Quotes from Bill Bryson

Impulsively, I lumbered aboard, bought a ticket, and took a seat toward the back. The trick of successful walking, I always say, is knowing when to stop.

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion

a little change in the Earth's dynamics can have repercussions beyond our imagining.

Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of.

The uncertainty around which the theory is built is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it is at a given instant, but we cannot know both.

times weaker. This can be expressed with the formula

Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured—never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history." We

So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.

Then, having nothing better to do, I leafed through the index and amused myself, in a very low-key way, by looking for ridiculous names, of which Australia has a respectable plenitude. I am thus able to report that the following are all real places: Wee Waa, Poowong, Burrumbuttock, Suggan Buggan, Boomahnoomoonah, Waaia, Mullumbimby, Ewlyamartup, Jiggalong, and the supremely satisfying Tittybong.

As the economist Herman Daly once put it: "The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.

On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway).

life wants to be; life doesn't always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on.

Any attempt to measure one will unavoidably disturb the other. This isn't a matter of simply needing more precise instruments; it is an immutable property of the universe.

Jurassic refers to the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland.

even a modest dilution of the ocean's salt content—from increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet, for instance—could disrupt the cycle disastrously. The

The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror. British geologist Derek V.Ager

Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot. With binoculars the number of stars you can see from a single location rises to about 50,000, and with a small two-inch telescope it leaps to 300,000.

On 1 July 1858, Darwin's and Wallace's theory was unveiled to the world. Darwin himself was not present. On the day of the meeting, he and his wife were burying their son.

We are only beginning to understand the importance and nature of a woman's vaginal microbiome. Babies born by Cesarean section are robbed of this initial wash. The consequences for the baby can be profound. Various studies have found that people born by C-section have substantially increased risks for type 1 diabetes, asthma, celiac disease, and even obesity and an eightfold greater risk of developing allergies.

Antioxidants are molecules that neutralize free radicals, so the thinking is that if you take a lot of them in the form of supplements, you can counter the effects of aging. Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence to support that.

which state, very baldly, that a thing moves in the direction in which it is pushed; that it will keep moving in a straight line until some other force acts to slow or deflect it; and that every action has an opposite and equal reaction)

beyond a network of pedestrian tunnels and over a large open space shared by parking lots and those strange new-town trees that never seem to grow.

Permian recalls the former Russian province of Perm in the Ural Mountains. For Cretaceous (from the Latin for chalk) we are indebted to a Belgian geologist with the perky name of J. J. d'Omalius d'Halloy.

For scientific convenience, the atmosphere is divided into four unequal layers: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and ionosphere (now often called the thermosphere).