I just finished reading the book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson. Here is a link to some information on the book –
en.wikipedia.org...
This book was a really interesting read, it is a book about science and tries to cram a ton of info into about 500 pages. I was interested if anyone
else on ATS has read it, and what there thoughts are on the book. The information in this book seems like it should be common information taught in
high school, but I was amazed by how much I would have never heard of if I didn't seek it out on my own.
I thought some of the same things that interested me would interest fellow ATSers. So below is some scientific info from the book that I thought was
cool. Please post any other cool science facts that you know!
Let's make this a thread full of cool/interesting/odd science facts!!
“Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the
number of seconds contained in half a million years.”
“The current best estimate for Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion metric tons...'
“Particles have a quality known as spin and, according to quantum theory, the moment you determine the spin of one particle, its sister particle, no
matter how distant away, will immediately begin spinning in the opposite direction at the same rate. It is as if, in the words of the science writer
Lawrence Joseph, you had two identical pool balls, one in Ohio and the other in Fiji, and the instant you sent one spinning the other would
immediately spin in a contrary direction at precisely the same speed.”
An interesting quote in the book, “The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and
short periods of terror.” -British Geologist Derek V. Ager.
“As of July 2001, twenty-six thousand asteroids had been named and identified – half in just the previous two years. With up to a billion to
identify, the count obviously has barely begun.”
“An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth's atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn't get out
of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the
temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. It this instant of it's arrival in our
atmosphere, everything in the meteor's path – people, houses, factories, cars – would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame.”
“We know amazingly little about what happens beneath our feet. It is fairly remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and baseball has
been playing World Series for longer than we have known that the Earth has a core. And of course the idea that the continents move around on the
surface like lily pads has been common wisdom for much less than a generation.”
“The distance from the surface of Earth to the center is 3,959 miles, which isn't so very far... Our own attempts to penetrate toward the middle
have been modest indeed. One or two South African gold mines reach to a depth of 2 miles, but most mines on Earth go no more than about a quarter of
a mile beneath the surface. If the planet were an apple, we wouldn't yet have broken through the skin. Indeed, we haven't even come close.”
“The largest earthquake since the scale's invention was (depending on which source you credit) either one centered on Prince William Sound in
Alaska 1964, which measured 9.2 on the Richter scale, or one in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile in 1960, which was initially logged at a
magnitude of 8.6 magnitude but was later revised upward by some authorities...to a truly grand-scale 9.5”
more to come.......
