Quotes from Bill Bryson

To explain what kept atoms together, other forces were needed, and in the 1930s two were discovered: the strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force.

Traveling is more fun—hell, life is more fun—if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

Buffon found himself threatened with excommunication for expressing it. A practical man, he apologized at once for his thoughtless heresy, then cheerfully repeated the assertions throughout his subsequent writings.

humans are in the domain eucarya, in the kingdom animalia, in the phylum chordata, in the subphylum vertebrata, in the class mammalia, in the order primates, in the family hominidae, in the genus Homo, in the species sapiens.

On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, "and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.

the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn't quite exist yet.

Vesto Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, was the first person to notice that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us—evidence that the universe was not, as everyone had long assumed, static.

Lord Kelvin, who throughout his career produced revolutionary scientific theories and was arguably the first scientist to become wealthy by patenting his work. Despite his undoubted brilliance, he was chronically, and indeed dismally, unable to determine the age of the

Excited, I took the book home that night and opened it before dinner – an action that I expect prompted my

Seven skulls vividly convey the long road of human evolution. From left they are: Adapis (50 million years ago), Proconsul (23–15 million years), Australopithecus africanus (3 million years), Homo habilis (2 million years), Homo erectus (1 million years), early Homo sapiens (92,000 years) and Cro-Magnon (20,000 years ago).

Astronomers today believe there are perhaps 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe.

The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally go wrong, but that they manage everything so smoothly for decades at a stretch.

Charles Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald, an area of southern England stretching across Kent, Surrey and Sussex, had taken, by his calculations, 306, 662, 400 years to complete.

Typically a cell will contain some 20,000 different types of protein, and of these about 2,000 types will each be represented by at least 50,000 molecules.

clearly no thinking presence behind any of the actions of the cells. It all just happens, smoothly and repeatedly and so reliably

Gibbs is perhaps the most brilliant person most people have never heard of. Modest to the point of near-invisibility, he passed virtually the whole of his life, apart from three years spent studying in Europe, within a three-block area bounded by his house and the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut. For his first ten years at Yale he didn't even bother to draw a salary.

The Super Constellations took three days to reach London [from Australia] and lacked the power or range to dodge most storms. When monsoons or cyclones were encountered, the pilots had no choice but to put on the seat belt signs and bounce through them. Even in normal conditions they flew at a height guaranteed to produce more or less constant turbulence. (Qantas called it, without evident irony, the Kangaroo Route.) It was, by any modern measure, an ordeal.

Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering. Indeed

When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them.

The red shift gives the speed at which galaxies are retiring, but doesn't tell us how far away they are to begin with.

Geiger would also later become a loyal Nazi, unhesitatingly betraying Jewish colleagues, including many who had helped him.

They believed that any boy treated with decency, encouragement, and respect would grow into a model citizen, and they were nearly always right. Ninety-five percent of Xaverian boys went on to live normal, stable lives.

It is the patchiness of the record that makes each new find look so sudden and distinct from all the others.

In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.