A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [242]
2 “It's like a trillion hydrogen bombs . . .” Robert Evans, interview by author, Hazelbrook, Australia, September 2, 2001.
3 “a chapter on autistic savants . . .” Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, p. 198.
4 “an irritating buffoon . . .” Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p. 164.
5 “refused to be left alone with him . . .” Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p. 125.
6 “Zwicky threatened to kill Baade . . .” Overbye, p. 18.
7 “Atoms would literally be crushed together . . .” Nature, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Neutron Star,” November 7, 2002, p. 31.
8 “the biggest bang in the universe . . .” Thorne, p. 171.
9 “hasn't been verified yet.” Thorne, p. 174.
10 “one of the most prescient documents . . .” Thorne, p. 174.
11 “he did not understand the laws of physics . . .” Thorne, p. 174.
12 “wouldn't attract serious attention for nearly four decades . . .” Overbye, p. 18.
13 “Only about 6,000 stars . . .” Harrison, Darkness at Night, p. 3.
14 “In 1987 Saul Perlmutter . . .” BBC Horizon documentary, “From Here to Infinity,” transcript of program first broadcast February 28, 1999.
15 “The news of such an event . . .” John Thorstensen, interview by author, Hanover, New Hampshire, December 5, 2001.
16 “Only half a dozen times . . .” Note from Evans, December 3, 2002.
17 “cosmologist and controversialist . . .” Nature, “Fred Hoyle (1915–2001),” September 17, 2001, p. 270.
18 “humans evolved projecting noses . . .” Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 190.
19 “continually creating new matter as it went.” Rees, p. 75.
20 “100 million degrees or more . . .” Bodanis, E = mc2, p. 187.
21 “99.9 percent of the mass of the solar system . . .” Asimov, Atom, p. 294.
22 “In just 200 million years . . .” Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p. 6.
23 “Most of the lunar material . . .” New Scientist supplement, “Firebirth,” August 7, 1999, unnumbered page.
24 “first proposed in the 1940s by Reginald Daly.” Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p. 38.
25 “Earth might well have frozen over permanently” Drury, Stepping Stones, p. 144.
CHAPTER 4 THE MEASURE OF THINGS
1 “a long and productive career . . .” Sagan and Druyan, p. 52.
2 “a very specific and precise curve . . .” Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p. 90.
3 “Hooke, who was well known . . .” Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p. 219.
4 “betwixt my eye and the bone . . .” Quoted by Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p. 106.
5 “told no one about it for twenty-seven years.” Durant and Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, p. 538.
6 “Even the great German mathematician Gottfried von Leibniz . . .” Durant and Durant, p. 546.
7 “one of the most inaccessible books ever written . . .” Cropper, The Great Physicists, p. 31.
8 “proportional to the mass of each . . .” Feynman, p. 69.
9 “Newton, as was his custom, contributed nothing.” Calder, The Comet Is Coming! p. 39.
10 “He was to be paid instead . . .” Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p. 36.
11 “within a scantling.” Wilford, The Mapmakers, p. 98.
12 “The Earth was forty-three kilometers stouter . . .” Asimov, Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos, p. 86.
13 “Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil . . .” Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p. 134.
14 “Mason and Dixon sent a note . . .” Jardine, p. 141.
15 “born in a coal mine . . .” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 7, p. 1302.
16 “For convenience, Hutton had assumed . . .” Jungnickel and McCormmach, Cavendish, p. 449.
17 “it was Michell to whom he turned . . .” Calder, The Comet Is Coming! p. 71.
18 “to a ‘degree bordering on disease.' ” Jungnickel and McCormmach, p. 306.
19 “talk as it were into vacancy.” Jungnickel and McCormmach, p. 305.
20 “foreshadowed ‘the work of Kelvin and G. H. Darwin . . . ' ” Crowther, Scientists of the Industrial Revolution, pp. 214–15.
21 “two 350-pound lead balls . . .” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 3, p. 1261.
22 “six billion trillion metric tons . . .” Economist, “G Whiz,” May 6, 2000, p. 82.
CHAPTER 5 THE STONE-BREAKERS
1 “Hutton was by all accounts . . .” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 10, pp. 354–56.
2