But one must be careful when speaking of ‘experimental science’ before the Enlightenment, for it often meant demonstrating what one already knew to be the case – and if experiment seemed to contradict axiomatic reason, so much the worse for experiment.
Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of.
Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, who in 1524, aged not quite sixteen, arrived in Vicenza.
He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them.
We started this chapter with three points: life wants to be; life doesn’t always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on. And often, as we shall see, it goes on in ways that are decidedly amazing.
Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured – never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history.” We.
Although the Spirit of St. Louis looked metallic, and was often described as such in newspaper reports, only the nose cowling was actually of metal. With only a thin layer of canvas between the pilot and the outside world, the Spirit of St. Louis was deafeningly noisy and unnervingly insubstantial. It would have been rather like crossing the ocean in a tent.
Jurassic refers to the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland.
Isn’t it amazing how many people in the world hate you? Most of them you will never even meet, and yet they really don’t like you at all. All the people who write software at Microsoft hate you, and so do most of the people who answer phones at Expedia.
In consequence, some 50 percent of people globally are estimated to be vitamin D deficient for at least part of the year. In northern climes, it may be as much as 90 percent.
It was the most improbably wise move any aristocrat has ever made. Paxton leaped into the job with levels of energy and application that simply dazzled. He.
Like many British towns, Eastleigh has closed its factories and workshops, and instead is directing all its economic energies into the making and drinking of coffee. There were essentially two types of shop in the town: empty shops and coffee shops. Some of the empty shops, according to signs in their windows, were in the process of being converted into coffee shops, and many of the coffee shops, judging by their level of custom, looked as if they weren’t far from becoming empty shops again.
On 1 July 1858, Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory was unveiled to the world. Darwin himself was not present. On the day of the meeting, he and his wife were burying their son.
Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else.
Originally, geological history was divided into four spans of time: primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary.
Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, and the most unreliable water sources, particularly in high summer.
There is a critical threshold where the natural biosphere stops buffering us from the effects of our emissions and actually starts to amplify them.
When you feel the sun warm on your back on a summer’s day, it’s really excited atoms you feel. The higher you climb, the fewer molecules there are, and so the fewer collisions between them.
I also learned that about ten thousand containers fall off ships each year. Sometimes after a period of years the container doors pop open and the contents float to the surface.
Ruskin never escaped his prudish ways or gave any indication of desiring to. After the death of J. M. W. Turner, in 1851, Ruskin was given the job of going through the works left to the nation by the great artist and found several watercolors of a cheerfully erotic nature. Horrified, Ruskin decided that they could only have been drawn “under a certain condition of insanity,” and for the good of the nation destroyed almost all of them, robbing posterity of several priceless works.