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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Cox
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August 6, 2020 - October 30, 2025
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman used to tell a story about an artist friend who challenged him about the beauty of a flower. ‘You as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing’ he said. Feynman, after describing his friend as ‘kind of nutty’, went on to explain that whilst the aesthetic beauty of nature is surely open to everyone, albeit not in quite as refined a way, the world becomes more beautiful as our understanding deepens.
It only adds; I don’t understand how it subtracts.’
Let us find out, by studying nature, developing theories and testing those theories against our observations of the living world, how life can be fully explained by the laws of physics and chemistry, as it surely must be. This, I submit, is an excellent description of the science of biology.
‘How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?’ Erwin Schrödinger
The human condition seems special; our conscious experience feels totally divorced from the mechanistic world of atoms and forces, and perhaps even from the ‘lower forms’ of life. If there is a central argument through the five films and chapters in Wonders of Life, it is that this feeling is an emergent illusion created by the sheer complexity of our arrangement of atoms.
This is in the spirit of Feynman’s flower. Deeper understanding confers that most precious thing – wonder.
for all the people
Only the Christians, Jews and Muslims.
not merely because the King James version of the Bible contains some of the greatest prose ever written in the English language,
Brian says without presenting supporting evidence.
RETURN OF THE KING
An average adult monarch has a life span of little more than four weeks, but, when faced with the journey south, a ‘methuselah generation’ emerges; a generation that lives nearly ten times longer than its parents and grandparents.
You can take a southerly bearing at other times of day if you have a watch. Point the hour hand at the Sun, and the line halfway between the hour hand and the 12 o’clock mark will point due south. The monarchs use a sophisticated version of this technique – known as a time-compensated Sun compass – to maintain their southerly orientation during their migration.
Is the emergence of complex living things such as monarch butterflies, fir trees and human beings an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, or does it rely on a home whose existence is so improbable that Earth and its living ecosystem is a rare, even unique, corner of the Milky Way galaxy, itself one of billions of galaxies in the observable Universe?
A VERY SPECIAL HOME
Even though it covers only 1 per cent of the land area of our planet, it is home to over 200,000 different species – at the last count, 10 per cent of Earth’s bank of life.
Mexico.
Mexico is one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth. Even though it covers only 1 per cent of the land area of our planet, it is home to over 200,000 different species – 10 per cent of Earth’s bank of life.
Remove light, heat, soil, plants, insects, and even oxygen, and life still thrives. But one ingredient is, as far as we know, absolutely essential for life to exist.
SIMPLE BUT COMPLEX
THE HISTORY OF THE EXPLORATION OF WATER
There is something quite instructive in Cavendish’s approach to science. Even though his devotion to the phlogiston theory was wayward, to say the least, he did not allow his theoretical prejudice to contaminate his experimental results. This is why he was able to make genuine discoveries while holding at least some views about his subject that were flat-out wrong. That is the mark of a great experimental scientist!
MR BELL’S GUIDE TO THE ELECTROLYSIS OF WATER
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE…
Hydrogen forms 74 per cent of all the elemental mass. The second-lightest element, helium, comprises 24 per cent. These two elements dominate because they were formed in the first few minutes after the Big Bang.
All of the oxygen and carbon atoms in the Universe today, including all of those in your body, were produced in the cores of stars by nuclear fusion and scattered out into space as the stars died.
After the hydrogen molecule (H2) and carbon monoxide (CO), water is the third most common molecule in the Universe.
On 22 July 2011, a team of astronomers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) announced the discovery of the largest, most distant reservoir of water ever detected. A gigantic cloud of H2O, containing 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined, was sighted over 12 billion light years away from Earth.
The star systems and gas spiralling into this voracious monster release a power output equivalent to 1,000 trillion suns as they slide down the sheer space-time slopes. This generates a shock wave on a galactic scale, forcing hydrogen and oxygen molecules together in unimaginable numbers to produce a giant reservoir of water.
WALKING ON WATER
Gerridae are successful and vicious killers, piercing the body of a captured spider or fly with a specially adapted mouthpart and finishing it off by sucking out its insides.
Its short front legs are used for capturing prey, while its middle legs propel it through the water. Its back legs are long and slender, spreading the animal’s weight over a larger surface area. These gangly appendages contribute to the pond skater’s ability to walk on water, but alone they would not be enough to keep it afloat. Every square millimetre of its body is covered with a cohort of tiny hairs that increase the surface area still further. These hairs are also hydrophobic, making the whole animal water-resistant. Without this adaptation, a single drop of rain would be enough to weigh
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Look at a common pond skater, and you’ll be observing … an exquisitely balanced relationship between its anatomical features and the physical properties of water.
TREETOPS TO TEARDROPS: THE MAGIC OF HYDROGEN BONDS
Water’s angled geometry means that the region surrounding the hydrogen atoms has a slight positive charge, and the region away from the hydrogen atoms has a slight negative charge. This means that water is a ‘polar’ molecule – one side is slightly negatively charged, and the other is slightly positive, although the molecule itself remains electrically neutral.
Without hydrogen bonding, therefore, there would be no liquid water on the balmy Earth – no oceans, no rivers and lakes, no raindrops and no life.
Water’s high boiling point and surface tension are just the beginning, as far as biology is concerned. Water’s polar nature doesn’t only allow the formation of hydrogen bonds between water molecules, it also allows it to break up other weakly bonded molecular structures and disperse them. In other words, it is a superb solvent, able to dissolve salts and other nutrients which in turn allows them to be dispersed around the body and made available for chemical reactions to take place.
It is also highly structured in its liquid phase. We now know that water behaves more like a gel than a liquid, with complex networks of hydrogen-bonded water molecules forming giant, fleeting structures. These structures, it is thought, play a vital role in the complex biological reactions within cells. In a sense, water acts like scaffolding around which biology can happen.
It is known that the activity of proteins depends both on their chemical structure and their precise orientation and shape, and hydrogen bonding between water molecules and the protein molecules plays an important role in orientating these complex molecu...
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INTO THE LIGHT
For many biologists, life on Earth didn’t begin in the light, but rather in the darkness of the deep oceans.
The transformation of light from threat to food required one of life’s most extraordinary inventions: oxygenic photosynthesis. The evolution of this biological process ultimately resulted in the capture of carbon and the release of large amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere, which in turn played a key role in triggering the explosive evolution of life from the simple to the complex and conscious.
Without light, the process of oxygenic photosynthesis would not be possible. It was this biological process that resulted in the release of oxygen into the Earth’s atmosphere.
A TRAIN JOURNEY THROUGH TIME
Melanin is a complex molecule able to form polymers with varying structures depending on their location in the body. Its active heart, however, is a series of rings of carbon atoms bound together by a sea of mobile electrons. When a high-energy photon from the Sun hits one of the electrons, it doesn’t break the molecule apart. Instead, the energy is dissipated in around a picosecond, which is very fast indeed. In a million millionths of a second, the potentially threatening photon has been adsorbed and all its energy has been converted to heat. The melanin molecule survives intact to fight
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the dangers of UV light would have been one of the first challenges faced by life as first it rose to the ocean surface and then eventually colonised the land.
A CHILD STAR
The Sun’s chromosphere is the source of ultraviolet radiation. It is thought that, in the first few billion years of its life, the Sun was seven times brighter in the ultraviolet.
The early Earth was not a place that we would recognise as home – 4 billion years ago, our planet was under siege. Bombarded by the rocky remnants of the Solar System’s formation, our world was a tortured land of barren rock and dust-filled skies. The days were short, sweeping by in just five hours as the Earth spun frantically on its axis. Each morning this desolate landscape would have been met with the sight of a rising sun very different from the one we see today. Hanging in the sky was a sun in its infancy. If there had been human eyes to view it, it would have appeared only 70 per cent
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The relative lack of brightness, however, was deceptive. Beyond the visible and into the UV, the infant Sun was dazzling. This is because the Sun’s outer layers were much hotter than they are today, energised by the star’s higher spin rate giving rise to intense electromagnetic heating.
It is thought that the young Sun was seven times brighter in the ultraviolet during the first few billion years of its life.
