A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

and squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all. It is known as a singularity.

The singularity has no around around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for

The consensus seems to be heading for a figure of about 13.7 billion years,

that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang.

at least a hundred billion light years across, according to the theory, but possibly any size up to infinite—and

If infinite, what is beyond that?

Now, the question that has occurred to all of us at some point is: what would happen if you travelled out to the edge of the universe and, as it were, put your head through the curtains?

If you ever have the chance to visit the hall of ancient marine reptiles at the Natural History Museum in London,

Confronted with an intractable problem, he was prepared to work at it harder and longer than most people and to be more receptive to unorthodox explanations.

dilution of the ocean’s salt content—from increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet,

Fortunately, that moment hasn’t happened, but the chances are good that it will. I don’t wish to interject a note of gloom just at this point, but the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly.

Natural History Museum in London and has delighted and informed generations of

When, as occasionally happens, a cell fails to expire in the prescribed manner, but rather begins to divide and proliferate wildly, we call the result cancer.