by Bill Bryson
17 Luck was not always with the Mendeleyevs: Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry, p.312.
18 There he was a competent but not terribly outstanding chemist: Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry, p.111.
19 this was an idea whose time had not quite yet come: Carey (ed.), The Faber Book of Science, p.155.
20 chemistry really is just a matter of counting: Ball, H2O, p.139.
21 “the most elegant organizational chart ever devised”: Krebs, The History and Use of our Earth’s Chemical Elements, p.23.
22 “120 or so” known elements: from a review in Nature, “Mind over Matter?,” by Gautum R. Desiraju, 26 Sept. 2002.
23 “purely speculative”: Heiserman, Exploring Chemical Elements and their Compounds, p.33.
24 Marie Curie dubbed the effect “radioactivity”: Bodanis, E = mc2, p.75.
25 He never accepted the revised figures: Lewis, The Dating Game, p.55.
26 “Appropriately … it is an unstable element”: Strathern, Mendeleyev’s Dream, p.294.
27 featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its “Radio-active mineral springs”: advertisement in Time magazine, 3 Jan. 1927, p.24.
28 It wasn’t banned in consumer products until 1938: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, p.133.
29 Her lab books are kept in lead-lined boxes: Science, “We Are Made of Starstuff,” 4 May 2001, p.863.
Chapter 8: Einstein’s Universe
1 a deck of cards: Ebbing, General Chemistry, p.755.
2 his courses attracted an average of slightly over one student a semester: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.106.
3 which dazzlingly elucidated the thermodynamic principles of, well, nearly everything: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.109.
4 In essence, what Gibbs did was show that thermodynamics didn’t apply simply to heat and energy: Snow, The Physicists, p.7.
5 Gibbs’s Equilibrium has been called “the Principia of thermodynamics”: Kevles, The Physicists, p.33.
6 he came to the United States with his family as an infant and grew up in a mining camp in California’s gold rush country: Kevles, The Physicists, pp.27–8.
7 “The speed of light turned out to be the same in all directions and at all seasons”: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.64.
8 “probably the most famous negative result in the history of physics”: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.208.
9 Michelson counted himself among those who believed that the work of science was nearly at an end: Nature, “Physics from the Inside,” 12 July 2001, p.121.
10 of which three, according to C. P. Snow, “were among the greatest in the history of physics”: Snow, The Physicists, p.101.
11 His very first paper, on the physics of fluids in drinking straws: Bodanis, E = mc2, p.6.
12 only to discover that the quietly productive J. Willard Gibbs in Connecticut had done that work as well: Boorse et al., The Atomic Scientists, p.142.
13 is one of the most extraordinary scientific papers ever published: Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.193.
14 It was … as if Einstein “had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided”: Snow, The Physicists, p.101.
15 you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7×1018 joules of potential energy: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.172.
16 Even a uranium bomb … releases less than 1 per cent of the energy it could release: Bodanis, E = mc2, p.77.
17 “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied. “It’s so seldom I have one”: Nature, “In the Eye of the Beholder,” 21 March 2002, p.264.
18 “it is undoubtedly the highest intellectual achievement of humanity”: Boorse et al., The Atomic Scientists, p.53.
19 According to Einstein himself, he was simply sitting in a chair when the problem of gravity occurred to him: Bodanis, E = mc2, p.204.
20 the publication in early 1917 of a paper entitled “Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity”: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.36.
21 “Without it,” wrote Snow in 1979: Snow, The Physicists, p.21.
22 Crouch was hopelessly out of his depth, and got nearly everything wrong: Bodanis, E = mc2, p.215.
23 “I am trying to think who the third person is”: quoted in Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p.91; Aczel, God’s Equation, p.146.
24 and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.37.
25 a baseball thrown at 160 kilometres an hour will pick up 0.000000000002 grams of mass on its way to home plate: Brockman and Matson, How Things Are, p.263.
26 However, to turn to Bodanis again, we all commonly encounter other kinds of relativity: Bodanis, E = mc2, p.83.
27 “the ultimate sagging mattress”: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.55.
28 “In some sense, gravity does not exist”: Kaku, “The Theory of the Universe?” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p.161.
29 and Edwin enjoyed a wealth of physical endowments, too: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.423.
30 At a single high-school track meeting: Christianson, Edwin Hubble, p.33.
31 One Harvard computer, Annie Jump Cannon, used her repetitive acquaintance with the stars to devise a system of stellar classifications: Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.258.
32 they are elderly stars that have moved past their “main sequence phase”: Ferguson, Measuring the Universe, pp.166–7.
33 They could be used as standard candles: Ferguson, Measuring the Universe, p.166.
34 was developing his seminal theory that dark patches on the Moon were caused by swarms of seasonally migrating insects: Moore, Fireside Astronomy, p.63.
35 In 1923 he showed that a puff of distant gossamer in the Andromeda constellation known as M31 wasn’t a gas cloud at all: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.45; Natural History, “Delusions of Centrality,” Dec. 2002-Jan. 2003, pp.28–32.
36 The wonder, as Stephen Hawking has noted, is that no-one had hit on the idea of the expanding universe before: Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, pp.71–2.
37 In 1936 Hubble produced a popular book called The Realm of the Nebulae: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.13.
38 Half a century later the whereabouts of the century’s greatest astronomer remain unknown: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.28.
Chapter 9: The Mighty Atom
1 “All things are made of atoms”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.4.
2 45 billion billion molecules: Gribbin, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science, p.250.
3 up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p.127.
4 Atoms themselves, however, go on practically for ever: Rees, Just Six Numbers, p.96.
5 If you wanted to see … a paramecium swimming in a drop of water: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, pp.4–5.
6 “We might as well attempt to introduce a new planet into the solar system”: Boorstin, The Discoverers, p.679.
7 In 1826, the French chemist P. J. Pelletier travelled to Manchester: Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p.260.
8 a confused Pelletier, upon beholding the great man, stammered: Holmyard, Makers of Chemistry, p.222.
9 forty thousand people viewed the coffin and the funeral cortège stretched for two miles: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 5, p.433.
10 For a century after Dalton made his proposal: von Baeyer, Taming the Atom, p.17.
11 it was said to have played a part in the suicide of … Ludwig Boltzmann: Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, p.3.
12 to raise a little flax and a lot of children: Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, p.104.
13 “Had she taken a bullfighter”: quoted in Cropper, Great Physicists, p.259.
14 It was a feeling Rutherford would have understood: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.317.
15 would give up halfway through and tell the students to work it out for themselves: Wilson, Rutherford
, p.174.
16 “as far as he could see”: Wilson, Rutherford, p.208.
17 He was one of the first … to see: Wilson, Rutherford, p.208.
18 “Why use radio?”: quoted in Cropper, Great Physicists, p.328.
19 “Every day I grow in girth. And in mentality”: Snow, Variety of Men, p.47.
20 gave it up when he was persuaded by a senior colleague that radio had little future: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.94.
21 Some physicists thought that atoms might be cube-shaped: Asimov, The History of Physics, p.551.
22 The number of protons is what gives an atom its chemical identity: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.90.
23 Add or subtract a neutron or two and you get an isotope: Atkins, The Periodic Kingdom, p.106.
24 only one-millionth of a billionth of the full volume of the atom: Gribbin, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science, p.35.
25 but a fly many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.245.
26 “they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed”: Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.288.
27 “Because atomic behaviour is so unlike ordinary experience”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.117.
28 the delay in discovery was probably a very good thing: Boorse et al., The Atomic Scientists, p.338.
29 “I do not even know what a matrix is”: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.269.
30 This isn’t a matter of simply needing more precise instruments: Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.288.
31 until it is observed an electron must be regarded as being “at once everywhere and nowhere”: David H. Freedman, “Quantum Liaisons,” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p.137.
32 “a person who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what had been said”: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.109.
33 “Don’t try”: Von Baeyer, Taming the Atom, p.43.
34 The cloud itself is essentially just a zone of statistical probability: Ebbing, General Chemistry, p.295.
35 “an area of the universe that our brains just aren’t wired to understand”: Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p.62.
36 “things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.33.
37 where matter could pop into existence from nothing at all: Alan Lightman, “First Birth,” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p.13.
38 It is as if … you had two identical pool balls: Lawrence Joseph, “Is Science Common Sense?” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, pp.42–3.
39 Remarkably, the phenomenon was proved in 1997: Christian Science Monitor, “Spooky Action at a Distance,” 4 Oct. 2001.
40 one cannot “predict future events exactly”: Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p.61.
41 Scientists have dealt with this problem … “by not thinking about it”: David H. Freedman, “Quantum Liaisons,” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p.141.
42 The weak nuclear force … is ten billion billion billion times stronger than gravity: Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p.297.
43 The grip of the strong force reaches out only to about one-hundred-thousandth of the diameter of an atom: Asimov, Atom, p.258.
44 He devoted the rest of his life: Snow, The Physicists, p.89.
Chapter 10: Getting the Lead Out
1 Among the many symptoms associated with over-exposure are blindness, insomnia, kidney failure, hearing loss, cancer: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.88.
2 “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard”: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.92.
3 In fact, Midgley knew only too well the perils of lead poisoning: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.92.
4 One leak from a refrigerator at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929 killed more than a hundred people: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.96.
5 A single kilogram of CFCs can capture and annihilate 70,000 kilograms of atmospheric ozone: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, p.62.
6 A single CFC molecule is about ten thousand times more efficient at exacerbating greenhouse effects than a molecule of carbon dioxide: Science, “The Ascent of Atmospheric Sciences,” 13 Oct. 2000, p.299.
7 His death was itself memorably unusual: Nature, 27 Sept. 2001, p.364.
8 Up to this time, the oldest reliable dates went back no further than the First Dynasty in Egypt: Willard Libby, “Radiocarbon Dating,” from Nobel Lecture, 12 Dec. 1960.
9 After eight half-lives, only 0.39 per cent of the original radioactive carbon remains: Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age, p.58.
10 “every raw radiocarbon date you read today is given as too young by around 3 per cent”: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.174.
11 it is like miscounting by a dollar when counting to a thousand: Flannery, The Future Eaters, p.151.
12 Among the more dubious are dates just around the time that people first came to the Americas: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, pp.174–5.
13 the long-running debate over whether syphilis originated in the New World or the Old: Science, “Can Genes Solve the Syphilis Mystery?,” 11 May 2001, p.109.
14 Unfortunately, he now met yet another formidable impediment to acceptance: Lewis, The Dating Game, p.204.
15 It was this that eventually led him to create a sterile laboratory: Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p.58.
16 “a figure that stands unchanged 50 years later”: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.173.
17 In one such study, a doctor who had no specialized training in chemical pathology: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.94.
18 about 90 per cent of it appeared to come from car exhaust pipes: Nation, “The Secret History of Lead,” 20 March 2000.
19 The notion became the foundation of ice core studies, on which much modern climatological work is based: Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p.60.
20 Ethyl executives allegedly offered to endow a chair at Caltech “if Patterson was sent packing”: Nation, “The Secret History of Lead,” 20 March 2000.
21 Almost immediately lead levels in the blood of Americans fell by 80 per cent: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.169.
22 Americans alive today each have about 625 times more lead in their blood than people did a century ago: Nation, 20 March 2000.
23 The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow, quite legally, by about a hundred thousand tonnes a year: Green, Water, Ice and Stone, p.258.
24 “44 years after most of Europe”: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.191.
25 continued to contend “that research has failed to show that leaded gasoline poses a threat to human health”: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.191.
26 will almost certainly be around and devouring ozone long after you and I have shuffled off: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, pp.110–11.
27 Worse, we are still introducing huge amounts of CFCs into the atmosphere every year: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, p.63.
28 Two recent popular books on the history of the dating of the Earth actually manage to misspell his name: The books are Mysteries of Terra Firma and The Dating Game, both of which make his name “Claire.” (Since this note first appeared, I have received a rather severe rebuke from the author of the latter book, Cherry Lewis, informing me that her choice of spelling was intentional and arose from correspondence she had had with Patterson’s widow. Except for the other cited book, Lewis’s choice of spelling accords with no other published sources I can find, including Patterson’s many obituaries in leading journals—which were, after all, literally the last word on the man and his name. Nonetheless I am happy to accept that Ms. Lewis’s variant spelling of Patterson’s name was done intentionally and I unreservedly apologize to her for any dismay caused.)
29 made the additional, rather astounding error of thinking Patterson was a
woman: Nature, “The Rocky Road to Dating the Earth,” 4 Jan. 2001, p.20.
Chapter 11: Muster Mark’s Quarks
1 In 1911, a British scientist named C. T. R. Wilson: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.325.
2 “if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist”: quoted in Cropper, Great Physicists, p.403.
