A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.)

It is all, as you can see, just a little unwieldy, but it is the simplest model that can explain all that happens in the world of particles. Most particle physicists feel, as Leon Lederman remarked in a 1985 television documentary, that the Standard Model lacks elegance and simplicity. “It is too complicated. It has too many arbitrary parameters,” Lederman said. “We don’t really see the creator twiddling twenty knobs to set twenty parameters to create the universe as we know it.” Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness—or as Lederman put it: “There is a deep feeling that the picture is not beautiful.”

Incidentally, the first, much thinner edition of that atlas, produced in 1896, divided clouds into ten basic types, of which the plumpest and most cushiony-looking was number nine, cumulonimbus.1 That seems to have been the source of the expression “to be on cloud nine.”