For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere.
The Pacific is about a foot and a half higher along its western edge – a consequence of the centrifugal force created by the Earth’s spin.
This is one reason why some experts believe that there may have been many other big bangs, perhaps trillions and trillions of them, spread through the mighty span of eternity, and that the reason we exist in this particular one is that this is one that we could exist in.
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 is at a given instant, but we cannot know both.
Any attempt to measure one will unavoidably disturb the other. This isn’t a matter of simply needing more precise instruments; it is an immutable property of the universe.
Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot. With binoculars the number of stars you can see from a single location rises to about 50,000, and with a small two-inch telescope it leaps to 300,000.
Feynman expressed it, “things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale.
To explain what kept atoms together, other forces were needed, and in the 1930s two were discovered: the strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force.
Typically a cell will contain some 20,000 different types of protein, and of these about 2,000 types will each be represented by at least 50,000 molecules.
Geiger would also later become a loyal Nazi, unhesitatingly betraying Jewish colleagues, including many who had helped him.
What is perhaps most remarkable is that it is all just random frantic action, a sequence of endless encounters directed by nothing more than elemental rules of attraction and repulsion.
In the New England fisheries off Rhode Island, it was once routine to haul in lobsters weighing twenty pounds. Sometimes they reached thirty pounds. Left unmolested, lobsters can live for decades – as much as seventy years, it is thought – and they never stop growing. Nowadays few lobsters weigh more than two pounds on capture. “Biologists,” according to the New York Times, “estimate that 90 percent of lobsters are caught within a year after they reach the legal minimum size at about age six.
Eventually, not to say improbably, Alvin was constructed by General Mills, the food company, at a factory where it made the machines to produce breakfast cereals.
If this seems confusing, you may take some comfort in knowing that it was confusing to physicists, too. Overbye notes: “Bohr once commented that a person who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what had been said.” Heisenberg, when asked how one could envision an atom, replied: “Don’t try.
A typical submersible costs about $25,000 a day to operate, so they are hardly dropped into the water on a whim, still less put to sea in the hope that they will randomly stumble on something of interest. It’s rather as if our firsthand experience of the surface world were based on the work of five guys exploring on garden tractors after dark.
For the most part our fate and comfort – and even our eye color – are determined not by individual genes but by complexes of genes working in alliance.
It appears that the universe may not only be filled with dark matter, but with dark energy.
The genome, as Eric Lander of MIT has put it, is like a parts list for the human body: it tells us what we are made of, but says nothing about how we work.
One reason life took so long to grow complex was that the world had to wait until the simpler organisms had oxygenated the atmosphere sufficiently.
Mitochondria manipulate oxygen in a way that liberates energy from foodstuffs. Without this niftily facilitating trick, life on Earth today would be nothing more than a sludge of simple microbes.