A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [0]
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
QUOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART I LOST IN THE COSMOS
1 How to Build a Universe
2 Welcome to the Solar System
3 The Reverend Evans's Universe
PART II THE SIZE OF THE EARTH
4 The Measure of Things
5 The Stone-Breakers
6 Science Red in Tooth and Claw
7 Elemental Matters
PART III A NEW AGE DAWNS
8 Einstein's Universe
9 The Mighty Atom
10 Getting the Lead Out
11 Muster Mark's Quarks
12 The Earth Moves
PART IV DANGEROUS PLANET
13 Bang!
14 The Fire Below
15 Dangerous Beauty
PART V LIFE ITSELF
16 Lonely Planet
17 Into the Troposphere
18 The Bounding Main
19 The Rise of Life
20 Small World
21 Life Goes On
22 Good-bye to All That
23 The Richness of Being
24 Cells
25 Darwin's Singular Notion
26 The Stuff of Life
PART VI THE ROAD TO US
27 Ice Time
28 The Mysterious Biped
29 The Restless Ape
30 Good-bye
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY BILL BRYSON
Intro to Excerpt
An Excerpt from Bill Bryson’s At Home
Outro from Excerpt
COPYRIGHT PAGE
To Meghan and Chris. Welcome.
The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: “I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.” “Don't you think God knows the facts?” Bethe asked. “Yes,” said Szilard. “He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.”
—Hans Christian von Baeyer, Taming the Atom
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As I sit here, in early 2003, I have before me several pages of manuscript bearing majestically encouraging and tactful notes from Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History pointing out, inter alia, that Périgueux is not a wine-producing region, that it is inventive but a touch unorthodox of me to italicize taxonomic divisions above the level of genus and species, that I have persistently misspelled Olorgesaille (a place that I only recently visited), and so on in similar vein through two chapters of text covering his area of expertise, early humans.
Goodness knows how many other inky embarrassments may lurk in these pages yet, but it is thanks to Dr. Tattersall and all of those whom I am about to mention that there aren't many hundreds more. I cannot begin to thank adequately those who helped me in the preparation of this book. I am especially indebted to the following, who were uniformly generous and kindly and showed the most heroic reserves of patience in answering one simple, endlessly repeated question: “I'm sorry, but can you explain that again?”
In the United States: Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York; John Thorstensen, Mary K. Hudson, and David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire; Dr. William Abdu and Dr. Bryan Marsh of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire; Ray Anderson and Brian Witzke of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Iowa City; Mike Voorhies of the University of Nebraska and Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park near Orchard, Nebraska; Chuck Offenburger of Buena Vista University, Storm Lake, Iowa; Ken Rancourt, director of research, Mount Washington Observatory, Gorham, New Hampshire; Paul Doss, geologist of Yellowstone National Park, and his wife, Heidi, also of the National Park; Frank Asaro of the University of California at Berkeley; Oliver Payne and Lynn Addison of the National Geographic Society; James O. Farlow, Indiana-Purdue University; Roger L. Larson, professor of marine geophysics, University of Rhode Island; Jeff Guinn of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper; Jerry Kasten of Dallas, Texas; and the staff of the Iowa Historical Society in Des Moines.
In England: David Caplin of Imperial College, London; Richard Fortey, Len Ellis, and Kathy Way of the Natural History Museum; Martin Raff of University College, London; Rosalind Harding of the Institute of Biological Anthropology in Oxford; Dr. Laurence Smaje, formerly of the Wellcome Institute; and Keith Blackmore of The Times.
In Australia: the Reverend