The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within is a wonder.
As my father always used to tell me, ‘You see, son, there’s always someone in the world worse off than you.’ And I always used to think, ‘So?
I can’t imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity.
Scientists dealt with this paradox in the handiest possible way. They ignored it.
I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
Y es que la vida en este planeta no sólo es breve sino de una endeblez deprimente. Constituye un curioso rasgo de nuestra existencia que procedamos de un planeta al que se le da muy bien fomentar la vida, pero al que se le da aún mejor extinguirla.
La mayor parte de lo que ha vivido en la Tierra no ha dejado atrás el menor recuerdo.
Si se produjese la explosión de una supernova a quinientos años luz de la Tierra, pereceríamos; según Evans:-Pondría fin al asunto -dijo alegremente.
You don’t need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.
It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.
Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.
Paul Davies noted in Nature, it is “almost impossible for the non-scientist to discriminate between the legitimately weird and the outright crackpot.
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
It isn’t easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.
In essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute but relative both to the observer and the thing being observed, and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects will become. We can never accelerate ourselves to the speed of light, and the harder we try(the faster we go) the more distorted we become, relative to an outside observer.
There’d never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States – alcohol production – and just handed it to criminals – a pretty remarkable thing to do.
There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.