I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.
Cavendish, for his part, conducted experiments in which he subjected himself to graduated jolts of electrical current, diligently noting the increasing levels of agony until he could keep hold of his quill, and sometimes his consciousness, no longer.
In the tradition of the day, Hutton took an interest in nearly everything, from mineralogy to metaphysics. He conducted experiments with chemicals, investigated methods of coal mining and canal building, toured salt mines, speculated on the mechanisms of heredity, collected fossils, and propounded theories on rain,
In the tradition of the day, Hutton took an interest in nearly everything, from mineralogy to metaphysics. He conducted experiments with chemicals, investigated methods of coal mining and canal building, toured salt mines, speculated on the mechanisms of heredity, collected fossils, and propounded theories on rain, the composition of air, and the laws of motion, among much else.
In the winter of 1807, thirteen like-minded souls in London got together at the Freemasons Tavern at Long Acre, in Covent Garden, to form a dining club to be called the Geological Society. The idea was to meet once a month to swap geological notions over a glass or two of Madeira and a convivial dinner. The price of the meal was set at a deliberately hefty fifteen shillings to discourage those whose qualifications were merely cerebral.
His other slight peculiarity was the habit, when distracted by thought, of taking up improbable positions on furniturelying across two chairs at once or resting his head on the seat of a chair, while standing up (to quote his friend Darwin). Often when lost in thought he would slink so low in a chair that his buttocks would all but touch the floor.
One of the better early attempts at dating the planet came from the ever-reliable Edmond Halley, who in 1715 suggested that if you divided the total amount of salt in the worlds seas by the amount added each year, you would get the number of years that the oceans had been in existence, which would give you a rough idea of Earths age. The logic was appealing, but unfortunately no one knew how much salt was in the sea or by how much it increased each year,
Clearly there was more to extinctions than could be accounted for by a single Noachian deluge, as the Biblical flood was known. Cuvier resolved the matter to his own satisfaction by suggesting that Genesis applied only to the most recent inundation. God, it appeared, hadnt wished to distract or alarm Moses with news of earlier, irrelevant extinctions.
For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products,
Radiation, in fact, is so pernicious and long lasting that even now her papers from the 1890seven her cookbooksare too dangerous to handle. Her lab books are kept in lead-lined boxes, and those who wish to see them must don protective clothing.
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, thats not necessary, he replied. Its so seldom I have one.
Est-ce que jai lhonneur de maddresser à Monsieur Dalton? for he could hardly believe his eyes that this was the chemist of European fame, teaching a boy his first four rules. Yes, said the matter-of-fact Quaker. Wilt thou sit down whilst I put this lad right about his arithmetic?
All science is either physics or stamp collecting,
Rutherford was not an especially brilliant man and was actually pretty terrible at mathematics. Often during lectures he would get so lost in his own equations that he would give up halfway through and tell the students to work it out for themselves. According to his longtime colleague James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron, he wasnt even particularly clever at experimentation. He was simply tenacious and open-minded.
Rutherford was not an especially brilliant man and was actually pretty terrible at mathematics. Often during lectures he would get so lost in his own equations that he would give up halfway through and tell the students to work it out for themselves. According to his longtime colleague James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron, he wasnt even particularly clever at experimentation. He was simply tenacious and open-minded. For brilliance he substituted shrewdness and a kind of daring.
In 1913, while puzzling over the structure of the atom, Bohr had an idea so exciting that he postponed his honeymoon to write what became a landmark paper.
It also explained why ocean floors everywhere were so comparatively youthful. None had ever been found to be older than about 175 million years, which was a puzzle because continental rocks were often billions of years old.
It took some inspired deductions by the astronomer William Herschel to work out that they were nowhere near planet sized but much smaller. He called them asteroidsLatin for starlikewhich was slightly unfortunate as they are not like stars at all.
Every year the Earth accumulates some thirty thousand metric tons of cosmic spherulesspace dust in plainer languagewhich
We were caught practicing geology without a license.
For most geologists the idea of a devastating impact was, as Eugene Shoemaker noted, against their scientific religion.
Luis Alvarez was openly contemptuous of paleontologists and their contributions to scientific knowledge. Theyre really not very good scientists. Theyre more like stamp collectors,
even worse was the realization that the people we thought wed been collaborating with hadnt bothered to share with us their new findings. Why not? He shrugged. Who knows? Anyway, it was a pretty good insight into how unattractive science can get when youre playing at a certain level.
Nucleus G was only about the size of a small mountain, but it created wounds in the Jovian surface the size of Earth.
could,Saturn 5, was retired years ago and has never been replaced. Nor could we quickly build a new one because, amazingly, the plans for Saturn launchers were destroyed as part of a NASA housecleaning exercise.
Until slightly under a century ago, what the best-informed scientific minds knew about Earths interior was not much more than what a coal miner knewnamely, that you could dig down through soil for a distance and then youd hit rock and that was about it.
followed by granite for the next 2,300 meters and basalt
The mountains, he told me, were known as the Gallatins. That gap is sixty or maybe seventy miles across. For a long time nobody could understand why that gap was there, and then Bob Christiansen realized that it had to be because the mountains were just blown away. When youve got sixty miles of mountains just obliterated, you know youre dealing with something pretty potent.
He was famously absent-minded. Once after his wife had sent him upstairs to change for a dinner party he failed to return and was discovered asleep in bed in his pajamas. When roused, Haldane explained that he had found himself disrobing and assumed it was bedtime.
He had a particular interest in the effects of toxic gases on the human body. To understand more exactly how carbon monoxide leaks killed miners, he methodically poisoned himself, carefully taking and measuring his own blood samples the while. He quit only when he was on the verge of losing all muscle control
By the time he was a teenager, the two often tested gases and gas masks together, taking turns to see how long it took them to pass out.
In one experiment, Haldane simulated a dangerously hasty ascent to see what would happen. What happened was that the dental fillings in his teeth exploded. Almost every experiment, Norton writes, ended with someone having a seizure, bleeding, or vomiting.
Perforated eardrums were quite common, but, as Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.
For reasons that are still poorly understood, beneath depths of about a hundred feet nitrogen becomes a powerful intoxicant. Under its influence divers had been known to offer their air hoses to passing fish or decide to try to have a smoke break.
Like all mammals, humans are good at generating heat butbecause we are so nearly hairlessnot good at keeping it.
cobalt or nitrogen. Tin barely makes it into the top fifty, eclipsed
Modern cattle need quite a lot of copper because they evolved in parts of Europe and Africa where copper was abundant.
The Romans also flavored their wine with lead, which may be part of the reason they are not the force they used to be.
When elements dont occur naturally on Earth, we have evolved no tolerance for them, and so they tend to be extremely toxic to us, as with plutonium.
At any one moment 1,800 thunderstorms are in progress around the globesome 40,000 a day.
Low-pressure systems are created by rising air, which conveys water molecules into the sky, forming clouds and eventually rain. Warm air can hold more moisture than cool air, which is why tropical and summer storms tend to be the heaviest.
When two such systems meet, it often becomes manifest in the clouds. For instance, stratus cloudsthose unlovable, featureless sprawls that give us our overcast skieshappen when moisture-bearing updrafts lack the oomph to break through a level of more stable air above,
A tropical hurricane can release in twenty-four hours as much energy as a rich, medium-sized nation like Britain or France uses in a year. The impulse of the atmosphere
A tropical hurricane can release in twenty-four hours as much energy as a rich, medium-sized nation like Britain or France uses in a year.
Although he was an active and respected member of the Linnaean
Although he was an active and respected member of the Linnaean
If you walk 100 yards through a typical fog, you will come into contact with only about half a cubic inch of waternot enough to give you a decent drink.
When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade.
In the ocean the residence time is thought to be more like a hundred years.
slowit can take 1,500 years for water to travel from the North Atlantic to the mid-Pacificbut
Trillions upon trillions of tiny marine organisms that most of us have never heard offoraminiferans and coccoliths and calcareous algaecapture atmospheric carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, when it falls as rain and use it (in combination with other things) to make their tiny shells. By locking the carbon up in their shells, they keep it from being reevaporated into the atmosphere, where it would build up dangerously as a greenhouse gas. Eventually all the tiny foraminiferans and coccoliths and so on die and fall to the bottom of the sea, where they are compressed into limestone. It is remarkable, when you behold an extraordinary natural feature like the White Cliffs of Dover in England, to reflect that it is made up of nothing but tiny deceased marine organisms,
Of the 3 percent of Earths water that is fresh, most exists as ice sheets. Only the tiniest amount0.036 percentis found in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, and an even smaller partjust 0.001 percentexists in clouds or as vapor. Nearly 90 percent of the planets ice is in Antarctica, and most of the rest is in Greenland.
This was a living system based not on photosynthesis but on chemosynthesis, an arrangement that biologists would have dismissed as preposterous had anyone been imaginative enough to suggest it.
there is a lot of salt in the seaenough to bury every bit of land on the planet to a depth of about five hundred feet.
For every pound of shrimp harvested, about four pounds of fish and other marine creatures are destroyed.
It is almost impossible for us whose time on Earth is limited to a breezy few decades to appreciate how remote in time from us the Cambrian outburst was. If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period. It was, in other words, an extremely long time ago, and the world was a very different place.
There was so much unrecognized novelty in the collection that at one point upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, Oh fuck, not another phylum.
the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake.
Every day you produce and use up a volume of ATP equivalent to about half your body weight.
was sent an advance copy of a new book by the naturalist Charles Darwin. Elwin read the book with interest and agreed that it had merit, but feared that the subject matter was too narrow to attract a wide audience. He urged Darwin to write a book about pigeons instead. Everyone is interested in pigeons, he observed helpfully.
Finally, but not least, he devoted much effort to studying the consequences of inbreedinga matter of private interest to him. Having married his own cousin, Darwin glumly suspected that certain physical and mental frailties among his children arose from a lack of diversity in his family tree.
If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived. Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here.
Chromosomes had been discovered by chance in 1888 and were so called because they readily absorbed dye and thus were easy to see under the microscope.
Koenigswalds discoveries might have been more impressive still but for a tactical error that was realized too late. He had offered locals ten cents for every piece of hominid bone they could come up with, then discovered to his horror that they had been enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones to maximize their income.
the rare knack for being amused and earnest at the same time.
Schouten made life-sized paintings of every animal they could reasonably re-create, and Flannery wrote the words. The result was an extraordinary book calledA Gap in Nature , constituting the most completeand, it must be said, movingcatalog of animal extinctions from the last three hundred years.
an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is.