A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away.

The basic unit of measure in the solar system is the Astronomical Unit, or AU, representing the distance from the Sun to the Earth. Pluto is about 40 AUs from us, the heart of the Oort cloud about fifty thousand. In a word, it is remote.

The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh more than 500 billion kilograms.

The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish’s finding. Interestingly, all of this merely confirmed estimates made by Newton 110 years before Cavendish without any experimental evidence at all.

Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue-twister10 ‘She sells sea-shells on the seashore.’)

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 become24. We can never accelerate ourselves to the speed of light, and the harder we try (and the faster we go) the more distorted we will become, relative to an outside observer.

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

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.

So the atom turned out to be quite unlike the image that most people had created. The electron doesn’t fly around the nucleus like a planet around its sun, but instead takes on the more amorphous aspect of a cloud.

Sometime about a million and a half years ago, some forgotten genius of the hominid world did an unexpected thing. He (or very possibly she) took one stone and carefully used it to shape another. The result was a simple teardrop-shaped hand-axe, but it was the world’s first piece of advanced technology.