Quotes from Bill Bryson

Denham Harman had not, in 1945, read an article about aging in his wife's Ladies' Home Journal and developed a theory that free radicals and antioxidants are at the heart of human aging. Harman's idea was never anything more than a hunch, and subsequent research proved it to be wrong, but nonetheless the idea has taken hold and will not go away. The sale of antioxidant supplements alone is now worth well over $2 billion a year.

There is a critical threshold where the natural biosphere stops buffering us from the effects of our emissions and actually starts to amplify them.

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.

McDonald Observatory in Texas

among them Pleistocene ("most recent"), Pliocene ("more recent"), Miocene ("moderately recent") and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene ("but a little recent").

Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

Not incidentally, lead's symbol is Pb, for the Latin plumbum, the source word for our modern plumbing.) The Romans also flavored their wine with lead, which may be part of the reason they are not the

the idea of action at a distance—that one particle could instantaneously influence another trillions of miles away—was a stark violation of the special theory of relativity. This expressly decreed that nothing could outrace the speed of light and yet here were physicists insisting that, somehow, at the subatomic level, information could. (No one, incidentally, has ever explained how the particles achieve this feat.

Nowadays, and speaking very generally, geological time is divided first into four great chunks known as eras: Precambrian, Palaeozoic (from the Greek meaning "old life"), Mesozoic ("middle life") and Cenozoic ("recent life"). These four eras are further divided into anywhere from a dozen to twenty subgroups

what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time." Of

Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O'Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux

Moreover, all this applies only to units of time. Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series and stages.

there are three stages in scientific discovery7: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

the aforementioned Murchison, who spent the first thirty or so years of his life galloping after foxes, converting aeronautically challenged birds into puffs of drifting feathers with buckshot, and showing no mental agility whatever beyond that needed to read The Times or play a hand of cards. Then he discovered an interest in rocks and became with rather astounding swiftness a titan of geological thinking.

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, painted here by his friend Jan Vermeer, was a self-taught instrument maker.

Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning, and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but—and here is the absolutely salient point—once would be enough.

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, an assertion

Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the streets of Reykjavik he could find his way around, allowing for certain difficulties over terms like airport and quarter-pound cheeseburger.

And so one more to the wandering road. Beyond Blackheath the highway began a steep and curvaceous descent towards Lithgow, where it skirted along hem of the mountains...

The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds.

The proportions of these salts and minerals in our tissues are uncannily similar to those in sea water—we sweat and cry sea water, as Margulis and Sagan have put it—but curiously we cannot tolerate them as an input.

At some point in an unimaginably distant past some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence.

The friendliness of Australians – all of it quite sincere and spontaneous, as far as I could ever tell – never ceases to amaze or gratify.