A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

(It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)

The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years,

In three minutes, 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe.

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.

The most challenging and non-intuitive of all the concepts in the General Theory of Relativity is the idea that time is part of space.