A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot. With binoculars the number of stars you can see from a single location rises to about 50,000, and with a small two-inch telescope it leaps to 300,000. With a sixteen-inch telescope, such as Evans uses, you begin to count not in stars but in galaxies. From his deck, Evans supposes he can see between 50,000 and 100,000 galaxies, each containing tens of billions of stars.

When the poet Paul Valéry once asked Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied. “It’s so seldom I have one.”

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

Since 1946, the United States had been ferrying fifty-five-gallon drums of radioactive gunk out to the Farallon Islands, some thirty miles off the California coast near San Francisco, where it simply threw them overboard.

Overall, tropical rain forests cover only about 6 percent of Earth’s surface, but harbor more than half of its animal life and about two-thirds of its flowering plants, and most of this life remains unknown to us because too few researchers spend time in them.