. de Laubenfels: Peebles, Asteroids: A History, p.170.

  17 may have been the cause of an earlier event known as the Frasnian extinction: Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p.107.

  18 “They’re more like stamp collectors”: quoted by Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, p.142.

  19 even while conceding in a newspaper interview that he had no actual evidence of it: Boston Globe, “Dinosaur Extinction Theory Backed,” 16 Dec. 1985.

  20 continued to believe that the extinction of the dinosaurs was in no way related to an asteroid or cometary impact: Peebles, Asteroids: A History, p.175.

  21 a big part of the work you do is to evaluate Manure Management Plans: Iowa Department of Natural Resources Publication, Iowa Geology 1999, Number 24.

  22 “Suddenly we were at the centre of things”: interview with Anderson and Witzke, Iowa City, 15 June 2001.

  23 One of those moments came at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in 1985: Boston Globe, “Dinosaur Extinction Theory Backed,” 16 Dec. 1985.

  24 The formation had been found by Pemex, the Mexican oil company, in 1952: Peebles, Asteroids: A History, pp.177–8; Washington Post, “Incoming,” 19 April 1998.

  25 “I remember harboring some strong initial doubts about the efficacy of such an event”: Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, p.162.

  26 “Jupiter will swallow these comets up without so much as a burp”: quoted by Peebles, Asteroids: A History, p.196.

  27 One fragment, known as Nucleus G, struck with the force of about six million megatonnes: Peebles, Asteroids: A History, p.202.

  28 Shoemaker was killed instantly, his wife injured: Peebles, Asteroids: A History, p.204.

  29 nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead: Anderson, Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Iowa Geology 1999, “Iowa’s Mansion Impact Structure.”

  30 fleeing would mean “selecting a slow death over a quick one”: Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p.209.

  31 analysed helium isotopes from sediments left from the later KT impact and concluded that it affected the Earth’s climate for about ten thousand years: Arizona Republic, “Impact Theory Gains New Supporters,” 3 March 2001.

  32 First, as John S. Lewis notes, our missiles are not designed for space work: Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p.215.

  33 Tom Gehrels … thinks that even a year’s warning would probably be insufficient: New York Times magazine, “The Asteroids Are Coming! The Asteroids Are Coming!,” 28 July 1996, pp.17–19.

  34 Shoemaker-Levy 9 had been orbiting Jupiter in a fairly conspicuous manner since 1929, but it was over half a century before anyone noticed: Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p.168.

  Chapter 14: The Fire Below

  1 “It was a dumb place to look for bones”: interview with Mike Voorhies, Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park, Nebraska, 13 June 2001.

  2 At first they thought the animals were buried alive: National Geographic, “Ancient Ashfall Creates Pompeii of Prehistoric Animals,” Jan. 1981, p.66.

  3 “far better than we understand the interior of the earth”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.60.

  4 The distance from the surface of Earth to the middle is 6,370 kilometres: Williams and Montaigne, Surviving Galeras, p.78.

  5 A modest fellow, he never referred to the scale by his own name: Ozima, The Earth, p.49.

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

  7 sixty thousand people were dead: Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, p.52.

  8 “the city waiting to die”: McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World, p.21.

  9 the potential economic cost has been put as high as $7 trillion: McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World, p.130.

  10 “collapsed scaffolding erected around the Capitol Building”: Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p.158.

  11 The project became known, all but inevitably, as the Mohole: Vogel, Naked Earth, p.37.

  12 “like trying to drill a hole … using a strand of spaghetti”: Valley News, “Drilling the Ocean Floor for Earth’s Deep Secrets,” 21 August 1995.

  13 the crust of the Earth represents only about 0.3 per cent of the planet’s volume: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.73.

  14 We know a little bit about the mantle from what are known as kimberlite pipes: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, pp.16–18.

  15 Scientists are generally agreed: Scientific American, “Sculpting the Earth from Inside Out,” March 2001, pp.40–7, and New Scientist, “Journey to the Centre of the Earth,” supplement, 14 Oct. 2000, p.1.

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

  17 The movements occur not just laterally: Science, “Much About Motion in the Mantle,” 1 Feb. 2002, p.982.

  18 an English vicar named Osmond Fisher presciently suggested: Tudge, The Time Before History, p.43.

  19 “then had suddenly found out about wind”: Vogel, Naked Earth, p.53.

  20 “there are two sets of data, from two different disciplines”: Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p.146.

  21 82 per cent of the Earth’s volume and 65 per cent of its mass: Nature, “The Earth’s Mantle,” 2 Aug. 2001, pp.501–6.

  22 something over three million times those found at the surface: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.50.

  23 during the age of the dinosaurs, it was up to three times as strong as it is now: New Scientist, “Dynamo Support,” 10 March 2001, p.27.

  24 37 million years appears to be the longest stretch: New Scientist, “Dynamo Support,” 10 March 2001, p.27.

  25 “the greatest unanswered question in the geological sciences”: Tr
efil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p.150.

  26 “Geologists and geophysicists rarely go to the same meetings”: Vogel, Naked Earth, p.139.

  27 The seismologists resolutely based their conclusions on the behaviour of Hawaiian volcanoes: Fisher et al., Volcanoes, p.24.