A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

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.

In essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute, but relative both to the observer and to the thing being observed, and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other 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.