Still weakened, he finally made it onto a ship. It was nearly wrecked in a hurricane off the African coast. When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate.
Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most – 99.99.
By the middle of the nineteenth century most learned people thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions years old, but probably not more than that. So.
In fact, of course, the world was about to enter a century of science where many people wouldn’t understand anything and none would understand everything.
Called “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” it is one of the most extraordinary scientific papers ever published, as much for how it was presented as for what it said.
There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting.
I didn’t doubt the correctness of the information for an instant – I still tend to trust the pronouncements of scientists in the way I trust those of surgeons, plumbers, and other possessors of arcane and privileged information.
E. C. Bullard of Cambridge University in 1949 that this fluid part of the Earth’s core revolves in a way that makes it, in effect, an electrical motor, creating the Earth’s magnetic field.
The pressure that such a pool of magma exerts on the crust above has lifted Yellowstone and about three hundred miles of surrounding territory about 1,700 feet higher than they would otherwise be. If it blew, the cataclysm is pretty well beyond imagining.
Gravity on this view is no longer so much a thing as an outcome – “not a ‘force’ but a byproduct of the warping of spacetime,” in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: “In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.
This is gravity – a product of the bending of spacetime.
0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001, or one ten million trillion trillion trillionths11 of a second.
We are actually getting worse at some matters of hygiene. Dr. Maunder believes that the move toward low-temperature washing machine detergents has encouraged bugs to proliferate. As he puts it: “If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice.
Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals – the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations – but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn’t just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it’s way beyond Jupiter – five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter.
Each one carries a copy of the complete genetic code – the instruction manual for your body – so it knows not only how to do its job but every other job in the body.
You have at least 200,000 different types of protein laboring away inside you, and so far we understand what no more than about 2 percent of them do.
The main agent of heat transfer on Earth is what is known as thermohaline circulation, which originates in slow, deep currents far below the surface – a process first detected by the scientist-adventurer Count von Rumford in 1797.
Space, let me repeat, is enormous. The average distance between stars out there is 20 million million miles. Even at speeds approaching those of light, these are fantastically challenging distances for any traveling individual.
According to the new theory, an electron moving between orbits would disappear from one and reappear instantaneously in another without visiting the space between.
Because it expands, ice floats on water – “an utterly bizarre property,” according to John Gribbin.