by Bill Bryson
20 Our nearest neighbour in the cosmos, Proxima Centauri: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.1; Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p.39.
21 The average distance between stars: Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, p.251.
22 “If we were randomly inserted into the universe,” Sagan wrote: Sagan, Cosmos, p.5.
Chapter 3: The Reverend Evans’s Universe
1 releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns: Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p.37.
2 “It’s like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once”: Robert Evans, interviewed Hazelbrook, Australia, 2 Sept. 2001.
3 devotes a passage to him in a chapter on autistic savants: Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, p.189.
4 “an irritating buffoon”: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.164.
5 refused to be left alone with him: Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p.125.
6 On at least one occasion Zwicky threatened to kill Baade: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.18.
7 Atoms would literally be crushed together: Nature, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Neutron Star,” 7 Nov. 2002, p.31.
8 enough to make the biggest bang in the universe: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.171.
9 hasn’t been verified yet: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.174.
10 “one of the most prescient documents in the history of physics and astronomy”: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.174.
11 “he did not understand the laws of physics”: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.175.
12 wouldn’t attract serious attention for nearly four decades: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.18.
13 Only about six thousand stars are visible to the naked eye: Harrison, Darkness at Night, p.3.
14 In 1987 Saul Perlmutter … set out to find a more systematic method of searching for them: BBC Horizon documentary, “From Here to Infinity,” transcript of programme first broadcast 28 Feb. 1999.
15 “The news of such an event travels out at the speed of light, but so does the destructiveness”: interview with John Thorstensen, Hanover, NH, 5 Dec. 2001.
16 Only half a dozen times in recorded history have supernovae been close enough to be visible to the naked eye: note from Evans, 3 Dec. 2002.
17 “cosmologist and controversialist”: Nature, “Fred Hoyle (1915–2001),” 17 Sept. 2001, p.270.
18 humans evolved projecting noses … as a way of keeping cosmic pathogens from falling into them: Gribbin and Cherfas, The First Chimpanzee, p.190.
19 continually creating new matter as it went: Rees, Just Six Numbers, p.75.
20 100 million degrees or more: Bodanis, E = mc2, p.187.
21 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system: Asimov, Atom, p.294.
22 In just 200 million years, possibly less: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.6.
23 Most of the lunar material, it is thought, came from the Earth’s crust, not its core: New Scientist supplement, “Firebirth,” 7 Aug. 1999, n.p.
24 in fact it was first proposed in the 1940s by Reginald Daly of Harvard: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p.38.
25 the Earth might well have frozen over permanently: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.144.
Chapter 4: The Measure of Things
1 In the course of a long and productive career: Sagan, Comet, p.52.
2 “a very specific and precise curve”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.90.
3 Hooke … claimed that he had solved the problem already: Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p.219.
4 and rubbed it around “betwixt my eye and the bone”: quoted by Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.106.
5 but then told no-one about it for twenty-seven years: Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, p.538.
6 Even the great German mathematician Gottfried von Leibniz: Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, p.546.
7 “one of the most inaccessible books ever written”: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.31.
8 “proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.69.
9 Newton, as was his custom, contributed nothing: Calder, The Comet Is Coming!, p.39.
10 He was to be paid instead in copies of The History of Fishes: Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p.36.
11 to “within a scantling”: Wilford, The Mapmakers, p.98.
12 The Earth was 43 kilometres stouter when measured equatorially than when measured from top to bottom around the poles: Asimov, Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos, p.86.
13 Unluckier still was Guillaume le Gentil: Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.134.
14 Mason and Dixon sent a note to the Royal Society: Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p.141.
15 “said to have been born in a coal mine”: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 12, p.1302.
16 We know that in 1772: American Heritage, “Mason and Dixon: Their Line and its Legend,” Feb. 1964, pp.23–9.
17 For convenience, Hutton had assumed: Jungnickel and McCormmach, Cavendish, p.449.
18 it was Michell to whom he turned for instruction in making telescopes: Calder, The Comet Is Coming!, p.71.
19 to a “degree bordering on disease”: Jungnickel and McCormmach, Cavendish, p.306.
20 “talk as it were into vacancy”: Jungnickel and McCormmach, Cavendish, p.305.
21 he also foreshadowed “the work of Kelvin and G. H. Darwin on the effect of tidal friction”: Crowther, Scientists of the Industrial Revolution, pp.214–15.
22 At the heart of the machine were two 350-pound lead balls: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 3, p.1261.
23 six billion trillion metric tons: Economist, “G Whiz,” 6 May 2000, p.82.
Chapter 5: The Stone-Breakers
1 Hutton was by all accounts a man of the keenest insights and liveliest conversation: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 10, pp.354–6.
2 “almost entirely innocent of rhetorical accomplishments”: Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology, p.18.
3 He became a leading member of a society called the Oyster Club: McPhee, Basin and Range, p.99.
4 quotations from French sources, still in the original French: Gould, Time’s Arrow, p.66.
5 A third volume was so unenticing that it wasn’t published until 1899: Oldroyd, Thinking About the Earth, pp.96–7.
6 Even Charles Lyell … couldn’t get through it: Schneer (ed.), Toward a History of Geology, p.128.
7 In the winter of 1807: Geological Society papers, A Brief History of the Geological Society of London.
8 The members met twice a month from November until June: Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy, p.25.
9 As even a Murchison supporter conceded: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.28.
10 In 1794 he was implicated in a faintly lunatic-sounding conspiracy: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.39.
11 known ever since as Parkinson’s disease: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 15, pp.314–15.
12 because his mother was convinced that Scots were feckless drunks: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.26.
13 Once Mrs. Buckland found herself being shaken awake: Annan, The Dons, p.27.
14 His other slight peculiarity: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.30.
15 Often when lost in thought: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.202.
16 but it was Lyell most people read: Schneer (ed.), Toward a History of Geology, p.139.
17 “and called for a new pack”: Clark, The Huxleys, p.48.
18 “Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence”: quoted in Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, p.167.
19 He failed to explain … how mountain ranges were formed: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.135.
20 “the refrigeration of the globe”: Gould, Ever since Darwin, p.151.
21 He rejected the notion that animals and plants suffered sudden annihilations: Stanley, Extinction, p.5.
22 “one yet saw it partially through his eyes”: quoted in Schn
eer (ed.), Toward a History of Geology, p.288.
23 “De la Beche is a dirty dog”: quoted in Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy, p.194.
24 with the perky name of J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.190.
25 Lyell originally intended to employ “-synchronous” for his endings: Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p.305.
26 these number in the “tens of dozens”: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.50.
27 Rocks are divided into quite separate units: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p.200.
28 “I have seen grown men glow incandescent with rage”: Fortey, Trilobite!, p.238.
29 When Buckland speculated: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.149.
30 The most well known early attempt: Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p.185.
31 “most thinking people accepted the idea that the earth was young”: cited in Gould, Time’s Arrow, p.114.
32 “No geologist of any nationality whose work was taken seriously”: Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy, p.42.
33 Even the Reverend Buckland: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.192.
34 somewhere between 75,000 and 168,000 years old: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.105 and Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, pp.246–7.
35 Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald: Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p.335.
36 The German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.78.
37 and written (in French and English) a dozen papers in pure and applied mathematics of such dazzling originality that he had to publish them anonymously: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.79.
38 At the age of twenty-two he returned to Glasgow: Dictionary of National Biography, Supplement 1901–1911, p.508.
Chapter 6: Science Red in Tooth and Claw
1 who described it at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.4.
2 The cause of this froth was a strange assertion by the great French naturalist the Comte de Buffon: Kastner, A Species of Eternity, p.123.
3 A Dutchman named Corneille de Pauw: Kastner, A Species of Eternity, p.124.
4 in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species of Living and Fossil Elephants: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.15.
5 Jefferson for one couldn’t abide the thought that whole species would ever be permitted to vanish: Simpson, Fossils and the History of Life, p.7.
6 On the evening of 5 January 1796, he was sitting in a coaching inn in Somerset: Harrington, Dance of the Continents, p.175.
7 “The whys and wherefores cannot come within the Province of a Mineral Surveyor”: Lewis, The Dating Game, pp.17–18.
8 Cuvier resolved the matter to his own satisfaction: Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, p.217.
9 In 1806 the Lewis and Clark expedition passed through the Hell Creek formation: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.5.
10 She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue-twister: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.3.
11 The plesiosaur alone took her ten years of patient excavation: Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, p.127.
12 Mantell could see at once it was a fossilized tooth: New Zealand Geographic, “Holy Incisors! What a Treasure!,” April-June 2000, p.17.
13 the name was actually suggested to Buckland by his friend Dr. James Parkinson: Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p.31.
14 Eventually he was forced to sell most of his collection to pay off his debts: Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p.34.
15 the world’s first theme park: Fortey, Life, p.214.
16 he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs and other parts: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.133.
17 Once his wife returned home to find a freshly deceased rhinoceros filling the front hallway: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.200.
18 some were no bigger than rabbits: Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p.5.
19 the one thing they most emphatically were not was lizards: Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies, p.22.
20 dinosaurs constitute not one but two orders of reptiles: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.33.
21 He was the only person Charles Darwin was ever known to hate: Nature, “Owen’s Parthian shot,” 12 July 2001, p.123.
22 referred to his father’s “lamentable coldness of heart”: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.321.
23 Huxley was leafing through a new edition of Churchill’s Medical Directory: Clark, The Huxleys, p.45.
24 His deformed spine was removed and sent to the Royal College of Surgeons: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.291.
25 “not quite as original as it appeared”: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, pp.261–2.
26 he became the driving force behind the creation of London’s Natural History Museum: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.30.
27 Before Owen, museums were designed primarily for … the elite: Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum, p.24.
28 He even proposed, very radically, to put informative labels on each display: Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum, p.98.
29 “lying everywhere like logs”: Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p.97.
30 he managed to win them over by repeatedly taking out and replacing his false teeth: Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p.100.
31 it was an affront that he would never forget: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.73.
32 increased the number of known dinosaur species in America from nine to almost one hundred and fifty: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.93.
33 Nearly every dinosaur that the average person can name: Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p.90.
34 Between them they managed to “discover” a species called Uintatheres anceps no fewer than twenty-two times: Psihoyos and Knoebber, Hunting Dinosaurs, p.16.
35 mercifully obliterated by a German bomb in the Blitz: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.325.
36 much of it was taken to New Zealand by his son Walter: Newsletter of the Geological Society of New Zealand, “Gideon Mantell—The New Zealand Connection,” April 1992; New Zealand Geographic, “Holy Incisors! What a Treasure!” April-June 2000, p.17.
37 hence the name: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.151.
38 He calculated that the Earth was 89 million years old: Lewis, The Dating Game, p.37.
39 Such was the confusion: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.173.
Chapter 7: Elemental Matters
1 could make himself invisible: Ball, H2O, p.125.
2 An ounce of phosphorus retailed for 6 guineas: Durant, Age of Louis XIV, p.516.
3 and got credit for none of them: Strathern, Mendeleyev’s Dream, p.193.
4 which is why we ended up with two branches of chemistry: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p.14.
5 perhaps £12 million in today’s money: White, Rivals, p.63.
6 the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of his bosses: Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry, p.92.
7 jour de bonheur: Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus, p.366.
8 It was in such a capacity in 1780 that Lavoisier made some dismissive remarks: Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry, pp.95–6.
9 failed to uncover a single one: Strathern, Mendeleyev’s Dream, p.239.
10 taken away and melted down for scrap: Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry, p.124.
11 “a highly pleasurable thrilling”: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.139.
12 Theatres put on “laughing gas evenings”: Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, p.76.
13 What Brown noticed: Silver, The Ascent of Science, p.201.
14 “lukewarmness in the cause of liberty”: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 19, p.686.
15 a diameter of 0.00000008 centimetres: Asimov, The History of Physics, p.501.
16 Later, fo
r no special reason: Ball, H2O, p.139.
