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Book: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Quotes of Book: A Short History of Nearly
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  1. Bill Bryson _ A Short History of Nearly

    Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so
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  2. Bill Bryson _ A Short History of Nearly

    As James Surowiecki noted in a New Yorker article, given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks and antidepressants that people will take every day for ever, drug companies not surprisingly opt for the latter. Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn't given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s.
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  3. Bill Bryson _ A Short History of Nearly

    You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy-enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. Everything has this kind of energy trapped within it. We're just not very good at getting it out. Even a uranium bomb-the most energetic thing we have produced yet-releases less than 1 percent of the energy it could release if only we were more cunning.
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  4. Bill Bryson _ A Short History of Nearly

    Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria's point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them.
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  5. Bill Bryson _ A Short History of Nearly

    What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous.
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  6. Bill Bryson _ A Short History of Nearly

    For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS {for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere}.
    book-quotesciencehumourspace

  7. Bill Bryson _ A Short History of Nearly

    If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately one million trillion, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived!.
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  8. Bill Bryson _ A Short History of Nearly

    As we parted at the Natural History Museum in London, I asked Richard Fortey how science ensures that when one person goes there's someone ready to take his place. He chuckled rather heartily at my naiveté. 'I'm afraid it's not as if we have substitutes sitting on the bench somewhere waiting to be called in to play. When a specialist retires or, even more unfortunately, dies, that can bring a stop to things in that field, sometimes for a very long while.' And I suppose that's why you value someone who spends forty-two years studying a single species of plant, even if it doesn't produce anything terribly new?' 'Precisely,' he said, 'precisely.' And he really seemed to mean it.
    book-quotescience

  9. Bill Bryson _ A Short History of Nearly

    The dandelion was long popularly known as the 'pissabed' because of its supposed diuretic properties, and other names in everyday use included 'mare's fart', 'naked ladies', 'twitch-ballock', 'hounds-piss', 'open arse', and 'bum-towel'.
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  10. Bill Bryson _ A Short History of Nearly

    In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
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  11. Bill Bryson _ A Short History of Nearly

    Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earths history."
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  12. Bill Bryson _ A Short History of Nearly

    There's something satisfying, I think,' Evans said, 'about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed.
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