"A Short History of Nearly Everything"

[fiefoe]

Bill Bryson

* for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence. <> Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level.
Atoms are so numerous and necessary that we easily overlook that they needn't actually exist at all. There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other physical properties on which our existence hinges.
* Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most-99.99 percent-are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. <> The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself-shape, size, color, species affiliation, everything-and to do so repeatedly. That's much easier said than done, because the process of change is random... So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore
The book was a standard-issue 1950s schoolbookbattered, unloved, grimly hefty... There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a longdistance phone call from the frankly interesting.
NO MATTER HOW hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small.
* Cosmic noise: They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as “white dielectric material,” or what is known more commonly as bird shit. Nothing they tried worked. <> Unknown to them, just thirty miles away at Princeton University, a team of scientists led by Robert Dicke was working on how to find the very thing they were trying so diligently to get rid of. .. They had found the edge of the universe, or at least the visible part of it, 90 billion trillion miles away. They were “seeing” the first photons—the most ancient light in the universe—though time and distance had converted them to microwaves, just as Gamow had predicted.
Rees maintains that six numbers in particular govern our universe, and that if any of these values were changed even very slightly things could not be as they are. For example, for the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner—specifically, in a way that converts seven one-thousandths of its mass to energy. Lower that value very slightly—from 0.007 percent to 0.006 percent, say—and no transformation could take place: the universe would consist of hydrogen and nothing else. Raise the value very slightly—to 0.008 percent—and bonding would be so wildly prolific that the hydrogen would long since have been exhausted.
we are not adrift in some large, ever-expanding bubble. Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite. .. Rather, the galaxies are rushing apart.
* With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is “less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground,” in the words of Carl Sagan.
Percival Lowell. Lowell, who came from one of the oldest and wealthiest Boston families (the one in the famous ditty about Boston being the home of the bean and the cod... is most indelibly remembered for his belief that Mars was covered with canals built by industrious Martians for purposes of conveying water from polar regions to the dry but productive lands nearer the equator.
in that easily excited age. This was the first American-discovered planet, and no one was going to be distracted by the thought that it was really just a distant icy dot. It was named Pluto at least partly because the first two letters made a monogram from Lowell’s initials.
Pluto: Its orbit is so irregular that for substantial periods on each of its lonely circuits around the Sun it is closer to us than Neptune is. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, Neptune was in fact the solar system’s most far-flung planet.
* A manned mission to Mars, called for by the first President Bush in a moment of passing giddiness, was quietly dropped when someone worked out that it would cost $450 billion and probably result in the deaths of all the crew (their DNA torn to tatters by high-energy solar particles from which they could not be shielded).
* It is these anomalous, very occasional pricks in the crowded dome of the night sky that the Reverend Evans finds... Now imagine fifteen hundred more tables like the first one—enough to fill a Wal-Mart parking lot, say, or to make a single line two miles long—each with a random array of salt across it. Now add one grain of salt to any table and let Bob Evans walk among them. At a glance he will spot it. That grain of salt is the supernova.
Zwicky and Baade: Despite its extreme brevity—one paragraph of twenty-four lines—the abstract contained an enormous amount of new science: it provided the first reference to supernovae and to neutron stars; convincingly explained their method of formation; correctly calculated the scale of their explosiveness; and, as a kind of concluding bonus, connected supernova explosions to the production of a mysterious new phenomenon called cosmic rays, which had recently been found swarming through the universe. These ideas were revolutionary to say the least. Neutron stars wouldn’t be confirmed for thirty-four years. The cosmic rays notion, though considered plausible, hasn’t been verified yet. Altogether, the abstract was, in the words of Caltech astrophysicist Kip S. Thorne, “one of the most prescient documents in the history of physics and astronomy.” <> Interestingly, Zwicky had almost no understanding of why any of this would happen... When, five years later, the great Robert Oppenheimer turned his attention to neutron stars in a landmark paper, he made not a single reference to any of Zwicky’s work even though Zwicky had been working for years on the same problem in an office just down the hall.
In the whole of astronomical history before Evans started looking in 1980, fewer than sixty supernovae had been found. (At the time I visited him, in August of 2001, he had just recorded his thirty-fourth visual discovery;... charge-coupled devices. “With CCDs you can aim a telescope at the sky and go watch television,” Evans said with a touch of dismay. “It took all the romance out of it.”
* the Big Bang created lots of light gases but no heavy elements. Those came later, but for a very long time nobody could figure out how they came later. The problem was that you needed something really hot—hotter even than the middle of the hottest stars—to forge carbon and iron and the other elements without which we would be distressingly immaterial. Supernovae provided the explanation
Fred Hoyle: suggested at one point that humans evolved projecting noses with the nostrils underneath as a way of keeping cosmic pathogens from falling into them.
At ground level, the principles of triangulation are the same, except that the triangles don't reach into space but rather are laid side to side on a map. In measuring a degree of meridian, the surveyors would create a sort of chain of triangles marching across the landscape.
* deepest suspicions from officials who found it difficult to believe that a group of French scientists would travel halfway around the world to measure the world. That made no sense at all. Two and a half centuries later it still seems a reasonable question. Why didn’t the French make their measurements in France and save themselves all the bother and discomfort of their Andean adventure? <> The answer lies partly with the fact that eighteenth-century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available,
Newton was a decidedly odd figure—brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. .. he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision. Again he escaped lasting damage, though he had to spend some days in a darkened room before his eyes forgave him.
Pressed by Halley, Newton agreed to redo the calculations and produce a paper. He did as promised, but then did much more. He retired for two years of intensive reflection and scribbling, and at length produced his masterwork: the Principia... It not only explained mathematically the orbits of heavenly bodies, but also identified the attractive force that got them moving in the first place—gravity.
A couple of brief multiplications, a simple division, and, bingo, you know your gravitational position wherever you go. It was the first really universal law of nature ever propounded by a human mind, which is why Newton is regarded with such universal esteem.
Newton refused to release the crucial third volume, without which the first two made little sense. Only with some frantic shuttle diplomacy and the most liberal applications of flattery did Halley manage finally to extract the concluding volume from the erratic professor... Halley, whose means were not great, paid for the book’s publication out of his own pocket. Newton, as was his custom, contributed nothing... He was to be paid instead in copies of The History of Fishes .
his final years in severe unease that his papers on trigonometry, with their arcane symbols, would be taken as communications with the devil and that he would be treated to a dreadful execution. So little is known of Norwood that it may in fact be that he deserved his unhappy declining years. What is certainly true is that he got them.
They chose the Andes because they needed to measure near the equator, to determine if there really was a difference in sphericity there, and because they reasoned that mountains would give them good sightlines. In fact, the mountains of Peru were so constantly lost in cloud that the team often had to wait weeks for an hour’s clear surveying. On top of that, they had selected one of the most nearly impossible terrains on Earth. Peruvians refer to their landscape as muy accidentado —“much accidented”... But Bouguer and La Condamine were nothing if not tenacious, and they stuck to the task for nine and a half long, grim, sun-blistered years. ... Bouguer and La Condamine thus had spent nearly a decade working toward a result they didn’t wish to find only to learn now that they weren’t even the first to find it.
the passage of the planet Venus across the face of the Sun. The tireless Edmond Halley had suggested years before that if you measured one of these passages from selected points on the Earth, you could use the principles of triangulation to work out the distance to the Sun, and from that calibrate the distances to all the other bodies in the solar system... With the instinct for ordeal that characterized the age, scientists set off for more than a hundred locations around the globe
Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil: With eight years to prepare, he erected a first-rate viewing station, tested and retested his instruments, and had everything in a state of perfect readiness. On the morning of the second transit, June 4, 1769, he awoke to a fine day, but, just as Venus began its pass, a cloud slid in front of the Sun and remained there for almost exactly the duration of the transit: three hours, fourteen minutes, and seven seconds... When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate.
surveying their way through 244 miles of dangerous American wilderness to settle a boundary dispute between the estates of William Penn and Lord Baltimore and their respective colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. The result was the famous Mason and Dixon line,
One of the problems, ironically, was that there were too many observations, which when brought together often proved contradictory and impossible to resolve. The successful charting of a Venusian transit fell instead to a little-known Yorkshire-born sea captain named James Cook, who watched the 1769 transit from a sunny hilltop in Tahiti, and then went on to chart and claim Australia for the British crown.
The surveyors had covered a map with scores of figures, each marking an elevation at some point on or around the mountain. It was essentially just a confusing mass of numbers, but Hutton noticed that if he used a pencil to connect points of equal height, it all became much more orderly. Indeed, one could instantly get a sense of the overall shape and slope of the mountain. <> He had invented contour lines. <> Extrapolating from his Schiehallion measurements, Hutton calculated the mass of the Earth at 5,000 million million tons, from which could reasonably be deduced the masses of all the other major bodies in the solar system, including the Sun.
Michell accomplished, nothing was more ingenious or had greater impact than a machine he designed and built for measuring the mass of the Earth... both the idea and the necessary equipment were passed on to a brilliant but magnificently retiring London scientist named Henry Cavendish. Cavendish is a book in himself.
* In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.
by which time credit had nearly always been given to others. <> Among much else, and without telling anyone, Cavendish discovered or anticipated the law of the conservation of energy, Ohm’s law, Dalton’s Law of Partial Pressures, Richter’s Law of Reciprocal Proportions, Charles’s Law of Gases, and the principles of electrical conductivity... he left clues that led directly to the discovery of the group of elements known as the noble gases,
Today, scientists have at their disposal machines so precise they can detect the weight of a single bacterium and so sensitive that readings can be disturbed by someone yawning seventy-five feet away, but they have not significantly improved on Cavendish’s measurements of 1797. The current best estimate for Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion metric tons, a difference of only about 1 percent from Cavendish’s finding. Interestingly, all of this merely confirmed estimates made by Newton 110 years before Cavendish without any experimental evidence at all.
It is hard to imagine now, but geology excited the nineteenth century—positively gripped it—in a way that no science ever had before or would again.
Once Mrs. Buckland found herself being shaken awake in the middle of the night, her husband crying in excitement: “My dear, I believe that Cheirotherium ’s footsteps are undoubtedly testudinal.” <> Together they hurried to the kitchen in their nightclothes. Mrs. Buckland made a flour paste, which she spread across the table, while the Reverend Buckland fetched the family tortoise. <> Plunking it onto the paste, they goaded it forward and discovered to their delight that its footprints did indeed match those of the fossil Buckland had been studying.
Originally, geological history was divided into four spans of time: primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary. The system was too neat to last, and soon geologists were contributing additional divisions while eliminating others. Primary and secondary fell out of use altogether, while quaternary was discarded by some but kept by others. Today only tertiary remains as a common designation everywhere, even though it no longer represents a third period of anything... Pleistocene (“most recent”), Pliocene (“more recent”), Miocene (“moderately recent”), and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene (“but a little recent”)... finally we have a mass of finer subdivisions known as stages or ages. Most of these are named, nearly always awkwardly, after places:
Kelvin really was a kind of Victorian superman...written (in French and English) a dozen papers in pure and applied mathematics of such dazzling originality that he had to publish them anonymously for fear of embarrassing his superiors. At the age of twenty-two he returned to Glasgow University to take up a professorship in natural philosophy
Thermodynamics: this crisp summation by the chemist P. W Atkins, just to provide a sense of them: 'There are four Laws. The third of them, the Second Law, was recognized first; the first, the Zeroth Law, was formulated last; the First Law was second; the Third Law might not even be a law in the same sense as the others.'
America, Buffon wrote in his vast and much-esteemed Histoire Naturelle , was a land where the water was stagnant, the soil unproductive, ... native American males were not only reproductively unimposing, but “so lacking in virility that they had milk in their breasts.” ... Not surprisingly, such aspersions were indignantly met in America. Thomas Jefferson incorporated a furious (and, unless the context is understood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in his Notes on the State of Virginia , and induced his New Hampshire friend General John Sullivan to send twenty soldiers into the northern woods to find a bull moose to present to Buffon as proof of the stature and majesty of American quadrupeds.
To interpret rocks, there needs to be some means of correlation, a basis on which you can tell that those carboniferous rocks from Devon are younger than these Cambrian rocks from Wales. Smith’s insight was to realize that the answer lay with fossils. At every change in rock strata certain species of fossils disappeared while others carried on into subsequent levels.
* Other bones and fossilized footprints were found in the Connecticut River Valley of New England after a farm boy named Plinus Moody spied ancient tracks on a rock ledge at South Hadley, Massachusetts. Some of these at least survive—notably the bones of an Anchisaurus, which are in the collection of the Peabody Museum at Yale. Found in 1818, they were the first dinosaur bones to be examined and saved
* Mary Anning... found a strange fossilized sea monster, seventeen feet long and now known as the ichthyosaurus, embedded in the steep and dangerous cliffs along the English Channel... Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister “She sells seashells on the seashore.”) She would also find the first plesiosaurus, another marine monster,
she could extract them with the greatest delicacy and without damage. If you ever have the chance to visit the hall of ancient marine reptiles at the Natural History Museum in London, I urge you to take it for there is no other way to appreciate the scale and beauty of what this young woman achieved working virtually unaided with the most basic tools in nearly impossible conditions. The plesiosaur alone took her ten years of patient excavation.
it was for his work with dinosaurs that Owen is remembered. He coined the term dinosauria in 1841. It means “terrible lizard” .. He was the only person Charles Darwin was ever known to hate... In 1857, the naturalist T. H. Huxley was leafing through a new edition of Churchill’s Medical Directory when he noticed that Owen was listed as Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Government School of Mines, which rather surprised Huxley as that was the position he held. .. Owen set about systematically expunging Mantell’s contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named years before and claiming credit for their discovery for himself. Mantell continued to try to do original research but Owen used his influence at the Royal Society to ensure that most of his papers were rejected. In 1852, unable to bear any more pain or persecution, Mantell took his own life.
Marsh: his uncle was the supremely rich and extraordinarily indulgent financier George Peabody. When Marsh showed an interest in natural history, Peabody had a museum built for him at Yale
Question of Earth's age: Ernest Rutherford, and he produced pretty well irrefutable evidence that the Earth was at least many hundreds of millions of years old, probably rather more. <> Remarkably, his evidence was based on alchemy—natural, spontaneous, scientifically credible, and wholly non-occult, but alchemy nonetheless.
In the 1750s a Swedish chemist named Karl (or Carl) Scheele devised a way to manufacture phosphorus in bulk without the slop or smell of urine. It was largely because of this mastery of phosphorus that Sweden became, and emains, a leading producer of matches.
Scheele’s one notable shortcoming was a curious insistence on tasting a little of everything he worked with, including such notoriously disagreeable substances as mercury, prussic acid (another of his discoveries), and hydrocyanic acid—a compound so famously poisonous that 150 years later Erwin Schrödinger chose it as his toxin of choice in a famous thought experiment.. Scheele discovered oxygen in 1772, but for various heartbreakingly complicated reasons could not get his paper published in a timely manner... Even more remarkable was Scheele’s failure to receive credit for the discovery of chlorine.
The theory was indeed wrong, but the scientist never forgave him. His name was Jean-Paul Marat. <> The one thing Lavoisier never did was discover an element... It certainly wasn’t for want of beakers. <> Lavoisier had thirteen thousand of them in what was, to an almost preposterous degree, the finest private laboratory in existence. Instead he took the discoveries of others and made sense of them. He threw out phlogiston and mephitic airs.
For years, he and Madame Lavoisier occupied themselves with extremely exacting studies requiring the finest measurements. They determined, for instance, that a rusting object doesn’t lose weight, as everyone had long assumed, but gains weight—an extraordinary discovery.
another type of revolution—the French one—and for this one Lavoisier was entirely on the wrong side. Not only was he a member of the hated Ferme Générale, but he had enthusiastically built the wall that enclosed Paris—an edifice so loathed that it was the first thing attacked by the rebellious citizens.
Chemistry was, generally speaking, a science for businesspeople, for those who worked with coal and potash and dyes, and not gentlemen, who tended to be drawn to geology, natural history, and physics.
a splendidly improbable character named Count von Rumford, who, despite the grandeur of his title, began life in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753 as plain Benjamin Thompson. Thompson was dashing and ambitious, “handsome in feature and figure,” occasionally courageous and exceedingly bright, but untroubled by anything so inconveniencing as a scruple... He became the world’s foremost authority on thermodynamics and the first to elucidate the principles of the convection of fluids and the circulation of ocean currents.
Humphry Davy: He discovered so many elements not so much because he was serially astute as because he developed an ingenious technique of applying electricity to a molten substance—electrolysis... he developed an abiding attachment to the buoyant pleasures of nitrous oxide.
Avogadro's number: it is equivalent to the number of popcorn kernels needed to cover the United States to a depth of nine miles
the indomitable Mrs. Mendeleyev hitchhiked with young Dmitri four thousand miles to St. Petersburg—that’s equivalent to traveling from London to Equatorial Guinea... Worn out by her efforts, she died soon after.
the important work on entropy had in fact been done already, in this instance by a retiring scholar at Yale University named J. Willard Gibbs... Gibbs is perhaps the most brilliant person that most people have never heard of. Modest to the point of near invisibility, he passed virtually the whole of his life, apart from three years spent studying in Europe, within a three-block area bounded by his house and the Yale campus
In essence what Gibbs did was show that thermodynamics didn’t apply simply to heat and energy at the sort of large and noisy scale of the steam engine, but was also present and influential at the atomic level of chemical reactions. Gibbs’s Equilibrium has been called “the Principia of thermodynamics,” but for reasons that defy speculation Gibbs chose to publish these landmark observations in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences
Too poor to pay for college, he traveled to Washington, D.C., and took to loitering by the front door of the White House so that he could fall in beside President Ulysses S. Grant when the President emerged for his daily constitutional. (It was clearly a more innocent age.) In the course of these walks, Michelson so ingratiated himself to the President that Grant agreed to secure for him a free place at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Kip S. Thorne has written: “The speed of light turned out to be the same in all directions and at all seasons.” It was the first hint in two hundred years—in exactly two hundred years, in fact—that Newton’s laws might not apply all the time everywhere. The Michelson-Morley outcome became, in the words of William H. Cropper, “probably the most famous negative result in the history of physics.”
Of course the sagging mattress analogy can take us only so far because it doesn’t incorporate the effect of time. But then our brains can take us only so far because it is so nearly impossible to envision a dimension comprising three parts space to one part time, all interwoven like the threads in a plaid fabric.
it was as close as women could get to real astronomy at Harvard—or indeed pretty much anywhere—in those days. The system, however unfair, did have certain unexpected benefits: it meant that half the finest minds available were directed to work that would otherwise have attracted little reflective attention, and it ensured that women ended up with an appreciation of the fine structure of the cosmos that often eluded their male counterparts.
One Harvard computer, Annie Jump Cannon, used her repetitive acquaintance with the stars to devise a system of stellar classifications so practical that it is still in use today. <> Leavitt’s contribution was even more profound. She noticed that a type of star known as a Cepheid variable.. pulsated with a regular rhythm—a kind of stellar heartbeat. .. Leavitt’s genius was to realize that by comparing the relative magnitudes of Cepheids at different points in the sky you could work out where they were in relation to each other.
* They are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare. .. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed;
The existence of atoms was so doubtfully held in the German-speaking world in particular that it was said to have played a part in the suicide of the great theoretical physicist, and atomic enthusiast, Ludwig Boltzmann in 1906. <> It was Einstein who provided the first incontrovertible evidence of atoms’ existence with his paper on Brownian motion in 1905,
When the wife of the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli left him for a chemist, he was staggered with disbelief. “Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood,”
To Rutherford’s astonishment, some of the particles bounced back. It was as if, he said, he had fired a fifteen-inch shell at a sheet of paper and it rebounded into his lap. <> This was just not supposed to happen. After considerable reflection he realized there could be only one possible explanation: the particles that bounced back were striking something small and dense at the heart of the atom, while the other particles sailed through unimpeded.
(Because the number of protons in an atom is always balanced by an equal number of electrons, you will sometimes see it written that it is the number of electrons that defines an element; it comes to the same thing. The way it was explained to me is that protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.)
* “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.
electrons are not like orbiting planets at all, but more like the blades of a spinning fan, managing to fill every bit of space in their orbits simultaneously (but with the crucial difference that the blades of a fan only seem to be everywhere at once; electrons are ).
Bohr : the paper explained how electrons could keep from falling into the nucleus by suggesting that they could occupy only certain well-defined orbits. According to the new theory, an electron moving between orbits would disappear from one and reappear instantaneously in another without visiting the space between. This idea—the famous “quantum leap”—is of course utterly strange, but it was too good not to be true. It not only kept electrons from spiraling catastrophically into the nucleus; it also explained hydrogen’s bewildering wavelengths.
the tireless Rutherford: came up with a model that explained why the nuclei didn’t blow up. He saw that they must be offset by some type of neutralizing particles, which he called neutrons...
The weak nuclear force, despite its name, is ten billion billion billion times stronger than gravity, and the strong nuclear force is more powerful still—vastly so, in fact—but their influence extends to only the tiniest distances. The grip of the strong force reaches out only to about 1/100,000 of the diameter of an atom. That’s why the nuclei of atoms are so compacted and dense and why elements with big, crowded nuclei tend to be so unstable: the strong force just can’t hold on to all the protons.
Midgley set out to create a gas that was stable, nonflammable, noncorrosive, and safe to breathe. With an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny, he invented chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs... they are extravagantly destructive. One pound of CFCs can capture and annihilate seventy thousand pounds of atmospheric ozone. CFCs also
hang around for a long time—about a century on average—wreaking havoc all the while. <> They are also great heat sponges. A single CFC molecule is about ten thousand times more efficient at exacerbating greenhouse effects than a molecule of carbon dioxide
Libby’s method was also based on the assumption that the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, and the rate at which it has been absorbed by living things, has been consistent throughout history. In fact it hasn’t been. We now know that the volume of atmospheric carbon-14 varies depending on how well or not Earth’s magnetism is deflecting cosmic rays, and that that can vary significantly over time... This is particularly so with dates just around the time that people first came to the Americas, which is one of the reasons the matter is so perennially in dispute. <> Finally, and perhaps a little unexpectedly, readings can be thrown out by seemingly unrelated external factors—such as the diets of those whose bones are being tested.
really ancient rocks are only rarely found on Earth. In the late 1940s no one altogether understood why this should be. Indeed, and rather extraordinarily, we would be well into the space age before anyone could plausibly account for where all the Earth’s old rocks went. (The answer was plate tectonics,
* Patterson: The assumption he made—rather a large one, but correct as it turned out—was that many meteorites are essentially leftover building materials from the early days of the solar system, and thus have managed to preserve a more or less pristine interior chemistry. Measure the age of these wandering rocks and you would have the age also (near enough) of the Earth.
Patterson’s samples were continuously and unaccountably contaminated with large doses of atmospheric lead whenever they were exposed to air. It was this that eventually led him to create a sterile laboratory—the world’s first.. Patterson announced a definitive age for the Earth of 4,550 million years (plus or minus 70 million years)—“a figure that stands unchanged 50 years later,” as McGrayne admiringly notes. After two hundred years of trying
* about 90 percent of it appeared to come from automobile exhaust pipes, but he couldn’t prove it. What he needed was a way to compare lead levels in the atmosphere now with the levels that existed before 1923, when tetraethyl lead was introduced. It occurred to him that ice cores could provide the answer.... He now made it his life’s quest to get lead taken out of gasoline.
seemingly without number: muons, pions, hyperons, mesons, K-mesons, Higgs bosons, intermediate vector bosons, baryons, tachyons. Even physicists began to grow a little uncomfortable. “Young man,” Enrico Fermi replied when a student asked him the name of a particular particle, “if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.”
Breaking up atoms, as James Trefil has noted, is easy; you do it each time you switch on a fluorescent light. Breaking up atomic nuclei, however, requires quite a lot of money and a generous supply of electricity.
string theory: the physicist Michio Kaku explaining the structure of the universe from a superstring perspective: “The heterotic string consists of a closed string that has two types of vibrations, clockwise and counterclockwise, which are treated differently. The clockwise vibrations live in a ten-dimensional space. The counterclockwise live in a twenty-six- dimensional space, of which sixteen dimensions have been compactified.
* 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.
* Wegener developed the theory that the world’s continents had once come together in a single landmass he called Pangaea... but Wegener had no background in geology. He was a meteorologist, for goodness sake. A weatherman—a German weatherman. These were not remediable deficiencies.
Continental drift was not entirely without support in the United States. Reginald Daly of Harvard spoke for it, but he, you may recall, was the man who suggested that the Moon had been formed by a cosmic impact, and his ideas tended to be considered interesting, even worthy, but a touch too exuberant for serious consideration.
throughout the 1950s oceanographers were undertaking more and more sophisticated surveys of the ocean floors. In so doing, they found an even bigger surprise: the mightiest and most extensive mountain range on Earth was—mostly—underwater. It traced a continuous path along the world’s seabeds, rather like the stitching on a baseball.
core samples showed that the ocean floor was quite young at the mid-Atlantic ridge but grew progressively older as you moved away from it to the east or west. Harry Hess considered the matter and realized that this could mean only one thing: new ocean crust was being formed on either side of the central rift, then being pushed away from it as new crust came along behind. The Atlantic floor was effectively two large conveyor belts, one carrying crust toward North America, the other carrying crust toward Europe.... When the crust reached the end of its journey at the boundary with continents, it plunged back into the Earth in a process known as subduction. That explained where all the sediment went.
Some plates are large and comparatively inactive, others small but energetic. They bear only an incidental relationship to the landmasses that sit upon them. ... Kazakhstan, it turns out, was once attached to Norway and New England. One corner of Staten Island, but only a corner, is European.
What Dickson established was that the chemical composition of the world’s oceans has altered abruptly and vigorously throughout the past half billion years and that these changes often correlate with important events in biological history—the huge outburst of tiny organisms that created the chalk cliffs of England’s south coast, the sudden fashion for shells among marine organisms during the Cambrian period, and so on. No one can say what causes the oceans’ chemistry to change so dramatically from time to time, but the opening and shutting of ocean ridges would be an obvious possible culprit.
Derek Ager: The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.
The limestone that elsewhere gives Iowa its hard mineralized water was obliterated and replaced by the shocked basement rocks that so puzzled the water driller in 1912. The Manson impact was the biggest thing that has ever occurred on the mainland United States. Of any type. Ever.
Shoemaker knew nothing about underground.. but he did know all about blast zones. One of his first jobs out of college was to study explosion rings at the Yucca Flats nuclear test site in Nevada. there was nothing at Meteor Crater to suggest volcanic activity, but that there were huge distributions of other stuff— anomalous fine silicas and magnetites principally—that suggested an impact from space.
The arresting analogy that is always made is that the number of people in the world who are actively searching for asteroids is fewer than the staff of a typical McDonald’s restaurant.
Scattered through this thin dusting are exotic elements not normally much found on Earth. Among these is the element iridium, which is a thousand times more abundant in space than in the Earth’s crust... Luis and Walter Alvarez dropped in on Asaro and asked him if he would run the necessary tests for them. It was really quite a presumptuous request. They were asking Asaro to devote months to making the most painstaking measurements of geological samples merely to confirm what seemed entirely self-evident to begin with—that the thin layer of clay had been formed as quickly as its thinness suggested.
the Alvarezes announced their belief that the dinosaur extinction .. suddenly in a single explosive event Walter was a geologist specializing in paleomagnetism, Luis was a physicist and I was a nuclear chemist. And now here we were telling paleontologists that we had solved a problem that had eluded them for over a century.
disordered heaps of papers, journals, furled charts, and hefty specimen stones. (Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.)
Shoemakers and Levy discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which they soon realized was headed for Jupiter. For the first time, humans would be able to witness a cosmic collision—and witness it very well thanks to the new Hubble space telescope.
An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. .. the later KT impact and concluded that it affected Earth’s climate for about ten thousand years. This was actually used as evidence to support the notion that the extinction of dinosaurs was swift and emphatic—and so it was in geological terms.
I asked him in what way it was a dumb place to hunt for bones. “Well, if you’re looking for bones, you really need exposed rock. That’s why most paleontology is done in hot, dry places. <> It’s not that there are more bones there. It’s just that you have some chance of spotting them.
“Strange as it may seem,” wrote Richard Feynman, “we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.”
Because they come up from such depths—up to 120 miles down—kimberlite pipes bring up all kinds of things not normally found on or near the surface: a rock called peridotite, crystals of olivine, and—just occasionally, in about one pipe in a hundred—diamonds. Lots of carbon comes up with kimberlite ejecta, but most is vaporized or turns to graphite. Only occasionally does a hunk of it shoot up at just the right speed and cool down with the necessary swiftness to become a diamond. It was such a pipe that made Johannesburg the most productive diamond mining city in the world,
Earth's molten core: In about 1970, when geophysicists realized just how much turmoil was going on down there, it came as a considerable shock. As Shawna Vogel put it in the book Naked Earth: The New Geophysics: “It was as if scientists had spent decades figuring out the layers of the Earth’s atmosphere—troposphere, stratosphere, and so forth—and then had suddenly found out about wind.”
St Helen's: The seismologists resolutely based their conclusions on the behavior of Hawaiian volcanoes, which don’t blow out sideways.
NASA decided to test some new high-altitude cameras by taking photographs of Yellowstone... As soon as Christiansen saw the photos he realized why he had failed to spot the caldera: virtually the whole park—2.2 million acres—was caldera. The explosion had left a crater more than forty miles across
one of the Brocks’ two new bacteria, Thermophilus aquaticus, remained a laboratory curiosity until a scientist in California named Kary B. Mullis realized that heat-resistant enzymes within it could be used to create a bit of chemical wizardry known as a polymerase chain reaction, which allows scientists to generate lots of DNA from very small amounts—as little as a single molecule in ideal conditions. It’s a kind of genetic photocopying,
The air would leave the suit with such violence that the hapless diver would be, all too literally, sucked up into the helmet and hosepipe. When hauled to the surface, “all that is left in the suit are his bones and some rags of flesh,” the biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote in 1947, adding for the benefit of doubters, “This has happened.”
father-and-son team of John Scott and J. B. S. Haldane. Even by the demanding standards of British intellectuals, the Haldanes were outstandingly eccentric. .. By the time he was a teenager, the two often tested gases and gas masks together, taking turns to see how long it took them to pass out... Perforated eardrums were quite common, but, as Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, “the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.”
the portions of Earth on which we are prepared or able to live are modest indeed: just 12 percent of the total land area, ... it appears that if you wish to have a planet suitable for life, you have to be just awfully lucky, and the more advanced the life, the luckier you have to be.
Apart from much else, our lively interior created the outgassing that helped to build an atmosphere and provided us with the magnetic field that shields us from cosmic radiation. It also gave us plate tectonics, which continually renews and rumples the surface. If Earth were perfectly smooth, it would be covered everywhere with water to a depth of four kilometers. <> There might be life in that lonesome ocean, but there certainly wouldn’t be baseball. In addition to having a beneficial interior, we also have the right elements in the correct proportions.
Our Moon, however, is more than a quarter the diameter of the Earth, ... Without the Moon’s steadying influence, the Earth would wobble like a dying top
it seems evident that if you wish to end up as a moderately advanced, thinking society, you need to be at the right end of a very long chain of outcomes involving reasonable periods of stability interspersed with just the right amount of stress and challenge (ice ages appear to be especially helpful in this regard) and marked by a total absence of real cataclysm
Carbon is only the fifteenth most common element, accounting for a very modest 0.048 percent of Earth’s crust, but we would be lost without it. What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous.
But at the height of the thermosphere, at fifty miles or more, the air is so thin that any two molecules will be miles apart and hardly ever come in contact. So although each molecule is very warm, there are few interactions between them and thus little heat transference. This is good news for satellites and spaceships
how Howard Somervell, on a 1924 British expedition up Everest, “found himself choking to death after a piece of infected flesh came loose and blocked his windpipe.” With a supreme effort Somervell managed to cough up the obstruction. It turned out to be “the entire mucus lining of his larynx.”
For reasons not entirely understood the lighter particles tend to become positively charged and to be wafted by air currents to the top of the cloud. The heavier particles linger at the base, accumulating negative charges. These negatively charged particles have a powerful urge to rush to the positively charged Earth, and good luck to anything that gets in their way. A bolt of lightning travels at 270,000 miles an hour
the first, much thinner edition of that atlas, produced in 1896, divided clouds into ten basic types, of which the plumpest and most cushiony-looking was number nine, cumulonimbus.1 That seems to have been the source of the expression “to be on cloud nine.”
* the average cloud is actually a benign and surprisingly insubstantial thing. .. You can get some sense of the immaterial quality of clouds by strolling through fog—which is, after all, nothing more than a cloud that lacks the will to fly.
The main agent of heat transfer on Earth is what is known as thermohaline circulation, which originates in slow, deep currents far below the surface
A six-inch cube of Dover chalk will contain well over a thousand liters of compressed carbon dioxide that would otherwise be doing us no good at all. Altogether there is about twenty thousand times as much carbon locked away in the Earth’s rocks as in the atmosphere.
A glass of water may not appear terribly lively, but every molecule in it is changing partners billions of times a second. That’s why water molecules stick together to form bodies like puddles and lakes, but not so tightly that they can’t be easily separated as when, for instance, you dive into a pool of them... In one sense the bond is very strong—it is why water molecules can flow uphill when siphoned... It is also why water has surface tension.
In 1994, thirty-four thousand ice hockey gloves were swept overboard from a Korean cargo ship during a storm in the Pacific. The gloves washed up all over, from Vancouver to Vietnam, helping oceanographers to trace currents more accurately than they ever had before.
deep-sea vents: A type of worm called an alvinellid was found living right on the margins, with the water temperature 140 degrees warmer at its head than at its tail.
why the oceans don’t grow saltier with time: Geophysicists realized that the vents were acting much like the filters in a fish tank. As water is taken down into the crust, salts are stripped from it, and eventually clean water is blown out again through the chimney stacks. The process is not swift—it can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean—but it is marvelously efficient as long as you are not in a hurry.
Perhaps nothing speaks more clearly of our psychological remoteness from the ocean depths than that the main expressed goal for oceanographers during International Geophysical Year of 1957–58 was to study “the use of ocean depths for the dumping of radioactive wastes.” ... Before it was halted in the 1990s, the United States had dumped many hundreds of thousands of drums into about fifty ocean sites
We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas. Even the most substantial ocean creatures are often remarkably little known to us—including the most mighty of them all, the great blue whale,
The indigestible parts of giant squid, in particular their beaks, accumulate in sperm whales' stomachs into the substance known as ambergris
any roughy you have eaten may well have been born when Victoria was Queen. Roughy have adopted this exceedingly unhurried lifestyle because the waters they live in are so resource-poor. In such waters, some fish spawn just once in a lifetime. Clearly these are populations that cannot stand a great deal of disturbance. Unfortunately, by the time this was realized the stocks had been severely depleted.
Hemoglobin is only 146 amino acids long, a runt by protein standards, yet even it offers 10190 possible amino acid combinations, which is why it took the Cambridge University chemist Max Perutz twenty-three years—a career, more or less—to unravel it. For random events to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability—like a whirlwind spinning through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled jumbo jet, in the colorful simile of the astronomer Fred Hoyle.
The actual chemistry of all this is a little arcane for our purposes here, but it is enough to know that if you make monomers wet they don’t turn into polymers—except when creating life on Earth. How and why it happens then and not otherwise is one of biology’s great unanswered questions.
* Whatever prompted life to begin, it happened just once. That is the most extraordinary fact in biology, perhaps the most extraordinary fact we know. Everything that has ever lived, plant or animal, dates its beginnings from the same primordial twitch. .. it cleaved itself and produced an heir. A tiny bundle of genetic material passed from one living entity to another, and has never stopped moving since.
“Well, one school of thought says it was actually cool then because the sun was much weaker.” (I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the “Chinese restaurant problem”—because we had a dim sun.)
In an anaerobic (or a non-oxygen-using) world, oxygen is extremely poisonous. Our white cells actually use oxygen to kill invading bacteria.
billion years such tiny exertions raised the level of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere to 20 percent, preparing the way for the next, more complex chapter in life’s history. <> It has been suggested that the cyanobacteria at Shark Bay are perhaps the slowest-evolving organisms on Earth, and certainly now they are among the rarest. Having prepared the way for more complex life forms, they were then grazed out of existence nearly everywhere by the very organisms whose existence they had made possible.
* even after a billion years mitochondria behave as if they think things might not work out between us. They maintain their own DNA. <> They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do. In short, they keep their bags packed. They don’t even speak the same genetic language as the cell in which they live.
* Any bacterium can take pieces of genetic coding from any other. Essentially, as Margulis and Sagan put it, all bacteria swim in a single gene pool. Any adaptive change that occurs in one area of the bacterial universe can spread to any other.
A species called Micrococcus radiophilus was found living happily in the waste tanks of nuclear reactors, gorging itself on plutonium and whatever else was there.
Fungi: Structurally they have more in common with animals in that they build their cells from chitin, a material that gives them their distinctive texture. The same substance is used to make the shells of insects and the claws of mammals, though it isn’t nearly so tasty in a stag beetle as in a Portobello mushroom.
slime molds are, make no mistake, among the most interesting organisms in nature. When times are good, they exist as one-celled individuals, much like amoebas. But when conditions grow tough, they crawl to a central gathering place and become, almost miraculously, a slug.
Bacteria can be exasperatingly difficult to isolate and study. Only about 1 percent will grow in culture. Considering how wildly adaptable they are in nature, it is an odd fact that the one place they seem not to wish to live is a petri dish.
Archaeans are more different from bacteria than you and I are from a crab or spider. Singlehandedly Woese had discovered an unsuspected division of life, so fundamental that it stood above the level of kingdom at the apogee of the Universal Tree of Life, as it is rather reverentially known... Three new principal categories—Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya
If Woese’s new arrangement teaches us anything it is that life really is various and that most of that variety is small, unicellular, and unfamiliar. It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance toward largeness and complexity—in a word, toward us. We flatter ourselves. .. Of the twenty-three main divisions of life, only three—plants, animals, and fungi—are large enough to be seen by the human eye
The most effective strategy of all is to enlist the help of a mobile third party. Infectious organisms love mosquitoes because the mosquito’s sting delivers them directly to a bloodstream where they can get straight to work before the victim’s defense mechanisms can figure out what’s hit them.
One of the odder aspects of infection is that microbes that normally do no harm at all sometimes get into the wrong parts of the body and “go kind of crazy,”... “It happens all the time with car accidents when people suffer internal injuries. Microbes that are normally benign in the gut get into other parts of the body
IT ISN’T EASY to become a fossil. .. First, you must die in the right place. Only about 15 percent of rocks can preserve fossils, so it’s no good keeling over on a future site of granite. In practical terms the deceased must become buried in sediment, where it can leave an impression,... the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today—that’s 270 million people with 206 bones each—will only be about fifty bones..
Throughout the nineteenth century, trilobites were almost the only known forms of early complex life,... These were creatures with limbs, gills, nervous systems, probing antennae, “a brain of sorts,” in Fortey’s words, and the strangest eyes ever seen. Made of calcite rods, the same stuff that forms limestone, they constituted the earliest visual systems known.
Walcott : There, 8,000 feet above sea level, he found a shale outcrop, about the length of a city block, containing an unrivaled array of fossils from soon after the moment when complex life burst forth in dazzling profusion—the famous Cambrian explosion. Walcott had found, in effect, the holy grail of paleontology. The outcrop became known as the Burgess Shale, and for a long time it provided “our sole vista upon the inception of modern life in all its fullness,”
* One, Opabinia, had five eyes and a nozzle-like snout with claws on the end. Another, a disc-shaped being called Peytoia, looked almost comically like a pineapple slice. A third had evidently tottered about on rows of stilt-like legs, and was so odd that they named it Hallucigenia. There was so much unrecognized novelty in the collection that at one point upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, “Oh fuck, not another phylum.”
Alas, it turns out the Cambrian explosion may not have been quite so explosive as all that. <> The Cambrian animals, it is now thought, were probably there all along, but were just too small to see... to have many of them, all distinct but clearly related, turning up simultaneously in the fossil record in places as far apart as China and New York clearly suggests that we are missing a big part of their history.
* lichens are slow-growing. It may take a lichen more than half a century to attain the dimensions of a shirt button. .. It would be hard to imagine a less fulfilling existence. “They simply exist,” Attenborough adds, “testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake.” <> It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is.
* To live on land: The slow fusion of the continents into a single landmass, Pangaea, meant there was much, much less coastline than formerly and thus much less coastal habitat. So competition was fierce. There was also an omnivorous and unsettling new type of predator on the scene, one so perfectly designed for attack that it has scarcely changed in all the long eons since its emergence: the shark.
Some took to this new means of locomotion with such uncanny facility that they haven’t changed their techniques in all the time since. Then, as now, dragonflies could cruise at up to thirty-five miles an hour, instantly stop, hover, fly backwards, and lift far more proportionately than any human flying machine.
Most animals are tetrapods, and all living tetrapods have one thing in common: four limbs that end in a maximum of five fingers or toes. Dinosaurs, whales, birds, humans, even fish— all are tetrapods, which clearly suggests they come from a single common ancestor.
The KT meteor: These are difficult inconsistencies... what about those like bees that navigate by sunlight and need pollen? Explaining their survival isn’t so easy.” Above all, there are the corals. Corals require algae to survive and algae require sunlight, and both together require steady minimum temperatures.
* on the whole, it is true, most of the survivors were small and furtive. Indeed, with the world dark and hostile, it was a perfect time to be small, warm-blooded, nocturnal, flexible in diet, and cautious by nature—the very qualities that distinguished our mammalian forebears. Had our evolution been more advanced, we would probably have been wiped out.
Stephen Jay Gould expressed it succinctly in a well-known line: “Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured—never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history.” <> We started this chapter with three points: Life wants to be; life doesn’t always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct.
When the crates arrived, the curators excitedly jimmied them open to see what they had been left and were surprised, to put it mildly, to discover that a very large number of specimens bore the museum’s own labels. Mr. Meinertzhagen, it turned out, had been helping himself to their collections for years.
in the nineteenth century mosses and lichens weren’t distinguished. True mosses aren’t actually fussy about where they grow, so they are no good as natural compasses. In fact, mosses aren’t actually much good for anything. “Perhaps no great group of plants has so few uses,
Joseph Banks was such an astute and inventive collector. Even when unable to go ashore at Rio de Janeiro because of a quarantine, he sifted through a bale of fodder sent for the ship’s livestock and made new discoveries.
* Carl Linné: Rarely has a man been more comfortable with his own greatness. He spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits of himself, ... It was never wise to question his generous self-assessments. Those who did so were apt to find they had weeds named after them. Linnaeus’s other striking quality was an abiding—at times, one might say, a feverish—preoccupation with sex... To the parts of one species of clam he gave the names v ulva, labia, pubes, anus, and hymen. He grouped plants by the nature of their reproductive organs
before Linnaeus the common names of many plants and animals had been heartily vulgar. The dandelion was long popularly known as the “pissabed” because of its supposed diuretic properties
whether you are a “lumper” or a “splitter,” as they say in the biological world... The problem is that there are five thousand species of grass and many of them look awfully alike even to people who know grass. In consequence, some species have been found and named at least twenty times, and there are hardly any, it appears, that haven’t been independently identified at least twice.
* In the late 1980s the common chrysanthemum was banished (on apparently sound scientific principles) from the genus of the same name and relegated to the comparatively drab and undesirable world of the genus Dendranthema. Chrysanthemum breeders are a proud and numerous lot, and they protested
Godfray particularly stresses the absence of attention being paid to the systematizing possibilities of the Internet. The fact is that taxonomy by and large is still quaintly wedded to paper.
Dr. Maunder believes that the move toward low-temperature washing machine detergents has encouraged bugs to proliferate. As he puts it: 'If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice.'
Take the hardy and little-known organisms known as bdelloid rotifers. These are microscopic animals that can survive almost anything. .. They can be found all over the world, but you could have all the bdelloid rotifer experts in the world to dinner and not have to borrow plates from the neighbors.
* Surprises at the cellular level turn up all the time. In nature, nitric oxide is a formidable toxin and a common component of air pollution. So scientists were naturally a little surprised when, in the mid-1980s, they found it being produced in a curiously devoted manner in human cells. Its purpose was at first a mystery, but then scientists began to find it all over the place—controlling the flow of blood and the energy levels of cells, attacking cancers and other pathogens, regulating the sense of smell, even assisting in penile erections. It also explained why nitroglycerine, the well-known explosive, soothes the heart pain known as angina. (It is converted into nitric oxide in the bloodstream, relaxing the muscle linings of vessels,
cells also vary in liveliness. Your skin cells are all dead. It’s a somewhat galling notion to reflect that every inch of your surface is deceased.
No such device was listed among Vermeer's personal effects after his death, but it happens that the executor of Vermeer's estate was none other than Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the most secretive lens-maker of his day.
* Cell: The membrane is not, as most of us imagine it, a durable, rubbery casing... , it is made up of a type of fatty material known as a lipid, which has the approximate consistency “of a light grade of machine oil,” .. at the microscopic level things behave differently. To anything on a molecular scale water becomes a kind of heavy-duty gel, and a lipid is like iron.
Each strand of DNA is on average attacked or damaged once every 8.4 seconds—ten thousand times in a day—by chemicals and other agents
Typically a cell will contain some 20,000 different types of protein, and of these about 2,000 types will each be represented by at least 50,000 molecules. “This means,” says Nuland, “that even if we count only those molecules present in amounts of more than 50,000 each, the total is still a very minimum of 100 million protein molecules in each cell... Every day you produce and use up a volume of ATP equivalent to about half your body weight.
Darwin was invited to sail on the naval survey ship HMS Beagle, essentially as dinner company for the captain, Robert FitzRoy, whose rank precluded his socializing with anyone other than a gentleman.
If natural selection were to work, some alternative, unconsidered mechanism was required. <> Unknown to Darwin and everyone else, eight hundred miles away in a tranquil corner of Middle Europe a retiring monk named Gregor Mendel was coming up with the solution.
depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived. <> Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that your line is not pure. You couldn’t be here without a little incest—actually quite a lot of incest—albeit at a genetically discreet remove.
* Your body, in short, loves to make DNA and without it you couldn’t live. Yet DNA is not itself alive. No molecule is, but DNA is, as it were, especially unalive. It is “among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world,” .. That is why it can be recovered from patches of long-dried blood or semen in murder investigations and coaxed from the bones of ancient Neandertals.
James Watson, an American prodigy who had distinguished himself as a boy as a member of a highly popular radio program called The Quiz Kids.. who had entered the University of Chicago aged just fifteen... Their assumption was that if you could determine the shape of a DNA molecule you would be able to see—correctly, as it turned out—how it did what it did. They hoped to achieve this, it would appear, by doing as little work as possible beyond thinking, and no more of that than was absolutely necessary.
If Franklin was not warmly forthcoming with her findings, she cannot be altogether blamed. Female academics at King’s in the 1950s were treated with a formalized disdain that dazzles modern sensibilities (actually any sensibilities).
Croll was the first to suggest that cyclical changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit, from elliptical (which is to say slightly oval) to nearly circular to elliptical again, might explain the onset and retreat of ice ages. No one had ever thought before to consider an astronomical explanation for variations in Earth’s weather.
Essentially Milankovitch had to work out the angle and duration of incoming solar radiation at every latitude on Earth, in every season, for a million years, adjusted for three ever-changing variables... in 1914 Milankovitch suddenly got a great deal of that when World War I broke out and he was arrested owing to his position as a reservist in the Serbian army. He spent most of the next four years under loose house arrest.. He was possibly the happiest prisoner of war in history.
“It is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow, however little, lasts.” It is thought that an ice age could start from a single unseasonal summer. The leftover snow reflects heat and exacerbates the chilling effect. “The process is self-enlarging, unstoppable, and once the ice is really growing it moves,” says McPhee.
* It is mildly unnerving to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history—the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest—has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather. Previous interglacials have lasted as little as eight thousand years.
it appears that we have had at least seventeen severe glacial episodes in the last 2.5 million years or so—the period that coincides with the rise of Homo erectus in Africa followed by modern humans. Two commonly cited culprits for the present epoch are the rise of the Himalayas and the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, the first disrupting air flows, the second ocean currents.
An icy planet should reflect so much heat that it would stay frozen forever. It appears that rescue may have come from our molten interior. Once again, we may be indebted to tectonics for allowing us to be here. The idea is that we were saved by volcanoes
Whole continents sagged under the weight of so much ice and even now, twelve thousand years after the glaciers’ withdrawal, are still rising back into place. The ice sheets didn’t just dribble out boulders and long lines of gravelly moraines, but dumped entire landmasses—Long Island and Cape Cod and Nantucket, among others—as they slowly swept along.
In the long run, incidentally, ice ages are by no means bad news for the planet. They grind up rocks and leave behind new soils of sumptuous richness, and gouge out fresh water lakes that provide abundant nutritive possibilities for hundreds of species of being. They act as a spur to migration and keep the planet dynamic. As Tim Flannery has remarked: “There is only one question you need ask of a continent in order to determine the fate of its people: ‘Did you have a good ice age?’ ”
Koenigswald’s discoveries might have been more impressive still but for a tactical error that was realized too late. He had offered locals ten cents for every piece of hominid bone they could come up with, then discovered to his horror that they had been enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones to maximize their income.
the whole of our understanding of human prehistory is based on the remains, often exceedingly fragmentary, of perhaps five thousand individuals. “You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck
We have a good brain, with which we can devise strategies, and we have hands with which we can fling or brandish hurtful objects. We are the only creature that can harm at a distance. We can thus afford to be physically vulnerable.
some forgotten sailor or sailor’s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings... A passing employee, aghast, tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb. <> As a result of this and other departures from common sense, we are not now entirely sure what a living dodo was like.
There a curator grew very excited because the bird was a relic species of flightless wrens—the only example of a flightless perching bird ever found anywhere. He set off at once for the island, but by the time he got there the cat had killed them all. Twelve stuffed museum species of the Stephens Island flightless wren are all that now exist.
It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people who were most intensely interested in the world’s living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them. <> No one represented this position on a larger scale (in every sense) than Lionel Walter Rothschild, the second Baron Rothschild.
The tragedy for many Hawaiian birds was that they were not only distinctive, desirable, and rare—a dangerous combination in the best of circumstances—but also often heartbreakingly easy to take. The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover
Edward O. Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: “One planet, one experiment.” If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here—and by “we” I mean every living thing.