A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bryson
Ref: Bill Bryson (2003). A Short History of Nearly Everything. NY Random House Publishing.
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Summary
To get from “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.
The start of the Ice Ages and the rise of Homo erectus in Africa followed by modern humans is commonly cited by two primary culprits for the present epoch: The rise of the Himalayas disrupting air flows. India, once an island, has pushed 2,000 kilometres into the Asian land mass over the past 45 million years, raising not only the Himalayas, but also the vast Tibetan plateau behind it. The hypothesis is that the higher landscape was not only cooler, but diverted winds in a way that made them flow north and towards North America, making it more susceptible to long-term chills. The second is the formation of the Isthmus of Panama disrupting ocean currents. Beginning about 5 mya, Panama rose from the sea, closing the gap between North and South America, disrupting the flows of warming currents between the Pacific and the Atlantic, and changing patterns of precipitation across at least half the world. One consequence was a drying out of Africa, which caused apes to climb down out of trees and go looking for a new way of living on the emerging savannas.
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Misc Quotes
Ordered complexity is commonplace in the universe.
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Ecology
Species Classification
Kingdom
Phylum: Describes the basic body plans of organisms.
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species
Stromatolites: a kind of living rock made by billions and billions of microscopic cyanobacteria. Their cumulative respirations over millions of years largely created Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere, paving the way for more complex living things.
If you wished to create another living object, whether a goldfish or a head of lettuce or a human being, you would need really only four principal elements: C, H, O, N; plus small amounts of a few others, principally S, P, Ca, & Fe. Put these together in three dozen or so combinations to form some sugars, acids and other basic compounds and you can build anything that lives.
The warmest organism found so far, according to Frances Ashcroft in Life at the Extremes, is Pyrolobus fumarii, which dwells in the walls of ocean vents where the temperature can reach 113 degrees Celsius. The upper limit for life is thought to be about 120 degrees Celsius, though no one actually knows.
“Wherever we go on Earth—even into what’s seemed like the most hostile possible environments for life—as long as there is liquid water and some source of chemical energy, we find life.”-Jay Bergstralh, NASA.
The absolute limit of human tolerance for continuous living appears to be about 5,500 meters.
Lichens: Partnership between fungi and algae. The fungi excrete acids which dissolve the surface of the rock, freeing minerals that the algae convert into food sufficient to sustain both.
Latitudinal Diversity Gradient (LDG): As a general rule, the variety of life is most impoverished at the poles and richest at low latitudes, as noted by the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.
Plants: Because they can’t flee from predators, plants have had to contrive elaborate chemical defenses, and so are particularly rich in intriguing compounds. Even now, nearly a quarter of all prescribed medicines are derived from just forty plants, with another 16% coming from animals or microbes, so there is a serious risk with every hectare of forest felled of losing medically vital possibilities.
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Reproduction
From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.
Life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment.
How fast a man’s beard grows, for instance, is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge).
Asexual Reproduction: valuable in good times, producing offspring that are exactly as well adapted genetically to their environment as their parents.
Sexual Reproduction: valuable when the environment changes, because the sexual shuffling of genes greatest variability, which helps the offspring survive in altered circumstances.
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Evolution
Neanderthals had brains that were significantly larger than those of modern people—1.8 litres for Neandertals versus 1.4 for modern people, according to one calculation. This is more than the difference between modern Homo sapiens and late Homo erectus, a species we are happy to regard as barely human. The argument put forward is that although our brains were smaller, they were somehow more efficient.
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Humans
Domain: Eukarya
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Homo
Species: sapien
Human Brain: makes up only 2% of the body's mass, but devour 20% of its energy in the form of glucose.
Human Heart: pumps 343 litres of blood an hour, over 8,000 litres every day, 3 million litres in a year—that’s enough to fill four Olympic-sized swimming pools—to keep all those cells freshly oxygenated. (And that’s at rest. During exercise the rate can increase as much as sixfold.) The oxygen is taken up by the mitochondria. These are the cells’ power stations and there are about a thousand of them in a typical human.
White Blood Cells: Your body holds lots of different varieties of defensive white blood cells—some ten million types in all, each designed to identify and destroy a particular sort of invader. It would be impossibly inefficient to maintain ten million separate standing armies, so each variety of white blood cell keeps only a few scouts on active duty. When an infectious agent—what’s known as an antigen—invades, relevant scouts identify the attacker and put out a call for reinforcements of the right type. While your body is manufacturing these forces, you are likely to feel wretched. The onset of recovery begins when the troops finally swing into action.
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—Human Genome—
A common way to regard the genome is as a kind of instruction manual for the body. Viewed this way, the chromosomes can be imagined as the book’s chapters and the genes as individual instructions for making proteins. The words in which the instructions are written are called codons and the letters are known as bases. The bases—the letters of the genetic alphabet—consist of the four nucleotides mentioned a page or two back: adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. Despite the importance of what they do, these substances are not made of anything exotic. Guanine, for instance, is the same stuff that abounds in, and gives its name to, guano.
DNA
DNA: The shape of a DNA molecule is like a spiral staircase or twisted rope ladder: the famous double helix. The uprights of this structure are made of a type of sugar called deoxyribose and the whole of the helix is a nucleic acid—hence the name “deoxyribonucleic acid.” The rungs (or steps) are formed by two bases joining across the space between, and they can combine in only two ways: guanine is always paired with cytosine and thymine always with adenine. The order in which these letters appear as you move up or down the ladder constitutes the DNA code; logging it has been the job of the Human Genome Project.
Each length of DNA comprises some 3.2 billion letters of coding, enough to provide 103,480,000,000 possible combinations, “guaranteed to be unique against all conceivable odds.
Junk DNA: 97% of your DNA consists of nothing but long stretches of meaningless garble- “junk” or “non-coding DNA.”
Junk DNA does have a use. It is the portion employed in DNA fingerprinting.
Replication: When it is time to produce a new DNA molecule, the two strands part down the middle, like the zip on a jacket, and each half goes off to form a new partnership. Because each nucleotide along a strand pairs up with a specific other nucleotide, each strand serves as a template for the creation of a new matching strand. If you possessed just one strand of your own DNA, you could easily enough reconstruct the matching side by working out the necessary partnerships: if the topmost rung on one strand was made of guanine, then you would know that the topmost rung on the matching strand must be cytosine. Work your way down the ladder through all the nucleotide pairings and eventually you would have the code for a new molecule. That is just what happens in nature, except that nature does it really quickly.
Mutation: Most of the time our DNA replicates with dutiful accuracy, but just occasionally—about one time in a million—a letter gets into the wrong place. This is known as a single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP, familiarly known to biochemists as a “Snip.” Generally these Snips are buried in stretches of noncoding DNA and have no detectable consequence for the body. But occasionally they make a difference. They might leave you predisposed to some disease, but equally they might confer some slight advantage—more protective pigmentation, for instance, or increased production of red blood cells for someone living at altitude. Over time, these slight modifications accumulate both in individuals and in populations, contributing to the distinctiveness of both.
Proteins & Amino Acids
Proteins are what you get when you string amino acids together, and we need a lot of them. No-one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body, and each one is a little miracle. By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn’t exist. To make a protein you need to assemble amino acids (which I am obliged by long tradition to refer to here as “the building blocks of life”) in a particular order, in much the same way that you assemble letters in a particular order to spell a word. The problem is that words in the amino-acid alphabet are often exceedingly long. To spell “collagen,” the name of a common type of protein, you need to arrange eight letters in the right order. To make collagen, you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence. But—and here’s an obvious but crucial point—you don’t make it. It makes itself, spontaneously, without direction, and this is where the unlikelihoods come in. The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil. It just isn’t going to happen. To grasp what a long shot its existence is, visualize a standard Las Vegas slot machine but broadened greatly—to about 27 metres, to be precise—to accommodate 1,055 spinning wheels instead of the usual three or four, and with twenty symbols on each wheel (one for each common amino acid). How long would you have to pull the handle before all 1,055 symbols came up in the right order? Effectively, for ever. Even if you reduced the number of spinning wheels to 200, which is actually a more typical number of amino acids for a protein, the odds against all 200 coming up in a prescribed sequence are 1x10260 (that is a 1 followed by 260 zeros). That in itself is a larger number than all the atoms in the universe.
To be of use, a protein must not only assemble amino acids in the right sequence, it must then engage in a kind of chemical origami and fold itself into a very specific shape. Even having achieved this structural complexity, a protein is no good to you if it can’t reproduce itself, and proteins can’t. For this you need DNA. DNA is a whiz at replicating—it can make a copy of itself in seconds—but can do virtually nothing else. So we have a paradoxical situation. Proteins can’t exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow. And there is more still. DNA, proteins and the other components of life couldn’t prosper without some sort of membrane to contain them. No atom or molecule has ever achieved life independently. Pluck any atom from your body and it is no more alive than is a grain of sand. It is only when they come together within the nurturing refuge of a cell that these diverse materials can take part in the amazing dance that we call life. Without the cell, they are nothing more than interesting chemicals. But without the chemicals, the cell has no purpose. As Davies puts it, “If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?”
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Cells
Nearly all your cells are built to fundamentally the same plan: they have an outer casing or membrane, a nucleus wherein resides the necessary genetic information to keep you going, and a busy space between the two called the cytoplasm. The membrane is not, as most of us imagine it, a durable, rubbery casing, something that you would need a sharp pin to prick. Rather, it is made up of a type of fatty material known as a lipid, which has the approximate consistency “of a light grade of machine oil,” to quote Sherwin B. Nuland. If that seems surprisingly insubstantial, bear in mind that at the microscopic level things behave differently. To anything on a molecular scale water becomes a kind of heavy-duty gel and a lipid is like iron.
Apoptosis: Programmed cell death.
Cancer: When, as occasionally happens, a cell fails to expire in the prescribed manner, but rather begins to divide and proliferate wildly, we call the result cancer. Cancer cells are really just confused cells. Cells make this mistake fairly regularly, but the body has elaborate mechanisms for dealing with it. It is only very rarely that the process spirals out of control. On average, humans suffer a fatal malignancy for each 100 million billion cell divisions. Cancer is bad luck in every possible sense of the term.
Cell Communication: The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally go wrong, but that they manage everything so smoothly for decades at a stretch. They do so by constantly sending and monitoring streams of messages—a cacophony of messages—from all around the body: instructions, queries, corrections, requests for assistance, updates, notices to divide or expire. Most of these signals arrive by means of couriers called hormones, chemical entities such as insulin, adrenaline, oestrogen and testosterone that convey information from remote outposts like the thyroid and endocrine glands. Still other messages arrive by telegraph from the brain or from regional centres in a process called paracrine signaling. Finally, cells communicate directly with their neighbours to make sure their actions are coordinated.
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ATP
Virtually all the food and oxygen you take into your body are delivered, after processing, to the mitochondria, where they are converted into a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP.
ATP molecules are essentially little battery packs that move through the cell providing energy for all the cell’s processes, and you get through a lot of it. At any given moment, a typical cell in your body will have about one billion ATP molecules in it, and in two minutes every one of them will have been drained dry and another billion will have taken their place. Every day you produce and use up a volume of ATP equivalent to about half your body weight. Feel the warmth of your skin. That’s your ATP at work.
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Microbiome
Every human body consists of about ten quadrillion cells, but is host to about a hundred quadrillion bacterial cells.
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Extinction
At least two dozen potential culprits have been identified as causes or prime contributors, including global warming, global cooling, changing sea levels, oxygen depletion of the seas (a condition known as anoxia), epidemics, giant leaks of methane gas from the sea floor, meteor and comet impacts, runaway hurricanes of a type known as hypercanes, huge volcanic upwellings and catastrophic solar flares.
The history of life,” wrote Gould,” is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.” Evolutionary success, it appeared, was a lottery.
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Paleontology
Fossilization: In order to become a fossil, several things must happen. First, you must die in the right place. Only about 15% of rocks can preserve fossils, so it’s no good keeling over on a future site of granite. In practical terms the deceased must become buried in sediment where it can leave an impression, like a leaf in wet mud, or decompose without exposure to oxygen, permitting the molecules in its bones and hard parts (and very occasionally softer parts) to be replaced by dissolved minerals, creating a petrified copy of the original. Then, as the sediments in which the fossil lies are carelessly pressed and folded and pushed about by Earth’s processes, the fossil must somehow maintain an identifiable shape. Finally, but above all, after tens of millions or perhaps hundreds of millions of years hidden away, it must be found and recognized as something worth keeping. Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, ever becomes fossilized.
The complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today—that’s 270 million people with 206 bones each—will only be about fifty bones, one-quarter of a complete skeleton. That’s not to say, of course, that any of these bones will ever actually be found. Bearing in mind that they can be buried anywhere within an area of slightly over 9.3 million square kilometres, little of which will ever be turned over, much less examined.
It has been estimated that less than one species in ten thousand has made it into the fossil record.
About 95% of all the fossils we possess are of animals that once lived under water, mostly in shallow seas.
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Dating Techniques
Radioactive Dating
Arthur Holmes devised a method for accurately dating rocks based on the decay rate of U into Pb, allowing him to show that Earth was at least three billion years old.
Ice Core Dating
Snowfall in places like Greenland accumulates into discrete annual layers (because seasonal temperature differences produce slight changes in coloration from winter to summer). By counting back through these layers and measuring the amount of Pb in each, scientists could work out global atmospheric Pb concentrations at any time for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. The notion became the foundation of ice core studies, on which much modern climatological work is based.
Carbon Dating
Invented by Willard Libby and based on the realization that all living things have within them an isotope of C called C-14, which begins to decay at a measurable rate the instant they die. C-14 has a half-life of about 5,600 years, so by working out how much of a given sample of carbon had decayed, Libby could get a good fix on the age of an object—though only up to a point. After eight half-lives, only 0.39% of the original radioactive C remains, which is too little to make a reliable measurement, so radiocarbon dating works only for objects up to forty thousand or so years old.
The volume of atmospheric C-14 varies depending on how well or not the Earth’s magnetism is deflecting cosmic rays. The decay constant, was out by about 3%.
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Pathogens
White cells are merciless and will hunt down and kill every last pathogen they can find. To avoid extinction, attackers have evolved two elemental strategies. Either they strike quickly and move on to a new host, as with common infectious illnesses like flu, or they disguise themselves so that the white cells fail to spot them, as with HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, which can sit harmlessly and unnoticed in the nuclei of cells for years before springing into action.
Sickness
Making a host unwell has certain benefits for the microbe. The symptoms of an illness often help to spread the disease. Vomiting, sneezing and diarrhea are excellent methods of getting out of one host and into position for boarding another. The most effective strategy of all is to enlist the help of a mobile third party. Infectious organisms love mosquitoes because the mosquito’s sting delivers them directly into a bloodstream where they can get straight to work before the victim’s defence mechanisms can figure out what’s hit them. This is why so many grade A diseases—malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, encephalitis and a hundred or so other less celebrated but often rapacious maladies—begin with a mosquito bite. It is a fortunate fluke for us that HIV, the AIDS agent, isn’t among them—at least not yet. Any HIV the mosquito sucks up on its travels is dissolved by the mosquito’s own metabolism. When the day comes that the virus mutates its way around this, we may be in real trouble.
Virus
Viruses prosper by hijacking the genetic material of a living cell, and using it to produce more virus. They reproduce in a fanatical manner, then burst out in search of more cells to invade. Not being living organisms themselves, they can afford to be very simple. Many, including HIV, have ten genes or fewer, whereas even the simplest bacteria require several thousand. They are also very tiny, much too small to be seen with a conventional microscope. Viruses can do immense damage. Smallpox in the twentieth century alone killed an estimated 300 million people.
Bacteria
Further research has shown that there is or may well be a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders—heart disease, asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, several types of mental disorders, many cancers, even, it has been suggested (in Science no less), obesity.
Some 70% of the antibiotics used in the developed world are given to farm animals, often routinely in stock feed, simply to promote growth or as a precaution against infection. Such applications give bacteria every opportunity to evolve a resistance to them. It is an opportunity that they have enthusiastically seized.
About once every million divisions, bacteria produce a mutant. Usually this is bad luck for the mutant—for an organism, change is always risky—but just occasionally the new bacterium is endowed with some accidental advantage, such as the ability to elude or shrug off an attack of antibiotics. With this ability to evolve rapidly goes another, even scarier advantage. Bacteria share information. Any bacterium can take pieces of genetic coding from any other.
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Oceanography
Most liquids when chilled contract by about 10%. Water does too, but only down to a point. Once it is within whispering distance of freezing, it begins—perversely, beguilingly, extremely improbably—to expand. By the time it is solid, it is almost a tenth more voluminous than it was before.
Freshwater: Of the 3% of Earth’s water that is fresh, most exists as ice sheets. Only the tiniest amount—0.036% —is found in lakes, rivers and reservoirs, and an even smaller part—just 0.001%—exists in clouds or as vapour.
Abyssal Plain: the deep ocean floor which covers more than half the planet’s surface.
Ocean Depth: The average depth of the ocean is 3.86 km, with the Pacific on average about 300 m deeper than the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. 60% of the planet’s surface is ocean more than 1.6 km deep.
Thermohaline Circulation: The main agent of heat transfer on Earth; originates in slow, deep currents far below the surface—a process first detected by the scientist-adventurer Count von Rumford in 1797. What happens is that surface waters, as they get to the vicinity of Europe, grow dense and sink to great depths and begin a slow trip back to the southern hemisphere. When they reach Antarctica, they are caught up in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, where they are driven onward into the Pacific. The process is very slow—it can take fifteen hundred years for water to travel from the North Atlantic to the mid-Pacific—but the volumes of heat and water they move are very considerable and the influence on the climate is enormous.
Saltwater: Rivers carry minerals to the sea and these minerals combine with ions in the ocean water to form salts.
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Meteorology
The atmosphere is divided into four unequal layers:
Troposphere: contains enough warmth and oxygen to allow us to function. From ground level to its highest point, the troposphere (or “turning sphere”) is about 16 km thick at the equator and no more than 10 or 11 km high in the temperate latitudes where most of us live. 80% of the atmosphere’s mass, virtually all the water and thus virtually all the weather are contained within this thin and wispy layer.
Stratosphere: When you see the top of a storm cloud flattening out into the classic anvil shape, you are looking at the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere. This invisible ceiling is known as the tropopause and was discovered in 1902 by a Frenchman in a balloon, Léon-Philippe Teisserenc de Bort. Pause in this sense doesn’t mean to stop momentarily but to cease altogether; it’s from the same Greek root as menopause. After you have left the troposphere the temperature soon warms up again, to about 4 degrees Celsius, thanks to the absorptive effects of ozone.
Mesosphere: Temperatures plunge to as low as minus 90 degrees Celsius.
Thermosphere (aka ionosphere): Temperatures skyrocket to 1500 degrees Celsius or more. Temperatures in the thermosphere vary by over 500 degrees from day to night, though it must be said that “temperature” at such a height becomes a somewhat notional concept. Temperature is really just a measure of the activity of molecules. At sea level, air molecules are so thick that one molecule can move only the tiniest distance—about eight-millionths of a centimeter, to be precise—before banging into another. Because trillions of molecules are constantly colliding, a lot of heat gets exchanged. But at the height of the thermosphere, at 80 kilometres or more, the air is so thin that any two molecules will be miles apart and hardly ever come into contact. So although each molecule is very warm, there are few interactions between them and thus little heat transference.
Coriolis Effect: explains why anything moving through the air in a straight line laterally to the Earth’s spin will, given enough distance, seem to curve to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern as the Earth revolves beneath it. The standard way to envision this is to imagine yourself at the centre of a large carousel and tossing a ball to someone positioned on the edge. By the time the ball gets to the perimeter, the target person has moved on and the ball passes behind him. From his perspective, it looks as if it has curved away from him. That is the Coriolis effect and it is what gives weather systems their curl and sends hurricanes spinning off like tops. The Coriolis effect is also why naval guns firing artillery shells have to adjust to left or right; a shell fired 15 miles would otherwise deviate by about 100 yards and plop harmlessly into the sea.
Wind: Because heat from the Sun is unevenly distributed, differences in air pressure arise on the planet. Air can’t abide this, so it rushes around trying to equalize things everywhere. Wind is simply the air’s way of trying to keep things in balance. Air always flows from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure and the greater the discrepancy in pressures, the faster the wind blows.
Weather Systems: A typical weather front may consist of 750 million tonnes of cold air pinned beneath a billion tonnes of warmer air.
Global Climate Systems: Moist, warm air from the equatorial regions rises until it hits the barrier of the tropopause and spreads out. As it travels away from the equator and cools, it sinks. When it hits bottom, some of the sinking air looks for an area of low pressure to fill and heads back for the equator, completing the circuit. At the equator the convection process is generally stable and the weather predictably fair, but in temperate zones the patterns are far more seasonal, localized and random, which results in an endless battle between systems of high-pressure and low-pressure air.
Low-Pressure system: 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. Thus low areas tend to be associated with cloud and rain, and highs generally spell sunshine and fair weather. When two such systems meet, it often becomes manifest in the clouds. For instance, stratus clouds—those unlovable, featureless sprawls that give us our overcast skies—happen when moisture-bearing updraughts lack the oomph to break through a level of more stable air above, and instead spread out, like smoke hitting a ceiling.
Jet streams: usually located about 9,000–10,000 metres up, move at up to 300 kph and vastly influence weather systems over whole continents.
A fluffy summer cumulus several hundred metres to a side may contain no more than 100–150 litres of water—“about enough to fill a bathtub.”
Lightning: For reasons not entirely understood, the lighter particles tend to become positively charged and to be wafted by air currents to the top of the cloud. The heavier particles linger at the base, accumulating negative charges. These negatively charged particles have a powerful urge to rush to the positively charged Earth and good luck to anything that gets in their way. A bolt of lightning travels at 435,000 kilometres an hour and can heat the air around it to a decidedly crisp 28,000 degrees Celsius, several times hotter than the surface of the sun.
Atmospheric Oxygen: Microbes, including the modern versions of cyanobacteria, supply the greater part of the planet’s breathable oxygen. Algae and other tiny organisms bubbling away in the sea blowout about 150 billion kilograms of the stuff every year.
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Physics
Particles
Categories: up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom. Physicists oddly refer to them as “flavours,” and these are further divided into the colours red, green and blue.
Hadrons: a collective term for protons, neutrons and other particles governed by the strong nuclear force.
Quarks and Gluons: The basic building blocks of matter are quarks which are held together by particles called gluons; and together quarks and gluons form protons and neutrons, the stuff of the atom’s nucleus.
Leptons: the source of electrons and neutrinos.
Fermions: Collectively, Quarks and leptons.
Bosons (named for the Indian physicist S. N. Bose): are particles that produce and carry forces, and include photons and gluons. The Higgs boson may or may not actually exist; it was invented simply as a way of endowing particles with mass.
String Theory: In an attempt to draw everything together, physicists have come up with something called superstring theory. This postulates that all those little things like quarks and leptons that we had previously thought of as particles are actually “strings”—vibrating strands of energy that oscillate in eleven dimensions, consisting of the three we know already plus time and seven other dimensions that are, well, unknowable to us. The strings are very tiny—tiny enough to pass for point particles.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (aka Quantum Leap): An electron moving between orbits would disappear from one and reappear instantaneously in another without visiting the space between. This idea states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves.
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Chemistry
There are 92 naturally occurring elements on the Earth, plus a further 20 or so that have been created in labs. O is our most abundant element, accounting for just under 50% of the Earth’s crust.
Helium (He)
He, the second most abundant element, had only been found the year before—its existence hadn’t even been suspected before that—and then not on the Earth, but in the Sun, where it was found with a spectroscope during a solar eclipse, which is why it honours the Greek sun god Helios.
Lead (Pb)
Lead’s symbol is Pb for the Latin plumbum, the source word for our modern plumbing.
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Geology
Geological time is divided first into four great chunks known as eras.
Pre-Cambrian
Cambrian: from the Roman name for Wales.
Paleozoic (Greek for “old life”)
Mesozoic (Greek for “middle life”)
Cenozoic (Greek for “recent life”)
These four eras are further divided into anywhere from a dozen to twenty subgroups, usually called periods or systems (Cretaceous, Jurassic, etc).
Jurassic: Refers to the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland.
Cretaceous: from the Latin for chalk (from Belgian geologist, J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy).
These periods or systems are further divided into Lyell’s epochs—the Pleistocene, Miocene, etc—which apply only to the most recent (but paleontologically busy) 65 million years.
These Epochs are divided a last time into finer subdivisions known as stages or ages. Most of these are named, nearly always awkwardly, after places: Illinoian, Desmoinesian, Croixian, Kimmeridgian, etc.
Devonian: from the English county of Devon.
Ordovician and Silurian: Ancient Welsh tribes, the Ordovices and Silures.
Permian: from the former Russian province of Perm in the Ural Mountains.
Earth’s Composition
Crust: 0 to 40 kilometres.
Upper Mantle: 40 to 400 kilometres.
Transition Zone: 400 to kilometres.
Lower Mantle: 650 to 2700 kilometres.
D Layer: 2700 to 2890 kilometres.
Outer Core: 2,890 to 5,150 kilometres.
Inner Core: 5,150 to 6,370 kilometres.
Ice Ages: We have had at least seventeen severe glacial episodes in the last 2.5 million years or so with two primary culprits: The rise of the Himalayas disrupting air flows. India, once an island, has pushed 2,000 kilometres into the Asian land mass over the past 45 million years, raising not only the Himalayas, but also the vast Tibetan plateau behind it. The hypothesis is that the higher landscape was not only cooler, but diverted winds in a way that made them flow north and towards North America, making it more susceptible to long-term chills. The second is the formation of the Isthmus of Panama disrupting ocean currents. Beginning about 5 mya, Panama rose from the sea, closing the gap between North and South America, disrupting the flows of warming currents between the Pacific and the Atlantic, and changing patterns of precipitation across at least half the world. One consequence was a drying out of Africa, which caused apes to climb down out of trees and go looking for a new way of living on the emerging savannas.
Yellowstone Supervolcano: NASA decided to test some new high-altitude cameras by taking photographs of Yellowstone, copies of which a thoughtful official passed on to the park authorities on the assumption that they might make a nice display for one of the visitor centres. As soon as Christiansen saw the photos, he realized why he had failed to spot the caldera: virtually the whole park—9,000 km2—was caldera. The explosion had left a crater nearly 65 km across. Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that begins at least 200 km down in the Earth and rises to near the surface, forming what is known as a superplume. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone’s vents, geysers, hot springs and popping mud pots. Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about 72 km across—roughly the same dimensions as the park—and about 13 km thick at its thickest point.
Kimberlite Pipes: What happens is that deep in the Earth there is an explosion that fires, in effect, a cannonball of magma to the surface at supersonic speeds. It is a totally random event. A kimberlite pipe could explode in your back garden as you read this. Because they come up from such depths—up to 200 km down—kimberlite pipes bring up all kinds of things not normally found on or near the surface: a rock called peridotite, crystals of olivine and—just occasionally, in about one pipe in a hundred—diamonds. Lots of carbon comes up with kimberlite ejecta, but most is vaporized or turns to graphite. Only occasionally does a hunk of it shoot up at just the right speed and cool down with the necessary swiftness to become a diamond.
Magnetic Fields: Altogether in the last hundred million years it has reversed itself about two hundred times, and we don’t have any real idea why. This has been called “the greatest unanswered question in the geological sciences.”
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Climate Change
Climate is the product of so many variables—rising and falling CO2 levels, the shifts of continents, solar activity, the stately wobbles of the Milankovitch cycles—that it is as difficult to comprehend the events of the past as it is to predict those of the future.
Greenhouse Gases
Nature, mostly through the belching's of volcanoes and the decay of plants, sends about 200 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, nearly thirty times as much as we do with our cars and factories.
We know from samples of very old ice that the “natural” level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—that is, before we started inflating it with industrial activity—is about 280 ppm.
A six-inch cube of Dover chalk will contain well over a thousand litres of compressed CO2.
Since 1850, it has been estimated, we have lofted about 100 billion tonnes of extra C into the air, a total that increases by about 7 billion tonnes each year.
Ozone’s
A single kilogram of CFCs can capture and annihilate 70,000 kilograms of atmospheric ozone.
Carbon Sequestration: Trillions upon trillions of tiny marine organisms that most of us have never heard of—foraminifera and coccoliths and calcareous algae—capture atmospheric C, in the form of CO2, 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 re-evaporated 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. Among the tiny atomic structures the plankton take to the grave with them are two very stable isotopes, O-16 and O-18. This is where the geochemists come in, for the isotopes accumulate at different rates depending on how much O or CO2 is in the atmosphere at the time of their creation. By comparing the ancient rates of deposition of the two isotopes, geochemists can read conditions in the ancient world—oxygen levels, air and ocean temperatures, the extent and timing of ice ages and much else. By combining their isotope findings with other fossil residues that indicate other conditions such as pollen levels and so on—scientists can, with considerable confidence, recreate entire landscapes that no human eye ever saw.
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Astronomy
Dark Matter: When scientists calculate the amount of matter needed to hold things together, they always come up desperately short. It appears that at least 90% of the universe, and perhaps as much as 99%, is composed of Fritz Zwicky’s “dark matter”—stuff that is by its nature invisible to us.
The Milky Way Galaxy
Venus: could not hold onto its surface water, with disastrous consequences for its climate. As its water evaporated, the hydrogen atoms escaped into space and the oxygen atoms combined with carbon to form a dense atmosphere of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Venus became stifling hot.
Stars
Supernova: occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time more brightly than all the stars in its galaxy.
Solar Flare: A typical flare—something we wouldn’t even notice on Earth—will release the energy equivalent of a billion hydrogen bombs and fling into space 100 billion tonnes or so of murderous high-energy particles.
Sunlight energizes atoms. It increases the rate at which they jiggle and jounce, and in their enlivened state they crash into one another, releasing heat. When you feel the sun warm on your back on a summer’s day, it’s really excited atoms you feel. The higher you climb, the fewer molecules there are, and so the fewer collisions between them.
Neutron Star: If a star collapsed to the sort of densities found in the core of atoms, the result would be an unimaginably compacted core. Atoms would literally be crushed together, their electrons forced into the nucleus, forming neutrons; a Neutron Star.
According to Hoyle’s theory, an exploding star would generate enough heat to create all the new elements and spray them into the cosmos where they would form gaseous clouds—the interstellar medium, as it is known—that could eventually coalesce into new solar systems
Moons
The Moon’s steady gravitational influence keeps the Earth spinning at the right speed and angle to provide the sort of stability necessary for the long and successful development of life. This won’t go on forever. The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 4 cm a year. In another two billion years it will have receded so far that it won’t keep us steady.
Comet: Ice & Dust (aka dirty snowball)
The Kuiper belt is the source of what are known as short-period comets—those that come past pretty regularly—of which the most famous is Halley’s comet.
Comets develop their distinctive tails when their surface material begins to evaporate as they approach the Sun.
The more reclusive long-period comets (among them the recent visitors Hale–Bopp and Hyakutake) come from the much more distant Oort cloud, about which more presently.
Meteor: An asteroid that glows as friction with the atmosphere heats it.
Meteor showers often occur when the Earth’s orbit passes through the drifting tails of defunct comets.
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Chronology
Feb, 2003: A team from NASA and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, using a new, far-reaching type of satellite called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, announced with some confidence that the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, give or take a hundred million years or so.-Short History by Bryson.
1987: A Berkeley team, led by the late Allan Wilson, did an analysis of mitochondrial DNA from 147 individuals and declared that the rise of anatomically modern humans occurred in Africa within the last 140,000 years and that “all present-day humans are descended from that population.”-Short History by Bryson.
1986: DNA fingerprinting is discovered accidentally by Alec Jeffrey's, a scientist at the University of Leicester while studying DNA sequences for genetic markers associated with heritable diseases. When he was approached by the police and asked if he could help connect a suspect to two murders. He realized his technique ought to work perfectly for solving criminal cases—and so it proved. A young baker with the improbable name of Colin Pitchfork was sentenced to two life terms in prison for the murders.-Short History by Bryson.
1985: CA Scientist Kary Mullis discovers heat resistant enzymes inside Thermophilus aquticus, which could be used to create a bit of chemical wizardry known as a polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which allows scientists to generate lots of DNA from very small amounts—as little as a single molecule in ideal conditions. It’s a kind of genetic photocopying, and it became the basis for all subsequent genetic science, from academic studies to police forensic work.-Short History by Bryson.
1984: grains of shocked quartz were discovered in a layer of clay from the Cretaceous-Tertiary, or K-T, boundary in eastern Montana. (K is used as the abbreviation for Cretaceous because C was already taken by the Carboniferous; today, the border is formally known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, boundary.) The next clue showed up in south Texas, in a curious layer of end-Cretaceous sandstone that seemed to have been produced by an enormous tsunami. Finally, a hundred-mile-wide crater was discovered or, more accurately, rediscovered, beneath the Yucatan Peninsula. Buried under half a mile of newer sediment, the crater had shown up in gravity surveys taken in the nineteen-fifties by Mexico's state-run oil company. Company geologists had interpreted it as the traces of an underwater volcano and, since volcanoes don't yield oil, promptly forgotten about. The cores were finally located in 1991 and found to contain a layer of glass, rock that had melted, then rapidly cooled, right at the K-T boundary.-Sixth Extinction by Kolbert.
The amount of iridium in the Alvarez sample was more than three hundred times normal levels, far beyond anything they might have predicted.-Short History by Bryson.
Aug-Sep, 1977: Launch of Voyager I & II.
At this time Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were aligned in a way that happens only once every 175 years. This enabled the two Voyagers to use a “gravity assist” technique in which the craft were successively flung from one gassy giant to the next in a kind of cosmic version of crack the whip.-Short History by Bryson.
1969: in an attempt to bring some order to the growing inadequacies of classification, an ecologist from Cornell named R. H. Whittaker unveiled in the journal Science a proposal to divide life into five principal branches—kingdoms, as they are known—called Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista and Monera.-Short History by Bryson.
1961: The Drake Equation; Under Drake’s equation you divide the number of stars in a selected portion of the universe by the number of stars that are likely to have planetary systems; divide that by the number of planetary systems that could theoretically support life; divide that by the number on which life, having arisen, advances to a state of intelligence; and so on. At each such division, the number shrinks colossally—yet even with the most conservative inputs the number of advanced civilizations just in the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions.-Short History by Bryson.
Jan, 1960: Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh of the US Navy sink slowly in the vehicle “triest” to the bottom of the ocean’s deepest canyon, the Mariana Trench, some 400 kilometers off Guam in the western Pacific (and discovered, not incidentally, by Harry Hess with his fathometer). It took just under four hours to fall 10,918 meters, or almost 7 miles. Although the pressure at that depth was nearly 17,000 pounds per square inch.-Short History by Bryson.
25 Apr, 1953: In one of the most important discoveries of all time, Watson and Crick unlocked the structure of DNA, a double helix. When unraveled, a single strand of DNA stretches about 6’ long. On it is contained a sequence of 3 billion nucleic acids, A, T, C, G, that carry the code.–A Short History by Bryson.
The 25 Apr, 1953 edition of Nature carried a 900-word article by Watson and Crick titled “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.”–A Short History by Bill Bryson.
1953: Stanley Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, took two flasks—one containing a little water to represent a primeval ocean, the other holding a mixture of methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide gases to represent the Earth’s early atmosphere—connected them with rubber tubes and introduced some electrical sparks as a stand-in for lightning. After a few days, the water in the flasks had turned green and yellow in a hearty broth of amino acids, fatty acids, sugars and other organic compounds.–A Short History by Bryson.
1949: The theory was put forward by E. C. Bullard of Cambridge University that this fluid part of the Earth’s core revolves in a way that makes it, in effect, an electrical motor, creating the Earth’s magnetic field. The assumption is that the converting fluids in the Earth act somehow like the currents in wires.-A Short History by Bryson.
1949: “Big Bang” is coined by English cosmologist Fred Hoyle, who shows how supernova explosions could have generated the necessary heat to create the heavy elements that led to the formation of rocky planets. According to Hoyle’s theory, an exploding star would generate enough heat to create all the new elements and spray them into the cosmos where they would form gaseous clouds—the interstellar medium, as it is known—that could eventually coalesce into new solar systems.-A Short History by Bryson.
1944: Continental Drift is hypothesized by Holmes; he was the first scientist to understand that radioactive warming could produce convection currents within the Earth. In theory, these could be powerful enough to slide continents around on the surface. In his popular and influential textbook Principles of Physical Geology, first published in 1944, Holmes laid out a continental drift theory that was, in its fundamentals, the theory that prevails today.-Short History by Bryson.
1943: Viruses are first seen with the newly developed electron microscope.-Short History by Bryson.
1941: The Cyclotron (aka Atom Smasher) is invented at Berkeley by Ernest Lawrence. Cyclotrons accelerate a proton or other charged particle to an extremely high speed along a track (sometimes circular, sometimes linear), then bang it into another particle and see what flies off.-Short History by Bryson.
1939: A Croatian seismologist named Andrija Mohorovičić was studying graphs from an earthquake in Zagreb when he noticed a similar odd deflection, but at a shallower level. He had discovered the boundary between the crust and the layer immediately below, the mantle; this zone has been known ever since as the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or Moho for short.-Short History by Bryson.
1936: Danish scientist Inge Lehmann, studying seismographs of earthquakes in New Zealand, discover that there were two cores—an inner one, which we now believe to be solid, and an outer one (the one that Oldham had detected), which is thought to be liquid and the seat of magnetism.-Short History by Bryson.
1934: US began its first governmental birth control program- in Puerto Rico.-Short History by Bryson.
1930’s: Dark matter is first theorized by Fritz Zwicky. When scientists calculate the amount of matter needed to hold things together, they always come up desperately short. It appears that at least 90% of the universe, and perhaps as much as 99%, is composed of Fritz Zwicky’s “dark matter”—stuff that is by its nature invisible to us.-A Short History by Bryson.
1929: Hubble’s Constant; Hubble realized that Slipher’s light shift discoveries could be expressed with a simple equation, Ho = v/d (where Ho is the constant, v is the recessional velocity of a flying galaxy and d its distance away from us).
When astronomers refer to a Hubble constant of 50, what they really mean is “50 kilometres per second per megaparsec.” p=Parsec (a contraction of parallax and second), based on a universal measure called the stellar parallax and equivalent to 3.26 light years.-Short History by Bryson.
1928: chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are invented by Midgley at GM while looking to create a gas that was stable, non-flammable, non-corrosive and safe to breathe.
1925: Wolfgang Pauli’s Exclusion Principle of 1925, that certain pairs of subatomic particles, even when separated by the most considerable distances, can each instantly “know” what the other is doing. Particles have a quality known as spin and, according to quantum theory, the moment you determine the spin of one particle, its sister particle, no matter how distant away, will immediately begin spinning in the opposite direction and at the same rate.-Short History by Bryson.
1923: three of America’s largest corporations, General Motors, Dupont and Standard Oil of New Jersey, formed a joint enterprise called the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation (later shortened to simply Ethyl Corporation) with a view to making as much tetraethyl lead as the world was willing to buy, and that proved to be a very great deal. They called their additive “ethyl” because it sounded friendlier and less toxic than “lead.”-A Short History by Bryson.
1921: Tetraethyl is developed by Midgley while working for General Motors (GM) in Dayton, Ohio as a solution for “engine knock.”
1920s: Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest-scholar, first tentatively proposed the "Big Bang" theory.
Georges Lemaître “fireworks theory,” which suggested that the universe began as a geometrical point, a “primeval atom,”which burst into glory and had been moving a part ever since.-Short History by Bryson.
1918: H1N1 (The Great Swine Flue Epidemic AKA The Spanish Flu named after Alfonso XIII of Spain who was killed by it) Killed 40 million worldwide, more than WW1.
In the United States, the first deaths were recorded among sailors in Boston in late August 1918, but the epidemic quickly spread to all parts of the country. Schools closed, public entertainments were shut down, people everywhere wore masks. It did little good. Between autumn 1918 and spring the following year, 548,452 people died of the flu in America. The toll in Britain was 220,000, with similar numbers in France and Germany. No-one knows the global toll, as records in the third world were often poor, but it was not less than twenty million and probably more like fifty million.-Short History by Bryson.
WWI killed 21M people in four years; swine flu did the same in its first four months. Almost 80% of American casualties in the First World War came not from enemy fire, but from flu. In some units the mortality rate was as high as 80 per cent. Swine flu arose as a normal, non-lethal flu in the spring of 1918, but somehow, over the following months—no-one knows how or where—it mutated into something more severe. A fifth of victims suffered only mild symptoms, but the rest became gravely ill and many died. Some succumbed within hours; others held on for a few days.-Short History by Bryson.
1912: While taking spectrographic readings of distant stars, Vesto Slipher discovers that they appeared to be moving away from us. Light moving away from us shifts towards the red end of the spectrum; approaching light shifts to blue.-A Short History by Bryson.
1912: Plate Tectonics is first theorized by Alfred Wegener; he developed the theory that the world’s continents had once existed as a single landmass he called Pangaea, where flora and fauna had been able to mingle, before splitting apart and floating off to their present positions. He set the idea out in a book called Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, or The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which was published in German in 1912.-Short History by Bryson.
1910: Rutherford (assisted by his student Hans Geiger, who would later invent the radiation detector that bears his name) fired ionized helium atoms, or alpha particles, at a sheet of gold foil. To Rutherford’s astonishment, some of the particles bounced back. It was as if, he said, he had fired a 15-inch shell at a sheet of paper and it rebounded into his lap. This was just not supposed to happen. After considerable reflection he realized there could be only one possible explanation: the particles that bounced back were striking something small and dense at the heart of the atom, while the other particles sailed through unimpeded. An atom, Rutherford realized, was mostly empty space, with a very dense nucleus at the centre.-A Short History by Bryson.
1908: Plate Tectonics is first introduced by an amateur American geologist named Frank Bursley Taylor. In Germany, however, Taylor’s idea was picked up, and effectively appropriated, by a theorist named Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist at the University of Marburg.-Short History by Bryson
Wegener developed the theory that the world’s continents had once existed as a single landmass he called Pangaea, where flora and fauna had been able to mingle, before splitting apart and floating off to their present positions. He set the idea out in a book called Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, or The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which was published in German in 1912.-A Short History by Bryson.
1906: French physicist named Bernard Brunhes had found that the planet’s magnetic field reverses itself from time to time, and that the record of these reversals is permanently fixed in certain rocks at the time of their birth. Specifically, tiny grains of iron ore within the rocks point to wherever the magnetic poles happen to be at the time of their formation, then stay pointing in that direction as the rocks cool and harden. In effect, they “remember” where the magnetic poles were at the time of their creation.-A Short History by Bryson.
1906: Irish geologist R. D. Oldham, while examining some seismograph readings from an earthquake in Guatemala, noticed that certain shock waves had penetrated to a point deep within the Earth and then bounced off at an angle, as if they had encountered some kind of barrier. From this he deduced that the Earth has a core.-A Short History by Bryson.
1905: Einstein provides the first incontrovertible evidence of atoms’ existence with his paper on Brownian motion in 1905.-A Short History by Bryson.
1902: Discovery of the Tropopause and Ozone by French Baloonman Léon-Philippe Teisserenc de Bort.-Short History by Bryson.
1896: Radioactivity is discovered; Henri Becquerel in Paris carelessly left a packet of uranium salts on a wrapped photographic plate in a drawer. When he took the plate out some time later, he was surprised to discover that the salts had burned an impression in it, just as if the plate had been exposed to light. The rocks were converting mass into energy in an exceedingly efficient way. Marie Curie dubbed the effect “radioactivity.”-Short History by Bryson.
1872-1876: The first really organized investigation of the seas when a joint expedition set up by the British Museum, the Royal Society and the British government set forth from Portsmouth on a former warship called HMS Challenger. For three and a half years they sailed the world, sampling waters, netting fish and hauling a dredge through sediments. It was evidently dreary work. Out of a complement of 240 scientists and crew, one in four jumped ship and eight more died or went mad—“driven to distraction by the mind-numbing routine of years of dredging,” in the words of the historian Samantha Weinberg. But they sailed across almost 70,000 nautical miles of sea, collected over 4,700 new species of marine organisms, gathered enough information to create a fifty-volume report (which took nineteen years to put together), and gave the world the name of a new scientific discipline: oceanography.-Short History by Bryson.
1859: Darwin publishes “On the Origin of Species.” Specifically, what Darwin saw was that all organisms compete for resources, and those that had some innate advantage would prosper and pass on that advantage to their offspring. By such means would species continuously improve.–A Short History by Bryson.
1841: Owens coins the term dinosauria meaning “terrible lizard.”–A Short History by Bryson.
1831: Scottish botanist Robert Brown first see's the nucleus of a cell.-A Short History by Bryson.
1807: Davy discovers K, Na, Mg, St, and Al using electrolysis; applying electricity to a molten substance.
1802: Howard divided clouds into three groups: stratus for the layered clouds, cumulus for the fluffy ones (the word means heaped in Latin) and cirrus (meaning curled) for the high, thin feathery formations that generally presage colder weather. To these he subsequently added a fourth term, nimbus (from the Latin for cloud), for a rain cloud.-Short History by Bryson.
1797: Thermohaline Circulation is first detected by Scientist-Adventurer Count Von Rumford. What happens is that surface waters, as they get to the vicinity of Europe, grow dense and sink to great depths and begin a slow trip back to the southern hemisphere. When they reach Antarctica, they are caught up in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, where they are driven onward into the Pacific. The process is very slow—it can take fifteen hundred years for water to travel from the North Atlantic to the mid-Pacific—but the volumes of heat and water they move are very considerable and the influence on the climate is enormous.-Short History by Bryson.
1774: Contour Lines are first used by Charles Hutton, who noticed that if he used a pencil to connect points of equal height, it all became much more orderly. Indeed, one could instantly get a sense of the overall shape and slope of the mountain. He had invented contour lines.-Short History by Bryson.
1763- 18 Oct, 1767: Mason and Dixon survey 244 miles of dangerous American wilderness to settle a boundary dispute between the estates of William Penn and Lord Baltimore and their respective colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. The result was the famous Mason-Dixon line.-A Short History by Bryson.
1742: Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, invents the Celsius Temperature scale. In proof of the proposition that inventors seldom get matters entirely right, Celsius made boiling point zero and freezing point 100 on his scale, but that was soon reversed.-Short History by Bryson.
1735: “Hadley Cells” are discovered by Briton George Hadley, who saw that rising and falling columns of air tended to produce cells.
1717: Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a Dutch maker of instruments, produced an accurate thermometer. However, for reasons unknown he calibrated the instrument in a way that put freezing at 32 degrees and boiling at 212 degrees. From the outset this numeric eccentricity bothered some people and in 1742 Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, came up with a competing scale. In proof of the proposition that inventors seldom get matters entirely right, Celsius made boiling point zero and freezing point 100 on his scale, but that was soon reversed.-Short History by Bryson.
1650: Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC.-A Short History by Bryson.
2.5 Ma: The Ice Ages begin; the first of at least seventeen severe glacial episodes
2.5 Ma: Rise of Homo erectus in Africa.
5 Ma: Panama rose from the sea, closing the gap between North and South America, disrupting the flows of warming currents between the Pacific and Atlantic, and changing patterns of precipitation across at least half the world. One consequence was a drying out of Africa, which caused apes to climb down out of trees and go looking for a new way of living on the emerging savannas.-Short History by Bryson.
9 Ma: Teton orogenesis; a 64-kilometre-long fault opened within the Earth and since then, about once every 900 years, the Tetons experience a really big earthquake, enough to jerk them another 2m higher. It is these repeated jerks over aeons that have raised them to their present majestic heights of 2,000m.-Short History by Bryson.
45 Ma: India, once an island, pushes 2000 km into the Asian land mass, raising not only the Himalayas, but also the vast Tibetan plateau behind it. The hypothesis is that the higher landscape was not only cooler, but diverted winds in a way that made them flow north and towards North America, making it more susceptible to long-term chills.-Short History by Bryson.
66 Ma: Cretaceous Extinction
An asteroid or comet travelling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path—people, houses, factories, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out 1,000 cubic kilometres of rock, earth and superheated gases. Every living thing within 250 kilometres that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outwards at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling one entire field of view and travelling at thousands of kilometres an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion. Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had once been Chicago, St Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities—the whole of the Midwest, in short—nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to 1,500 kilometres away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond 1,500 kilometres the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that’s just the initial shock. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the Earth and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere.-A Short History by Bryson.
Thin band of reddish clay that divided two ancient layers of limestone, one from the Cretaceous period, the other from the Tertiary. This is a point known to geology as the KT boundary and it marks the time, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and roughly half the world's other species of animals abruptly vanish from the fossil record.-Short History by Bryson.
252 Ma: Permian Extinction aka "the Mother of Mass Extinctions" or "The Great Dying." Wiped out about 95% of species including 1/3 of known insect species (the only occasional on which they were lost en masse). It is as close as we have ever come to total obliteration.-Short History by Bryson.
540 Ma: The Cambrian Explosion; The start of the great outburst of complex life.–A Short History by Bryson.
2.5 Ba: At some point in the first billion years of life, cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, learned to tap into a freely available resource—the hydrogen that exists in spectacular abundance in water. They absorbed water molecules, supped on the hydrogen and released the oxygen as waste, and in so doing invented photosynthesis.-Short History by Bryson.
As cyanobacteria proliferated the world began to fill with O2.
3.5 Ba: Life begins in Deep Ocean Vents
The process is thought to have started when some blundering or adventuresome bacterium either invaded or was captured by some other bacterium and it turned out that this suited them both. The captive bacterium became, it is thought, a mitochondrion. This mitochondrial invasion (or endosymbiotic event, as biologists like to term it) made complex life possible.–A Short History by Bryson.
For two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life.–A Short History by Bryson.
13.8 Ba: The Big Bang.
According to Guth’s theory, at one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, gravity emerged. After another ludicrously brief interval it was joined by electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces—the stuff of physics. These were joined an instant later by shoals of elementary particles. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements—principally H and He, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of Li.-A Short History by Bryson.
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