topics: |  science | history | biology | geology | physics | chemistry

In this extremely broad coverage of the history of science and other
knowledge, Bill Bryson shows himself to be a true polymath.  This is
possibly the greatest science book since Isaac Asimov.

Excerpts

Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i
can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather
more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years.

If you'd prefer instead to build a more old-fashioned, standard Big
Bang universe, you'll need additional materials. In fact, you will
need to gather up everything there is-every last mote and particle of
matter between here and the edge of creation-and squeeze it into a
spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all. It
is known as a singularity.

In either case, get ready for a really big bang. Naturally, you will
wish to retire to a safe place to observe the
spectacle. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because
outside the singularity there is no where. When the universe begins to
expand, it won't be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only
space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.

It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of
pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space,
no darkness. The singularity has no "around" around it. There is no
space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how
long it has been there -- whether it has just lately popped into being,
like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly
awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it
to emerge from.

And so, from nothing, our universe begins.

In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and
expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly
dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively second (a
second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into
ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that
govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million
billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten
billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that
create the lighter elements-principally hydrogen and helium, with a
dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three
minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has
been produced. We have a universe.

When this moment happened is a matter of some debate. Cosmologists
have long argued over whether the moment of creation was 10 billion
years ago or twice that or something in between. The consensus seems
to be heading for a figure of about 13.7 billion years, but these
things are notoriously difficult to measure.

. . . in the 1940s by the Russian-born astrophysicist George Gamow
that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic
background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Gamow calculated
that by the time it crossed the vastness of the cosmos, the radiation
would reach Earth in the form of microwaves.  In a more recent paper
he had even suggested an instrument that might do the job: the Bell
antenna at Holmdel. Unfortunately, neither Penzias and Wilson had read
Gamow's paper.

The noise that Penzias and Wilson were hearing was, of course, the
noise that Gamow had postulated. 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. In his book The Inflationary
Universe, Alan Guth provides an analogy that helps to put this finding
in perspective. If you think of peering into the depths of the
universe as like looking down from the hundredth floor of the Empire
State Building (with the hundredth floor representing now and street
level representing the moment of the Big Bang), at the time of Wilson
and Penzias's discovery the most distant galaxies anyone had ever
detected were on about the sixtieth floor, and the most distant
things-quasars-were on about the twentieth. Penzias and Wilson's
finding pushed our acquaintance with the visible universe to within
half an inch of the sidewalk.

. . . this disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something
we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it
doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is
accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time
you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always
watch the birth of the universe.

Although everyone calls it the Big Bang, many books caution us not to
think of it as an explosion in the conventional sense. It was, rather,
a vast, sudden expansion on a whopping scale. So what caused it?

One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an
earlier, collapsed universe-that we're just one of an eternal cycle of
expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen
machine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call "a false
vacuum" or "a scalar field" or "vacuum energy"-some quality or thing,
at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the
nothingness that was. It seems impossible that you could get something
from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there
is a universe is evident proof that you can. It may be that our
universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different
dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the
place. Or it may be that space and time had some other forms
altogether before the Big Bang-forms too alien for us to imagine-and
that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the
universe went from a form we can't understand to one we almost
can. "These are very close to religious questions," Dr. Andrei Linde,
a cosmologist at Stanford, told the New York Times in 2001.

By doing a lot of math and watching carefully what goes on in particle
accelerators, scientists believe they can look back to 10^-43 seconds
after the moment of creation, when the universe was still so small
that you would have needed a microscope to find it. We mustn't swoon
over every extraordinary number that comes before us, but it is
perhaps worth latching on to one from time to time just to be reminded
of their ungraspable and amazing breadth. Thus 10^-43 is
0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001, or one 10 million
trillion trillion trillionths of a second.

According to Guth's theory, at one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a
trillionth of a trillionth of a second, gravity emerged. After another
ludicrously brief interval it was joined by electromagnetism and the
strong and weak nuclear forces-the stuff of physics. These were joined
an instant later by swarms of elementary particles-the stuff of
stuff. From nothing at all, suddenly there were swarms of photons,
protons, electrons, neutrons, and much else-between 1079 and 1089 of
each, according to the standard Big Bang theory.

Such quantities are of course ungraspable. It is enough to know that
in a single cracking instant we were endowed with a universe that was
vast-at least a hundred billion light-years across, according to the
theory, but possibly any size up to infinite-and perfectly arrayed for
the creation of stars, galaxies, and other complex systems.

[1024 miles - a million million million million (that's
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles across (the size of the
universe)]

"If you could visit a cell, you wouldn't like it," he says. "Blown up
to a scale at which atoms were about the size of peas, a cell itself
would be a sphere roughly half a mile across, and supported by a
complex framework of girders called the cytoskeleton. Within it,
millions upon millions of objects -- some the size of basketballs,
others the size of cars -- would whiz about like bullets. There
wouldn't be a place you could stand without being pummeled and ripped
thousands of times every second from every direction. Even for its
full-time occupants the inside of a cell is a hazardous place. Each
strand of DNA is on average attacked or damaged once every 8.4 seconds
-- 10,000 times in a day -- by chemicals and other agents that whack
into or carelessly slice through it, and each of these wounds must be
swiftly stitched up if the cell is not to perish.'

--

The first asteroid was discovered on the first day of the century (Jan 1
1801) by a Sicilian named Giuseppi Piazzi.

---

the great French naturalist the Comte de Buffon - "he of the heated spheres
from the previous chapter:

	living things in the New World were inferior in nearly every way
	to those of the Old World. America, Buffon wrote in his vast and
	much-esteemed Histoire Naturelle, was a land where the water was
	stagnant, the soil unproductive, and the animals without size or
	vigor, their constitutions weakened by the `noxious vapors' that rose
	from its rotting swamps and sunless forests. In such an environment
	even the native Indians lacked virility. `They have no beard or body
	hair,' Buffon sagely confided, `and no ardor for the female.' Their
	reproductive organs were `small and feeble.'

---

at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, an extraordinary child named Mary
Anning "aged eleven, twelve, or thirteen, ... 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. It was the start of a remarkable career. 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 [ten years of patient excavation], another marine monster, and
one of the first and best pterodactyls.  hall of ancient marine reptiles at
the Natural History Museum in London...  But even with the advantage of her
skills, significant finds were rare and she passed most of her life in
poverty.

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