Bill Bryson (III)

This will be my last post related to the book. Anyway, here goes:

1. “the solar system is quite a roomy place and the average asteroid [is] about one and a half million kilometres from its nearest neighbour. [that's almost four times the average distance from the earth to the moon..] Nobody knows even approximately how many asteroids there are tumbling through space, but the number is thought to be probably not less than a billion. [...] As of July 2001, 26.000 asteroids had been named and identified [...] As late as 1988, more than half of all American palaeontologists contacted in a survey continued to believe that the extinction of the dinosaurs was in no way related to an asteroid or cometary impact. [...] In 2001 researchers at the California Institute of Technology analysed helium isotopes from sediments left from the later KT impact and concluded that it affected the Earth’s climate for about ten thousand years. This was actually used as evidence to support the notion that the extinction of dinosaurs was swift and emphatic – and so it was, in geological terms. [...] if you exploded one Hiroshima-sized bomb for every person alive on Earth today you would still be about a billion bombs short of the size of the KT impact.”

2. “Until slightly under a century ago, what the best-informed scientific minds knew about Earth’s interior was not much more than what a coal miner knew – namely, that you could dig down through soil for a distance and then you’d hit rock, and that was about it. [...] Earthquakes are fairly common. Every day on average somewhere in the world there are two of magnitude 2.0 or greater – that’s enough to give anyone nearby a pretty good jolt. [...]

By the 1960s scientists had grown sufficiently frustrated by how little they understood of the Earth’s interior that they decided to try to do something about it. Specifically, they got the idea to drill through the ocean floor (the continental crust was too thick) to the Moho discontinuity [here's Salman Khan's treatment of the subject] and to extract a piece of the Earth’s mantle for examination at leisure. [...] The hope was to lower a drill through over 4,000 metres of Pacific Ocean water off the coast of Mexico and drill some 5,000 metres through relatively thin crustal rock. Drilling from a ship in open waters is, in the words of one oceanographer, ‘like trying to drill a hole in the sidewalks of New York from atop the Empire State Building using a strand of spaghetti’. Every attempt ended in failure. The deepest they penetrated was only about 180 metres.”

3. “From the bottom of the deepest ocean trench to the top of the highest mountain, the zone that covers nearly the whole of known life is only around 20 kilometres thick – not when set against the roominess of the cosmos at large. For humans it is even worse because we happen to belong to the portion of living things that took the rash but venturesome decision 400 million years ago to crawl out of the seas and become land-based and oxygen-breathing. In consequence, no less than 99,5 per cent of the world’s habitable space by volume, according to one estimate, is fundamentally – in practical terms completely – off limits to us. [yet some people still claim that the earth was "made for us"...] [...]

“Of the small portion of the planet’s surface that is dry enough to stand on, a surprisingly large amount is too hot or cold or dry or steep or lofty to be of much use to us. Partly, it must be conceded, this is our fault. In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless. [...] Even in quite mild weather half of the calories you burn go to keep your body warm.”

I’d like also to add that it’s worth remembering just how little the surface part of the Earth actually is. The highest permanent human settlements are located in a height of somewhere between 5,5 and 6 km above sea level. If we take the Kármán line to be the boundary between the atmosphere and outer space, there’s another 95 kilometers above us that we don’t make much use of. Below us there is something along the lines of 6,370 km’s in a straight line down to the centre of the core. Earth’s crust constitutes less than 1 % of Earth’s total volume, and we’ve never even gotten half of the way down there, even with all our fancy machinery.

4. “At any one moment 1,800 thunderstorms are in progress around the globe – some 40,000 a day.” [...] “because heat from the Sun is unevenly distributed, differences in air pressure arise on the planet. Air can’t abide this, so it rushes around trying to equalize things everywhere. Wind is simply the air’s way of trying to keep things in balance. Air always flows from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure [...] and the greater the discrepancy in pressures, the faster the wind blows.” [...] clouds are not great reservoirs of water. Only about 0.035 per cent of the Earth’s fresh water is floating around above us at any moment.”

5. “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. Altogether the Pacific holds just over half of all the ocean water (51.6 per cent); the Atlantic has 23.6 per cent and the Indian Ocean 21.2 per cent leaving just 3.6 per cent to be accounted for by all the other seas. The average depth of the ocean is 3.86 kilometres, with the Pacific on average about 300 metres deeper than the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Sixty per cent of the planet’s surface is ocean more than 1.6 kilometres deep.”

6. “It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s 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. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But – and here’s an interesting point – for the most part it doesn’t want to be much. [...] 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 crumble 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.”

…

I of course recommend this book. If you like the stuff you’ve read in the posts, you’ll love the book. It doesn’t go into much depth (well, at one point it goes to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and at another point it talks about stuff going on in the Earth’s core, so that’s not entirely true – but you know what I mean…), however it covers a lot of stuff along the way and I’ll almost guarantee that if you read the book, you’ll come across some stuff you didn’t know and didn’t know you wanted to know.

One more thing – I urge you to remember that the three posts here are excerpts and quotes from almost 600 pages of material. It takes me some time to figure out just what to include and what not to include in posts like these, even though I’ve painted and written plenty in the book along the way which facilitates the blogging process. Actually it’s somewhat easier to know what to include if you cover a ‘reasonably good’ book than it is if you’re reading a brilliant book filled with amazing stuff you want to give on to the rest of the world. This is just another way for me to say, yet again, that it takes a lot of time to make posts like these, which is a big part of why I don’t do it more often.

Bill Bryson (II)

More quotes from his wonderful book:

1. “Before [Richard] Owen, museums were designed primarily for the use and edification of the elite, and even they found it difficult to gain access. In the early days of the British Museum, prospective visitors had to make a written application and undergo a brief interview to determine if they were fit to be admitted at all. They then had to return a second time to pick up a ticket – that is, assuming they had passed the interview – and finally come back a third time to view the museum’s treasures. Even then they were whisked through in groups and not allowed to linger. Owen’s plan was to welcome everyone, even to the point of encouraging working men to visit in the evening, and to devote most of the museum’s space to public displays. He even proposed, very radically, to put informative labels on each display so that people could appreciate what they were viewing.”

2. “At the turn of the twentieth century, palaeontologists had literally tons of old bones to pick over. The problem was that they still didn’t have any idea how old any of these bones were. Worse, the agreed ages for the Earth couldn’t comfortably support the numbers of aeons and ages and epochs that the past obviously contained. If Earth were really only twenty million years old or so, as the great Lord Kelvin insisted, then whole orders of ancient creatures must have come into being and gone out again practically in the same geological instant. It just made no sense. [...] Such was the confusion that by the close of the nineteenth century, depending on which text you consulted, you could learn that the number of years that stood between us and the dawn of complex life in the Cambrian period was 3 million, 18 million, 600 million, 794 million, or 2,4 billion – or som other number within that range. As late as 1910 [five years after Einstein's Annus Mirabilis papers], one of the most respected estimates, by the American George Becker, put the Earth’s age at perhaps as little as 55 million years.”

3. “Soon after taking up his position [in the beginning of the nineteenth century], [Humphry] Davy began to bang out new elements one after the other – potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, and aluminum or aluminium [...] He discovered so many elements not so much because he was serially astute as because he developed an ingenious technique of applying electricity to a molten substance – electrolysis, as it is known. Altogether he discovered a dozen elements, a fifth of the known totals of his day.”

4. “They [Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy] also discovered that radioactive elements decayed into other elements – that one day you had an atom of uranium, say, and the next you had an atom of lead. This was truly extraordinary. It was alchemy pure and simple; no-one had ever imagined that such a thing could happen naturally and spontaneously. [...] For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the Finger Lakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its ‘Radio-active mineral springs’. It wasn’t banned in consumer products until 1938. By this time it was much too late for Mme Curie, who died of leukaemia in 1934.”

5. “In 1875, when a young German in Kiel named Max Planck was deciding whether to devote his life to mathematics or to physics, he was urged most heartily not to choose physics because the breakthroughs had all been made there. The coming century, he was assured, would be one of consolidation and refinement, not revolution.”

6. “You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 x 10^18 joules of potential energy – enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. Everything has this kind of energy trapped within it. We’re just not very good at getting it out. Even a uranium bomb – the most energetic thing we have produced yet – releases less than 1 per cent of the energy it could release if only we were more cunning.”

7. “It is worth pausing for a moment to consider just how little was known of the cosmos at the this time. Astronomers today believe there are perhaps 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe. [...] In 1919, when Hubble first put his head to the eyepiece, the number of these galaxies known to us was exactly one: the Milky Way. Everything else was thought to be either part of the Milky Way itself or one of many distant, peripheral puffs of gas. [...] at the time Leavitt and Cannon were inferring fundamental properties of the cosmos from dim smudges of distant stars 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.”

8. “Atoms, in short, are very abundant. They are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long-lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare.”

From the wiki correction page: “Jupiter Scientific has done an analysis of this problem and the figure in Bryon’s book is probably low: It is likely that each of us has about 200 billion atoms that were once in Shakespeare’s body.”

9. “Even though lead was widely known to be dangerous, by the early years of the twentieth century it could be found in all manner of consumer products. Food came in cans sealed with lead solder. Water was often stored in lead-lined tanks. Lead arsenate was sprayed onto fruits as a pesticide. Lead even came as part of the composition of toothpaste tubes. [...] Americans alive today each have about 625 times more lead in their blood than people did a century ago.”

In this chapter we also learn that we did not arrive at the current best estimate of the age of the earth until little over 50 years ago – I won’t quote from the book, but wikipedia has the short version: “An age of 4.55 ± 1.5% billion years, very close to today’s accepted age, was determined by C.C. Patterson using uranium-lead isotope dating (specifically lead-lead dating) on several meteorites including the Canyon Diablo meteorite and published in 1956.” At this point, the age of the universe was still very uncertain, from the book: “In 1956, astronomers discovered that Cepheid variables were more variable than they had thought; they came in two varieties, not one. This allowed them to rework their calculations and come up with a new age for the universe of between seven billion and twenty billion years” – as Bryson puts it, that estimate was “not terribly precise”. Our knowledge about the age of the universe is quite new.

10. “Well into the 1970s, one of the most popular and influential geological textbooks, The Earth by the venerable Harold Jefferys, strenuously insisted that plate tectonics was a physical impossibility, just as it had in the first edition way back in 1924. It was equally dismissive of convection and sea-floor spreading. And in Basin and Range, published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn’t believe in plate tectonics.”

11. “By the time Shoemaker came along, a common view was that Meteor Crater had been formed by an underground steam explosion. Shoemaker knew nothing about underground steam explosions – he couldn’t; they don’t exist…”

Bill Bryson

Here’s the link, order it if you like what you read here. I read the book 3 years ago, but this is the kind of book that you’ll probably want to reread at some point if you’re like me. When I read it the first time I borrowed my big brother’s book, as he had it standing on his bookshelf while I was visiting him over the Summer. I recently bought the book myself (it was on sale) and I’ve pretty much since I bought it been somewhat bugged by the fact that (yet) a(/nother) book I’ve read stands on my bookshelf looking as if it’s never even been touched by a human hand (most of the books I’ve read contains pages painted in at least two colours and often contain various notes in the margin – ‘you can tell they’ve been read’). So I decided to take another shot at it, also because I needed a break from Genetics – some of that is hard and this is supposed to be my vacation after all… Ok, let’s move on to some quotes from the book:

1. I’d actually like to quote the introduction chapter in full, it’s that good; but that would be overkill so less will do. However I can’t stop myself from telling you in a bit more detail just how Bryson starts out (…I was just about to add ‘…his adventure’):

“Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, co-operative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under appreciated state known as existence.
Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don’t actually care about you – indeed, they don’t even know that you are there. They don’t even know that they are there.”

[...]

“Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, then silently reassemble and go off to be other things. And that’s it for you. [...] The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is, of course, the miracle of life.

[...]

But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. 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. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. [...] The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years [...] Consider the fact that for 3,8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of heriditary combinations that could result – eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly – in you.[*]

This is a book about how it happened…”

*Technically, this passage is not entirely true/correct, as the concept of sexual reproduction is quite a bit younger than that – but the finer details don’t subtract much from the narrative: “The first fossilized evidence of sexually reproducing organisms is from eukaryotes of the Stenian period, about 1 to 1.2 billion years ago.” (wikipedia) It’s still a pretty long time ago. Interestingly, this inaccuracy is not mentioned on this wiki page dealing with inaccuracies and errors in the book. I’ve found at least a few passages besides those that I considered a bit problematic while reading them, but I generally let those pass when I’m reading both because of the background of the author and the likely background of the target group (it’s pop sci after all).

So anyway, that’s how he starts out.

2. Also from the introduction:

“about four of five years ago, I suppose – I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occured to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn’t know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on. I had no idea, for example, why the oceans were salty but the Great Lakes weren’t. Didn’t have the faintest idea. I didn’t know if the oceans were growing more salty with time or less, and whether ocean salinity levels was something I should be concerned about or not. [...] I didn’t know what a proton was, or a protein, didn’t know a quark from a quasar, didn’t understand how geologists could look at a layer of rock on a canyon wall and tell you how old it was – didn’t know anything, really.”

So he spent 3 years of his life to write the book and try to find out some of this stuff presumably asking a lot of really awkward questions along the way. Quotes below are from the book proper, not from the introduction:

3. “until 1978 no-one had ever noticed that Pluto has a moon.” [...] “Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it [...] fills less than a trillionth of the available space.” [...] “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, when considering the universe at large is that we don’t actually know what is in our own solar system.” [...] Surprisingly little of the universe is visible to us when we incline our heads to the sky. Only about six thousand stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about two thousand can be seen from any one spot.”

4. “It was history’s first co-operative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness or shipwreck. Others made their destinations but opened their crates to find equipment broken or warped by tropical heat. Once again the French seemed fated to provide the most memorably unlucky participants. Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements.”

5. “The second half of the eighteenth century was a time when people of a scientific bent grew intensely interested in the physical properties of fundamental things – gases and electricity in particular – and began seeing what they could do with them, often with more enthusiasm than sense. In America, Benjamin Franklin famously risked his life by flying a kite in an electrical storm. 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.”

6. “It is hard to imagine now, but geology excited the nineteenth century – positively gripped it – in a way that no science ever had before or would again. In 1839, when Roderick Murchison published The Silurian System, a plump and ponderous study of a type of rock called greywacke, it was an instant bestseller, racing through four editions, even though it cost 8 guineas a copy and was, in true Huttonian style, unreadable. (As even a Murchison supporter conceded, it had ‘a total want of literary attractiveness’.) And when, in 1841, the great Charles Lyell travelled to America to give a series of lectures in Boston, sellout audiences of three thousand at a time packed into the Lowell Institute to hear his tranquillizing descriptions of marine zeolites and seismic perturbations in Campania.”

7. “The first attempt at measurement [of the age of the Earth] that could be called remotely scientific was made by the Frenchman Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in the 1770s. It had long been known that the Earth radiated appreciable amounts of heat – that was apparent to anyone who went down a coal mine – but there wasn’t any way of estimating the rate of dissipation. Buffon’s experiment consisted of heating spheres until they glowed white-hot and then estimating the rate of heat loss by touching them (presumably very lightly at first) as they cooled. From this he guessed the Earth’s age to be somewhere between 75,000 and 168,000 thousand years old. This was of course a wild underestimate; but it was a radical notion nonetheless…”

Bryson often include examples like these, on just how people figured stuff out – as you can also tell from quote #4 and #5. These parts of the book are really fascinating to me, because they make it clear just how many problems related to measurements and knowledge sharing that were around, making life complicated for people trying to figure stuff out in the past; problems we don’t even spare a thought today. And because descriptions such as these make it much more clear how many of the tools people today take for granted didn’t exactly come along by themselves. The stuff above deals with only the first 100 pages or so; needless to say, there’s a lot of good stuff in this book. I’ll bring more quotes and stuff from the book tomorrow – I should have blogged the book in detail the first time I read it, but I never got around to do it and this time I’ll try to rectify that mistake.