A Short History of Nearly Everything Quotes

To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune.

I didn’t doubt the correctness of the information for an instant—I still tend to trust the pronouncements of scientists in the way I trust those of surgeons, plumbers, and other possessors of arcane and privileged information—but I couldn’t for the life of me conceive how any human mind could work out what spaces thousands of miles below us, that no eye had ever seen and no X-ray could penetrate, could look like and be made of.

And here’s the thing. It wasn’t exciting at all. It wasn’t actually altogether comprehensible.

We have been spoiled by artists’ renderings into imagining a clarity of resolution that doesn’t exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in Christy’s photograph is faint and fuzz—a piece of cosmic lint—and its moon is not the romantically backlit, crispy delineated companion orb you would get in a National Geographic painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness.

When I was a boy, the solar system was thought to contain thirty moons. The total now is “at least ninety,” about a third of which have been found in just the last ten years. The point to remember, of course, is that when considering the universe at large, we don’t actually know what’s in our own solar system.

Nearly every line he penned was an invitation to slumber.

Perhaps nothing better typifies the strange and often accidental nature of chemical science in its early days than a discovery made by a German named Henning Brand in 1675. Brand became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine […] None of it yielded gold, of course, but a strange and interesting thing did happen. After a time, the substance began to glow. Moreover, when exposed to air, it often spontaneously burst into flame.

Marie Curie would win a second prize, in chemistry, in 1911, the only person to win in both chemistry and physics.

Just to put these insights into perspective, it is perhaps worth noting that at the time Leavitt [was] inferring fundamental properties of the cosmos from dim smudges on photographic plates, the Harvard astronomer William H. Pickering, who could of course peer into a first class telescope as often as he wanted, was developing his seminal theory that dark patches on the Moon were caused by swarms of seasonally migrating insects.

The “shell” of an atom isn’t some hard shiny casing, as illustrations sometimes encourage us to suppose, but simply the outermost of these fuzzy electron clouds. The cloud itself is essentially just a zone of statistical probability beyond which the electron only very seldom strays. […] It seemed as if there was no end of strangeness.

Einstein couldn’t bear the notion that God could create a universe in which some things were forever unknowable.

Seldom has an industrial product been more swiftly or unfortunately embraced. CFCs went into production in the early 1930s and found a thousand applications in everything from car air conditioners to deodorant sprays before it was noticed, half a century later, that they were devouring the ozone in the stratosphere. As you will be aware, this is not a good thing.

Carl Sagan in Cosmos raised the possibility that if you traveled downward into an electron, you might find that it contained a universe of its own, recalling all those science fiction stories of the fifties.

Think of Earth’s orbit as a kind of freeway on which we are the only vehicle, but which is regularly crossed by pedestrians who don’t know enough to look before stepping off the curb. At least 90 percent of these pedestrians are quite unknown to us. […] All we know is that at some point, at uncertain levels, they trundle across the road down which we are cruising at sixty-six thousand miles per hour. […] The number of these relative tiddlers in Earth crossing orbits is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions, and they are nearly impossible to track.

Yellowstone, it appears, is due.

The real terror of the deep, however is the bends—not so much because they are unpleasant, though of course they are, as because they are so much more likely.

It was a world independent of sunlight, oxygen, or anything else normally associated with life. This was a living system based not on photosynthesis, but chemosynthesis, an arrangement that biologists would have dismissed as preposterous had anyone been imaginative enough to suggest it.

In fact, by 1957-58 the dumping of radioactive wastes had already been going on, with a certain appalling vigor, for over a decade.

Remarkably, by one estimate, some 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the developed world are given to farm animals, often routinely in stock feed, simply to promote growth or as a precaution against infection. Such applications give bacteria every opportunity to evolve a resistance to them.

Darwin kept his theory to himself because he well knew the storm it would cause. In 1844, the year he locked his notes away, a book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation roused much of the thinking world to fury by suggesting that humans might have evolved from lesser primates without the assistance of a divine creator.

And these, you may recall, are men who thought science was nearly at an end.

If Franklin was not warmly forthcoming with her findings, she cannot altogether be blamed. Female academics at King’s in the 1950s were treated with a formalized disdain that dazzles modern sensibilities (actually any sensibilities). However senior or accomplished, they were not allowed into the college’s senior common room but instead had to take their meals in a more utilitarian chamber that even Watson conceded was “dingily pokey.” On top of this she was being constantly pressed—at times actively harassed—to share her results with a trio of men whose desperation to get a peek at them was seldom matched by more engaging qualities, like respect.

Perhaps an apogee (or nadir) of this faith in biodeterminism was a study published in the journal Science in 1980 contending that women are genetically inferior at mathematics. In fact, we now know, almost nothing about you is so accommodatingly simple.

The extraordinary fact is that we don’t know which is more likely, a future offering us eons of perishing frigidity or one giving us equal expanses of steamy heat. Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife-edge.

We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.