Quotes from Bill Bryson

There are three things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

The main agent of heat transfer on Earth is what is known as thermohaline circulation, which originates in slow, deep currents far below the surface—a process first detected by the scientist-adventurer Count von Rumford in 1797.

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.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting

In breve, e come sempre, in Shakespeare un lettore attento può trovare sostegno per quasi qualsiasi posizione voglia prendere. (O come lo stesso Shakespeare ha scritto in una battuta citata spesso a sproposito: «Il diavolo può citare le Sacre Scritture per i propri fini».)

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. Not

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.

So we are stuck with a theory, and we do not know whether it is right or wrong, but we do know that it is a little wrong, or at least incomplete." In

electrons are not like orbiting planets at all, but more like the blades of a spinning fan, managing to fill every bit of space in their orbits simultaneously (but with the crucial difference that the blades of a fan only seem to be everywhere at once; electrons are).

Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in Arizona (they must have teenagers, after all), but it does seem unlikely.

Space, let me repeat, is enormous. The average distance between stars out there is 20 million million miles. Even at speeds approaching those of light, these are fantastically challenging distances for any traveling individual.

In short, there is just a great deal we don't know.

To me that was just a miracle. That has been my position with science ever since. Excited

The disputes are entertainingly surveyed in Charles Elliott's The Potting-Shed Papers.

At all events, thanks to the work of Clair Patterson, by 1953 the Earth at last had an age everyone could agree on.

Henry Ford had the additional distinction of being the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler's memoir of 1925.

it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.

A physicist is the atoms' way of thinking about atoms. Anonymous

transits of Venus, as they are known, are an irregular occurrence. They come in pairs eight years apart, but then are absent for a century or more

Mrs. Mendeleyev hitchhiked with young Dmitri four thousand miles to St. Petersburg—that's equivalent to travelling from London to Equatorial Guinea—and deposited him at the Institute of Pedagogy.

Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between.

Mendeleyev was said to have modelled the table on the card game solitaire.

It seemed such an extraordinary notion—that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin, floating in forest 450 miles to the north in a wilderness few have seen. A little voice in my head said: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!

According to the new theory, an electron moving between orbits would disappear from one and reappear instantaneously in another without visiting the space between