A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

Tune your

television to any channel it doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang.

remember that...

always watch the birth of th...

energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen.

what the equation is saying is that there is a huge amount—a really huge amount—of energy bound up in every material thing.

In essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute, but relative to both the observer and to the

thing being observed, and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become.

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.

protons, which have a positive electrical charge; electrons, which have a negative electrical charge; and neutrons, which have no charge.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves.

This means, as Stephen Hawking has observed with a touch of understandable excitement, that one cannot “predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!”

“Quantum theory is very worthy of regard,” he observed politely, but he really didn’t like it. “God doesn’t play dice,”

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.

indigestible parts of giant squid, in particular their beaks, accumulate in sperm whales’ stomachs into the substance known as ambergris, which is used as a fixative in perfumes. The next time you spray on Chanel No.