Some notes, comments, key concepts and excerpts from the excellent book, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
Shout out to my brother, who sent me the book as a gift!
Inflation theory, “which holds that a fraction of a moment after the dawn of creation, the universe underwent a sudden dramatic expansion. It inflated — in effect ran away with itself, doubling in size every 10^(-34) seconds.” Essentially the vast majority of our vast universe was all created “in a single cracking instant.”
We have three possible universes:
- Gravity may be too strong: “one day it may halt the expansion of the universe and bring it collapsing in upon itself, till it crushes itself down into another singularity, possibly to start the whole process over again.”
- Gravity may be too weak: “the universe will keep racing away forever until everything is so far apart that there is no chance of material interactions.”
- Gravity may be just right – critical density – “and it will hold the universe together at just the right dimensions to allow things to go on indefinitely.”
AF: Another way I like to look at the expansion of the universe is to consider how it’s expanding through our minds, innovations and perceptions of reality. For example, we’ve created alternate and new universes – or existences even – through art, books, math, the internet, stories, relationships. Each could be thought of as another layer of our expanding (or maybe, deepening in this case?) universe.
Isaac Newton: “upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head” … “capable of the most riveting strangeness” … “Once he inserted a bodkin — a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather — into his eye socket and rubbed it around … just to see what would happen.” … “On another occasion, he started at the Sun for as long as he could bare.” … “As a student, frustrated by the limitations of conventional mathematics, he invented an entirely new form, the calculus, but then told no one about it for twenty-seven years.”
AF: This anecdote, about the extremely shy London scientist Henry Cavendish, cracks me up every time I read it: “Once he opened his door to find an Austrian admirer, freshly arrived from Vienna, on the front step. Excitedly the Austrian began to babble out praise. For a few moments Cavendish received the compliments as if they were blows from a blunt object and then, unable to take any more, fled down the path and out the gate, leaving the front door wide open. It was some hours before he could be coaxed back to the property.”
Catastrophism: the theory that “the Earth was shaped by abrupt cataclysmic events — floods principally…”
Uniformitarianism: the theory that “changes on Earth were gradual and that nearly all Earth processes happened slowly, over immense spans of time.”
Albert Einstein: “He was a bright but not outstanding student.” His very first paper was on the physics of fluids in drinking straws. “His famous equation, E = mc², … says that mass and energy have an equivalence … energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen … Everything has this kind of energy trapped within it. … According to Einstein himself, he was simply sitting in a chair when the problem of gravity occurred to him … The most challenging and nonintuitive of all the concepts in the general theory of relativity is the idea that time is part of space.”
Quantum mechanics and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: “… the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves. The uncertainty around which the theory is built is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it as at a given instant, but we cannot know both. Any attempt to measure one will unavoidably disturb the other … In a sense, as Dennis Overbye has put it, an electron doesn’t exist until it is observed.”
AF: One of my favorite lines and paragraphs in the book, from the section on Heisenberg and quantum mechanics: “So the atom turned out to be quite unlike the image that most people had created. The electron doesn’t fly around the nucleus like a planet around its sun, but instead takes on the more amorphous aspect of a cloud. 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 marking the area beyond which the electron only very seldom strays. Thus an atom, if you could see it, would look more like a very fuzzy tennis ball than a hard-edged metallic sphere (but not much like either or, indeed, like anything you’ve ever seen; we are, after all, dealing with a world very different from the one we see around us).
Superstring theory: “postulates that all those little things like quarks and leptons that we had previously thought of as particles are actually ‘strings’ — vibrating strands of energy that oscillate in eleven dimensions, consisting of the three we know already plus time and seven other dimensions that are, well, unknowable to us.”
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
AF: Par IV Dangerous Planet, which talks about asteroids (and how near misses probably happen pretty regularly) and volcanoes (and how they could erupt and destroy civilization at any time) and other stuff that we have to just accept as risks — is quite humbling. Really, no control.
The Moon: Without the moon’s steadying influence, the Earth would wobble like a dying top, with goodness knows what consequences for climate and weather. The Moon’s steady gravitational influence keeps the Earth spinning at the right speed and angle to provide the sort of stability necessary for the long and successful development of life … think of it as much more than just a pleasant feature in the night sky.”
Bacteria: “… from a genetic point of view bacteria have become a single superorganism — tiny, dispersed, but invincible.”
AF: I think about all the bacteria in our guts like puppet masters. And then I think about the looming robo-apocalypse and AI and the singularity. The germs in our gut — these ‘superorganisms’ — won’t let their hosts die. Therefore, for humanity to survive, we must always go with our gut, and eat sauerkraut.
“If the estimates are correct, there could be more life under the Earth than on top of it … We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes — an interesting side branch.”
We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise.
Bill Bryson, from the chapter The Richness of Being (p.369)
“Climate is the product of so many variables — rising and falling carbon dioxide levels, the shifts of continents, solar activity, the stately wobbles of the Milankovitch cycles — that it is as difficult to comprehend the events of the past as it is to predict those of the future. Much is simply beyond us.”
“But here’s an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.”
AF: The amount of stuff I don’t know seems to grow proportionally to the amount of stuff I learn. We really have no idea what’s going on. We should keep that in mind.