A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

Looking for a supernova, therefore, was a little like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone lighting a twenty-first birthday cake.

Benjamin Franklin famously risked his life by flying a kite in an electrical storm. In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face. Cavendish, for his part, conducted experiments in which he subjected himself to graduated jolts of electrical current, diligently noting the increasing levels of agony until he could keep hold of his quill, and sometimes his consciousness, no longer.

Physicists are notoriously scornful of scientists from other fields. When the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s wife left him for a chemist, he was staggered with disbelief. “Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood,” he remarked in wonder to a friend. “But a chemist…”

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

(Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.)

When elements don’t occur naturally on Earth, we have evolved no tolerance for them and so they tend to be extremely toxic to us, as with plutonium. Our tolerance for plutonium is zero: there is no level at which it is not going to make you want to lie down.

a big part of the reason that Earth seems so miraculously accommodating is that we evolved to suit its conditions.