A short history of nearly everything

This is a book about how it happened – in particular, how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also some of what happened in between and since.

• How to build a universe
  • When the universe begins to expand, it won’t be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exist is the space it creates as it goes.
  • From nothing, our universe begins.
  • Perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier, collapsed universe – that ours is just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes.
  • Space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite.
• Welcome to the solar system
  • Pluto was much smaller than anyone had supposed – smaller even than Mercury. Indeed, seven moons in the solar system, including our own, are larger.
  • Most star systems in the cosmos are binary (double-starred), which makes our solitary sun a slight oddity.
• The Reverend Evan’s universe
  • A supernova occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time more brightly than all the stars in its galaxy.
• The measure of things
  • At the time people had lately become infected with a powerful desire to understand the Earth – to determine how old it was, and how massive, where it hung in space, and how it had come to be.
  • The mean distance from the Earth to the Sun is 149.597870691 million kilometers.
  • The current best estimate for Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes.
• The stone-breakers
  • There was nothing in physics that could explain how a body the size of the Sun could burn continuously for more than a few tens of millions of years at most without exhausting its fuel. Therefore it followed that the Sun and its planets were relatively,  but inescapably, youthful. The problem was that nearly all the fossil evidence contradicted this, and suddenly in the nineteenth century there was a lot of fossil evidence.
• Science read in tooth and claw
  • The upshot is that by the turn of the twentieth century, palaeontologists had literally tons of old bones to pick over. Theproblem was that they still didn’t have any idea how old any of these bones were. Worese, the agreed ages for the Earth couldn’t comfortably support the numbers of aeons and ages and epochs that the past obviously contained.
• Elemental matters
  • At the time, elements were normally grouped in two ways – either by atomic weight (using Avogadro’s Principle) or by common properties (whether they were metals or gases, for instance). Mendeleyev’s breakthrough was to see that the two could be combined in a single table.
• Einstein’s universe
  • As the nineteenth century drew to a close, scientists could reflect with satisfaction that they had pinned down most of the mysteries of the physical world.
  • Many wise people believed that there was nothing much left for science to do.
• The mighty atom
  • The picture of an atom that nearly everybody has in mind is of an electron or two flying around a nucleus, like planets orbiting a sun. It is completely wrong, but durable just the same.
  • Above all, there was the problem that quantum physics introduced a level of untidiness that hadn’t previously existed. Suddenly you needed two sets of laws to explain the behaviour of the universe – quantum theory for the world of the very small and relativity for the larger universe beyond.
• Getting the lead out
  • All living things have within them an isotope of carbon called carbon-14, which begins to decay at a measurable rate the instant they die.
• Muster Mark’s quarks
  • Eventually out of all this emerged what is called the Standard Model, which is essentially a sort of parts kit for the subatomic world.
  • The Standard Model lacks elegance and simplicity.
  • We live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distance from us and each other we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
• The Earth moves
  • The process of vertical movement, known as isostasy, was a foundation of geological belief for generations, though no-one had any really good theories as to how or why it happened.
  • Today we know that the Earth’s surface is made up of eight to twelve big plates and twenty or so smaller ones, and that they all move in different directions and at different speeds.
  • The distribution of continents in former times is much less neatly resolved than most people outside geophysics think.
  • There are also many surface features that tectonics can’t explain.
• Bang!
  • An extraterrestrial impact may have been the cause of an earlier event known as the Frasnian extinction.
• The fire below
  • Scientists are generally agreed that the world beneath us is composed of four layers – a rocky outer crust, a mantle of hot, viscous rock, a liquid outer core and a solid inner core.
• Dangerous beauty
  • Wherever we go on Earth – even into what’s seemed like the most hostile possible environments for life – as long as there is liquid water and some source of chemical energy we find life.
  • Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.
• Lonely planet
  • The portions of the Earth on which we are prepared or able to live are modest indeed: just 12 per cent of the total land area, and only 4 per cent of the whole surface if you include the seas.
• Into the troposphere
  • For scientific convenience, the atmosphere is divided into four unequal layers: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere and ionosphere (now often called the thermosphere).
  • Only about 0.035 per cent of the Earth’s fresh water is floating around above us at any moment.
• The bounding main
  • Ninety-seven per cent of all the water on Earth is in the seas, the greater part of it in the Pacific, which is bigger than all the land masses put together.
  • Of the 3 per cent of Earth’s water that is fresh, most exists as ice sheets. Only the tiniest amount – 0.036 per cent – is found in lakes, rivers and reservoirs, and an even smaller part – just 0.001 per cent – exists in clouds or as vapour.
• The rise of life
  • No-one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body, and each one is a little miracle.
• Small world
  • Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.
• Life goes on
  • Fossils are in every sense vanishingly rare. Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.
• Goodbye to all that
  • There is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly. For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumple and die remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct. Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isn’t terribly ambitious.
• The richness of being
  • Overall, tropical rainforests cover only about 6 per cent of Earth’s surface, but they harbour more than half of its animal life and about two-thirds of its flowering plants – and most of this life remains unknown to us because too few researchers spend time in them.
• Cells
  • When, as occasionally happens, a cell fails to expire in the prescribed manner, but rather begins to divide and proliferate wildly, we call the result cancer.
• Darwin’s singular notion
  • Darwin’s theory suggested a mechanism for how a species might become stronger or better or faster – in a word, fitter – but gave no indication of how it might throw up a new species.
  • Darwin’s theory didn’t really gain widespread acceptance until the 1930s and 1940s, with the advance of a refined theory called, with a certain hauteur, the Modern Synthesis, combining Darwin’s ideas with those of Mendel and others.
• The stuff of life
  • Chromosomes constitute the complete set of instructions necessary to make and maintain you and are made of long strands of the little wonder chemical called deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA – ‘ the most extraordinary molecule on Earth’, as it has been called.
  • Viewed this way, the chromosomes can be imagined as the book’s chapters and the genes as individual instructions for making proteins.
  • In field after field, researchers found that whatever organism they were working on – whether nematode worms or human beings – they were often studying essentially the same genes. Life, it appeared, was drawn up from a single set of blueprints.
• Ice time
  • Cyclical changes in the shape of the Earth’s orbit, from elliptical (which is to say, slightly oval) to nearly circular to elliptical again, might explain the onset and retreat of ice ages.
  • The fact is, we are still very much in an ice age; it’s just a somewhat shrunken one – though less shrunken than many people realize.
• The mysterious biped
  • Whole new species don’t emerge instantaneously, as the fossil record implies, but gradually out of other, existing species.
• The restless ape
  • The traditional theory to explain human movements – and the one still accepted by the majority of people in the field – is that humans dispersed across Eurasia in two waves.
• Goodbye
  • Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers.