A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [248]
19 “It has too many arbitrary parameters . . .” Quoted on the PBS video Creation of the Universe, 1985. Also quoted, with slightly different numbers, in Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, pp. 298–99.
20 “the notional Higgs boson . . .” CERN website document “The Mass Mystery,” undated.
21 “So we are stuck with a theory . . .” Feynman, p. 39.
22 “all those little things like quarks . . .” Science News, September 22, 2001, p. 185.
23 “tiny enough to pass for point particles . . .” Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 214.
24 “The heterotic string consists of a closed string . . .” Kaku, Hyperspace, p. 158.
25 “String theory has further spawned . . .” Scientific American, “The Universe's Unseen Dimensions,” August 2000, pp. 62–69; and Science News, “When Branes Collide,” September 22, 2001, pp. 184–85.
26 “The ekpyrotic process begins far in the indefinite past . . .” New York Times, “Before the Big Bang, There Was . . . What?” May 22, 2001, p. F1.
27 “to discriminate between the legitimately weird and the outright crackpot.” Nature, September 27, 2001, p. 354.
28 “The question came interestingly to a head . . .” New York Times website, “Are They a) Geniuses or b) Jokers?: French Physicists' Cosmic Theory Creates a Big Bang of Its Own,” November 9, 2002; and Economist, “Publish and Perish,” November 16, 2002, p. 75.
29 “Karl Popper . . . once suggested . . .” Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 230.
30 “we do not seem to be coming to the end . . .” Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 234.
31 “Hubble calculated that the universe was about . . .” U.S. News and World Report, “How Old Is the Universe?” August 25, 1997, p. 34.
32 “a new age for the universe . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 91.
33 “there erupted a long-running dispute . . .” Overbye, p. 268.
34 “a mountain of theory built on a molehill of evidence.” Economist, “Queerer Than We Can Suppose,” January 5, 2002, p. 58.
35 “may reflect the paucity of the data . . .” National Geographic, “Unveiling the Universe,” October 1999, p. 25.
36 “what they really mean . . .” Goldsmith, The Astronomers, p. 82.
37 “the best bets these days for the age of the universe . . .” U.S. News and World Report, “How Old Is the Universe?” August 25, 1997, p. 34.
38 “two-thirds of the universe is still missing . . .” Economist, “Dark for Dark Business,” January 5, 2002, p. 51.
39 “The theory is that empty space isn't so empty at all . . .” PBS Nova, “Runaway Universe,” Transcript from program first broadcast November 21, 2000.
40 “Einstein's cosmological constant . . .” Economist, “Dark for Dark Business,” January 5, 2002, p. 51.
CHAPTER 12 THE EARTH MOVES
1 “invited the reader to join him in a tolerant chuckle . . .” Hapgood, Earth's Shifting Crust, p. 29.
2 “they posited ancient ‘land bridges' . . .” Simpson, p. 98.
3 “Even land bridges couldn't explain some things.” Gould, Ever Since Darwin, p. 163.
4 “numerous grave theoretical difficulties.” Encylopaedia Britannica, 1964, vol. 6, p. 418.
5 “students might actually come to believe them.” Lewis, The Dating Game, p. 182.
6 “about half of those present . . .” Hapgood, p. 31.
7 “I feel the hypothesis is a fantastic one.” Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p. 147.
8 “Interestingly, oil company geologists . . .” McPhee, Basin and Range, p. 175.
9 “Aboard this vessel was a fancy new depth sounder . . .” McPhee, Basin and Range, p. 187.
10 “seamounts that he called guyots . . .” Harrington, p. 208.
11 “probably the most significant paper . . .” Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, pp. 131–32.
12 “Well into the 1970s . . .” Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p. 141.
13 “one American geologist in eight . . .” McPhee, Basin and Range, p. 198.
14 “Today we know that Earth's surface . . .” Simpson, p. 113.
15 “The connections between modern landmasses . . .” McPhee, Assembling California, pp. 202–8.
16 “at about the speed a fingernail grows . . .” Vogel, Naked Earth, p. 19.
17 “one-tenth of 1 percent of the Earth's history.” Margulis and