9 Bill Bryson Quotes on Science

Bill Bryson quotes on science

43. It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

44. All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.

45. As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: 'In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things that happen from time to time.' To which adds Guth: 'Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts.'

46. : as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: 'The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.'

47. In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.

49. It is natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity - in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes - an interesting side branch.

50. But what is life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.

51. Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be.

60. I have always wanted to know why, wherever archaeologists dig, do they always find red and white poles?