Life, in short, just wants to be.
22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.
We live in a world that doesn’t altogether seem to want us here.
Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia’s wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was more hospitable than it was.
Charles Darwin, driven to desperation by a mysterious lifelong malady that left him chronically lethargic, routinely draped himself with electrified zinc chains, doused his body with vinegar, and glumly underwent hours of pointless tingling in the hope that it would effect some improvement. It never did. The.
Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery7: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.
Some of your microbes are permanent residents. Others camp out on you for a week or a month and then, like a wandering tribe, quietly vanish.
His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons16, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled. Instead they became known as quarks.
Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called “strange quarks,” which could, theoretically, interact with other subatomic particles and propagate uncontrollably. If you are reading this, that hasn’t happened. Finding.
Sometimes the world just isn’t ready for a good idea.
Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is – well, we’ve covered that. To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary.
Thank you,” I said and then abruptly leaned across the counter and with two forked fingers poked him sharply in the eyes. Actually, I didn’t do that. I just imagined it. But imagining it made me feel better. I.
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.
Stephen Hawking has observed with a touch of understandable excitement, that one cannot “predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!
Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.
Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn’t know what it was when they had found it, and hadn’t described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times.
On the way out my attention was caught by a machine making a lot of noise. A woman had just won $600. For ninety seconds the machine just poured out money, a waterfall of silver. When it stopped, the woman regarded the pile without pleasure and began feeding it back into the machine. I felt sorry for her. It was going to take her all night to get rid of that kind of money.
I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other.
There is almost no area of British life that isn’t touched with a kind of genius for names.
One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to ‘bugger off’ to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.