Quotes from Bill Bryson

The pressure that such a pool of magma exerts on the crust above has lifted Yellowstone and about three hundred miles of surrounding territory about 1,700 feet higher than they would otherwise be. If it blew, the cataclysm is pretty well beyond imagining.

Gravity on this view is no longer so much a thing as an outcome—"not a 'force' but a byproduct of the warping of spacetime," in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: "In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.

the only English-language publication on offer was the weekend edition of USA Today, a publication that always puts me in mind of a newspaper we used to get in grade school called My Weekly Reader. I am amazed enough that they can find buyers for USA Today in the U.S.A., but the possibility that anyone would ever present himself at the station kiosk in Buchs, Switzerland, and ask for it seemed to me to set a serious challenge to the laws of probability.

I also said no to a first-aid kit, sewing kit, anti-snake-bite kit, $12 emergency whistle, and small orange plastic shovel for burying one's poop, on the grounds that these were unnecessary, too expensive, or invited ridicule.

This is gravity—a product of the bending of spacetime.

Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.

All 2,100 miles of the trail, as well as side trails, footbridges, signs, blazes, and shelters, are maintained by volunteers—indeed, the AT is said to be the largest volunteer-run undertaking on the planet.

To avoid arousal more generally, women were instructed to get plenty of fresh air, avoid stimulating pastimes like reading and card games, and above all never to use their brains more than was strictly necessary.

In some sense, gravity does not exist28; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.

As Siddhartha Mukherjee observed in The Gene: An Intimate History, humans don't actually reproduce at all.8 Geckos reproduce; we recombine.

supernova explosions could have generated the necessary heat to create the heavy elements that led to the formation of rocky planets and, eventually, us. (credit

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.

We have been gulled by the ease of air travel and other forms of communication into thinking that the world is not all that big, but at ground level, where researchers must work, it is actually enormous.

It would be just my luck, of course, to be savaged by an animal with a flea collar and a medical history. I imagined lying on my back, being extravagantly ravaged, inclining my head slightly to read a dangling silver tag that said: "My name is Mr. Bojangles. If found please call Tanya and Vinny at 924-4667.

The current best estimate for the Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 × 1018 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001, or one ten million trillion trillion trillionths11 of a second.

your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which would have ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)

If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon.

All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals.

Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposterously enormous cinder track. For the Greenwood kids—all of us white, marshmallowy, innately unphysical, squinting unfamiliarly in the bright sunshine—it was a shock to the system of an unprecedented order.

before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere, and that since that time lead levels had climbed steadily and dangerously.