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Bezig met laden... Een kleine geschiedenis van bijna alles (2003)| 20,641 | 361 | 141 | 
(4.18) | 481 | In this book Bill Bryson explores the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer and attempts to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. To that end, Bill Bryson apprenticed himself to a host of the world's most profound scientific minds, living and dead. His challenge is to take subjects like geology, chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people, like himself, made bored (or scared) stiff of science by school. His interest is not simply to discover what we know but to find out how we know it. How do we know what is in the center of the earth, thousands of miles beneath the surface? How can we know the extent and the composition of the universe, or what a black hole is? How can we know where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through space and time, Bill Bryson encounters a splendid gallery of the most fascinating, eccentric, competitive, and foolish personalities ever to ask a hard question. In their company, he undertakes a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge.… (meer) |
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Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis. Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen. | |
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Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis. Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen. The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: 'I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.' ''Don't you think God knows the facts?" Bethe asked. 'Yes,' said Szilard. 'He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.'
— Hans Christian von Baeyer, Taming the Atom  | |
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Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis. Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen. To Meghan and Chris. Welcome. | |
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Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis. Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen. No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. | |
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Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis. Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen. They're all in the same plane. They're all going around in the same direction. . . .It's perfect, you know. It's gorgeous. It's almost uncanny. - Astronomer Geoffrey Marcy describing the solar system Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; / God said, Let Newton be! and all was light. - Alexander Pope A physicist is the atoms' way of thinking about atoms. - Anonymous 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 The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming. - Freeman Dyson Descended from the apes! My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known. - Remark attributed to the wife of the Bishop of Worcester after Darwin's theory of evolution was explained to her I had a dream, which was not all / a dream. / The bright sun was extinguish'd, / and the stars / Did wander . . . - Byron, "Darkness" Because we can't see into the Earth, we have to use other interesting techniques, which mostly involve reading waves as they travel through the interior, to find out what is there. We know a little bit about the mantle from what are known as kimberlite pipes, where diamonds are formed. What happens is that deep in the Earth there is an explosion that fires, in effect, a cannonball of magma to the surface at supersonic speeds. It is a totally random event. A kimberlite pipe could explode in your back garden as you read this. Because they come up from such depths - up to 200 kilometres down - kimberlite pipes bring up all kinds of things not normally found on or near the surface: a rock called Peridotite, crystals of olivine and - just occasionally, in about one pipe in a hundred - diamonds. Lots of carbon comes up with kimberlite ejecta, but most is vaporized or turns to graphite. Only occasionally does a hunk of it shoot up at just the right speed and cool down with the necessary swiftness to become a diamond. It was such a pipe that made South Africa the most productive diamond-mining country in the world, but there may be others even bigger that we don't know about. Geologists know that somewhere in the vicinity of northeastern Indiana there is evidence of a pipe or group of pipes that may be truly colossal. Diamonds up to 20 carats or more have been found at scattered sites throughout the region. But no-one has ever found the source. As John McPhee notes, it may be buried under glacially deposited soil, like the Manson crater in Iowa, or under the Great Lakes.
(page 271) As James Surowiecki noted in a New Yorker article, given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks and antidepressants that people will take every day for ever, drug companies not suprisingly opt for the latter. Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn't given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s. (page 396) | |
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▾Verwijzingen Verwijzingen naar dit werk in externe bronnen.  Wikipedia in het Engels (32)
▾Boekbeschrijvingen In this book Bill Bryson explores the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer and attempts to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. To that end, Bill Bryson apprenticed himself to a host of the world's most profound scientific minds, living and dead. His challenge is to take subjects like geology, chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people, like himself, made bored (or scared) stiff of science by school. His interest is not simply to discover what we know but to find out how we know it. How do we know what is in the center of the earth, thousands of miles beneath the surface? How can we know the extent and the composition of the universe, or what a black hole is? How can we know where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through space and time, Bill Bryson encounters a splendid gallery of the most fascinating, eccentric, competitive, and foolish personalities ever to ask a hard question. In their company, he undertakes a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge. ▾Beschrijvingen bibliotheek Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. ▾Beschrijving door LibraryThing leden |
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Opvallend is de spanning in het boek tussen het idee dat het heelal zo omvangrijk is, dat leven onvermijdelijk wel moest ontstaan, en allicht op meer dan een plaats en het inzicht dat de omstandigheden op aarde zo hard schommelen en bij wijlen zo extreem zijn dat het een wonder is dat het leven heeft standgehouden. Of misschien beter: dat het leven de kans had om te evolueren tot de complexe vormen die we nu kennen. We leven, letterlijk en figuurlijk, op een vulkaan. Morgen zou het allemaal wel eens voorbij kunnen zijn.
[Tussendoor vermeldt Bryson het idee van Dawkins, dat de mens niet meer is dan een instrument om het voortbestaan van het dna te verzekeren. En dna is zo'n eenvoudige toolbox waarmee je bijzonder complexe levensvormen kan bouwen. We zien onszelf graag als hoogtepunt van die complexiteit. Vraag is of dat wel terecht is. Wie weet welke complexe constructies je nog zou kunnen samenstellen met dit eenvoudige alfabet...] (