A short history of nearly everything

CHAPTER 1 HOW TO BUILD A UNIVERSE

“Protons are so small that . . .” Bodanis, E = mc², p. 111.

“Now pack into that tiny, tiny space . . .” Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p. 254.

“about 13.7 billion years . . .”U.S. News and World Report, “How Old Is the Universe?” August 18-25, 1997, pp. 34-36; and New York Times, “Cosmos Sits for Early Portrait, Gives Up Secrets,” February 12, 2003, p. 1.

“the moment known to science as t = 0.” Guth, p. 86.

“They climbed back into the dish . . .” Lawrence M. Krauss, “Rediscovering Creation,” in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p. 50.

“an instrument that might do the job . . .” Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p. 153.

“They had found the edge of the universe . . .”Scientific American, “Echoes from the Big Bang,” January 2001, pp. 38-43; and Nature, “It All Adds Up,” December 19-26, 2002, p. 733.

“Penzias and Wilson’s finding pushed our acquaintance . . .” Guth, p. 101.

“about 1 percent of the dancing static . . .” Gribbin, In the Beginning, p. 18.

“These are very close to religious questions . . .”New York Times, “Before the Big Bang, There Was . . . What?” May 22, 2001, p. F1.

“or one 10 million trillion trillion trillionth . . .” Alan Lightman, “First Birth,” in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p. 13.

“He was thirty-two years old . . .” Overbye, p. 216.

“The lecture inspired Guth to take an interest . . .” Guth, p. 89.

“doubling in size every 10^-34 seconds.” Overbye, p. 242.

“it changed the universe . . .”New Scientist, “The First Split Second,” March 31, 2001, pp. 27-30.

“perfectly arrayed for the creation of stars . . .”Scientific American, “The First Stars in the Universe,” December 2001, pp. 64-71; and New York Times, “Listen Closely: From Tiny Hum Came Big Bang,” April 30, 2001, p. 1.

“no one had counted the failed attempts.” Quoted by Guth, p. 14.

“He makes an analogy with a very large clothing store . . .”Discover, November 2000.

“with the slightest tweaking of the numbers . . .” Rees, Just Six Numbers, p. 147.

“gravity may turn out to be a little too strong . . .”Financial Times, “Riddle of the Flat Universe,” July 1-2, 2000; and Economist, “The World Is Flat After All,” May 20, 2000, p. 97.

“the galaxies are rushing apart.” Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 34.

“Scientists just assume that we can’t really be the center . . .” Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 47.

“the universe we know and can talk about . . .” Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 13.

“the number of light-years to the edge . . .” Rees, p. 147.

CHAPTER 2 WELCOME TO THE SOLAR SYSTEM

“From the tiniest throbs and wobbles . . .”New Yorker, “Among Planets,” December 9, 1996, p. 84.

“less than the energy of a single snowflake . . .” Sagan, Cosmos, p. 217.

“a young astronomer named James Christy . . .” U.S. Naval Observatory press release, “20th Anniversary of the Discovery of Pluto’s Moon Charon,” June 22, 1998.

“Pluto was much smaller than anyone had supposed,”Atlantic Monthly, “When Is a Planet Not a Planet?” February 1998, pp. 22-34.

“In the words of the astronomer Clark Chapman . . .” Quoted on PBS Nova, “Doomsday Asteroid,” first aired April 29, 1997.

“it took seven years for anyone to spot the moon again . . .” U.S. Naval Observatory press release, “20th Anniversary of the Discovery of Pluto’s Moon Charon,” June 22, 1998.

“. . . after a year’s patient searching he somehow spotted Pluto . . .” Tombaugh paper, “The Struggles to Find the Ninth Planet,” from NASA website.

“there may be a Planet X out there . . .”Economist, “X Marks the Spot,” October 16, 1999, p. 83.

“The Kuiper belt was actually theorized . . .”Nature, “Almost Planet X,” May 24, 2001, p. 423.

“Only on February 11, 1999, did Pluto return . . .”Economist, “Pluto Out in the Cold,” February 6, 1999, p. 85.

“over six hundred additional Trans-Neptunian Objects . . .”Nature, “Seeing Double in the Kuiper Belt,” December 12, 2002, p. 618.

“about the same as a lump of charcoal . . .”Nature, “Almost Planet X,” May 24, 2001, p. 423.

“now flying away from us . . .” PBS NewsHour transcript, August 20, 2002.

“fills less than a trillionth of the available space.”Natural History, “Between the Planets,” October 2001, p. 20.

“The total now is ‘at least ninety . . .’ ”New Scientist, “Many Moons,” March 17, 2001, p. 39; and Economist, “A Roadmap for Planet-Hunting,” April 8, 2000, p. 87.

“we won’t reach the Oort cloud . . .” Sagan and Druyan, Comet, p. 198.

“probably result in the deaths of all the crew . . .”New Yorker, “Medicine on Mars,” February 14, 2000, p. 39.

“the comets drift in a stately manner . . .” Sagan and Druyan, p. 195.

“The most perfect vacuum ever created . . .” Ball, H₂O, p. 15.

“ Our nearest neighbor in the cosmos,” Proxima Centauri . . .” Guth, p. 1; and Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 39.

“The average distance between stars . . .” Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, p. 251.

“If we were randomly inserted . . .” Sagan, p. 52.

CHAPTER 3 THE REVEREND EVANS’S UNIVERSE

“the energy of a hundred billion suns . . .” Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p. 37.

“It’s like a trillion hydrogen bombs . . .” Robert Evans, interview by author, Hazelbrook, Australia, September 2, 2001.

“a chapter on autistic savants . . .” Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, p. 198.

“an irritating buffoon . . .” Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p. 164.

“refused to be left alone with him . . .” Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p. 125.

“Zwicky threatened to kill Baade . . .” Overbye, p. 18.

“Atoms would literally be crushed together . . .”Nature, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Neutron Star,” November 7, 2002, p. 31.

“the biggest bang in the universe . . .” Thorne, p. 171.

“hasn’t been verified yet.” Thorne, p. 174.

“one of the most prescient documents . . .” Thorne, p. 174.

“he did not understand the laws of physics . . .” Thorne, p. 174.

“wouldn’t attract serious attention for nearly four decades . . .” Overbye, p. 18.

“Only about 6,000 stars . . .” Harrison, Darkness at Night, p. 3.

“In 1987 Saul Perlmutter . . .” BBC Horizon documentary, “From Here to Infinity,” transcript of program first broadcast February 28, 1999.

“The news of such an event . . .” John Thorstensen, interview by author, Hanover, New Hampshire, December 5, 2001.

“Only half a dozen times . . .” Note from Evans, December 3, 2002.

“cosmologist and controversialist . . .”Nature, “Fred Hoyle (1915-2001),” September 17, 2001, p. 270.

“humans evolved projecting noses . . .” Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 190.

“continually creating new matter as it went.” Rees, p. 75.

“100 million degrees or more . . .” Bodanis, E = mc², p. 187.

“99.9 percent of the mass of the solar system . . .” Asimov, Atom, p. 294.

“In just 200 million years . . .” Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p. 6.

“Most of the lunar material . . .”New Scientist supplement, “Firebirth,” August 7, 1999, unnumbered page.

“first proposed in the 1940s by Reginald Daly.” Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p. 38.

“Earth might well have frozen over permanently” Drury, Stepping Stones, p. 144.

CHAPTER 4 THE MEASURE OF THINGS

“a long and productive career . . .” Sagan and Druyan, p. 52.

“a very specific and precise curve . . .” Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p. 90.

“Hooke, who was well known . . .” Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p. 219.

“betwixt my eye and the bone . . .” Quoted by Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p. 106.

“told no one about it for twenty-seven years.” Durant and Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, p. 538.

“Even the great German mathematician Gottfried von Leibniz . . .” Durant and Durant, p. 546.

“one of the most inaccessible books ever written . . .” Cropper, The Great Physicists, p. 31.

“proportional to the mass of each . . .” Feynman, p. 69.

“Newton, as was his custom, contributed nothing.” Calder, The Comet Is Coming! p. 39.

“He was to be paid instead . . .” Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p. 36.

“within a scantling.” Wilford, The Mapmakers, p. 98.

“The Earth was forty-three kilometers stouter . . .” Asimov, Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos, p. 86.

“Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil . . .” Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p. 134.

“Mason and Dixon sent a note . . .” Jardine, p. 141.

“born in a coal mine . . .”Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 7, p. 1302.

“For convenience, Hutton had assumed . . .” Jungnickel and McCormmach, Cavendish, p. 449.

“it was Michell to whom he turned . . .” Calder, The Comet Is Coming! p. 71.

“to a ‘degree bordering on disease.’ ” Jungnickel and McCormmach, p. 306.

“talk as it were into vacancy.” Jungnickel and McCormmach, p. 305.

“foreshadowed ‘the work of Kelvin and G. H. Darwin . . . ’ ” Crowther, Scientists of the Industrial Revolution, pp. 214-15.

“two 350-pound lead balls . . .”Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 3, p. 1261.

“six billion trillion metric tons . . .”Economist, “G Whiz,” May 6, 2000, p. 82.

CHAPTER 5 THE STONE-BREAKERS

“Hutton was by all accounts . . .”Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 10, pp. 354-56.

“almost entirely innocent of rhetorical accomplishments . . .” Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology, p. 18.

“He became a leading member . . .” McPhee, Basin and Range, p. 99.

“quotations from French sources . . .” Gould, Time’s Arrow, p. 66.

“A third volume was so unenticing . . .” Oldroyd, Thinking About the Earth, pp. 96-97.

“Even Charles Lyell . . .” Schneer (ed.), Toward a History of Geology, p. 128.

“In the winter of 1807 . . .” Geological Society papers: A Brief History of the Geological Society of London.

“The members met twice a month . . .” Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy, p. 25.

“(As even a Murchison supporter conceded . . . )” Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p. 28.

“In 1794, he was implicated . . .” Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p. 39.

“known ever since as Parkinson’s disease.”Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 15, pp. 314-15.

“convinced that Scots were feckless drunks.” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 26.

“Once Mrs. Buckland found herself being shaken awake . . .” Annan, The Dons, p. 27.

“His other slight peculiarity . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 30.

“Often when lost in thought . . .” Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p. 202.

“but it was Lyell most people read . . .” Schneer, p. 139.

“and called for a new pack . . .” Clark, The Huxleys, p. 48.

“Never was there a dogma . . .” Quoted in Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, p. 167.

“He failed to explain . . .” Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p. 135.

“the refrigeration of the globe . . .” Gould, Ever Since Darwin, p. 151.

“He rejected the notion . . .” Stanley, Extinction, p. 5.

“one yet saw it partially through his eyes . . .” quoted in Schneer, p. 288.

“De la Beche is a dirty dog . . .” Quoted in Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy, p. 194.

“the perky name of J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy.” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p. 190.

“to employ ‘-synchronous’ for his endings . . .” Gjertsen, p. 305.

“in the ‘tens of dozens.’ ” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p. 50.

“Rocks are divided into quite separate units . . .” Powell, p. 200.

“I have seen grown men glow incandescent . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 238.

“When Buckland speculated . . .” Cadbury, p. 149.

“The most well known early attempt . . .” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 185.

“most thinking people accepted the idea . . .” Gould, Time’s Arrow, p. 114.

“No geologist of any nationality . . .” Rudwick, p. 42.

“Even the Reverend Buckland . . .” Cadbury, p. 192.

“between 75,000 and 168,000 years old.” Hallam, p. 105; and Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, pp. 246-47.

“the geological processes that created the Weald . . .” Gjertsen, p. 335.

“The German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz . . .” Cropper, p. 78.

“and written (in French and English) a dozen papers . . .” Cropper, p. 79.

“At the age of twenty-two he returned to Glasgow . . .”Dictionary of National Biography, supplement 1901-1911, p. 508.

CHAPTER 6 SCIENCE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW

“who described it at a meeting . . .” Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and Their Discoveries, p. 4.

“the great French naturalist the Comte de Buffon . . .” Kastner, A Species of Eternity, p. 123.

“A Dutchman named Corneille de Pauw . . .” Kastner, p. 124.

“. . . in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 15.

“Jefferson for one couldn’t abide the thought . . .” Simpson, Fossils and the History of Life, p. 7.

“On the evening of January 5, 1796 . . .” Harrington, Dance of the Continents, p. 175.

“The whys and wherefores . . .” Lewis, The Dating Game, pp. 17-18.

“Cuvier resolved the matter to his own satisfaction . . .” Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, p. 217.

“In 1806 the Lewis and Clark expedition . . .” Colbert, p. 5.

“the source for the famous tongue twister . . .” Cadbury, p. 3.

“The plesiosaur alone took her ten years . . .” Barber, p. 127.

“Mantell could see at once it was a fossilized tooth . . .”New Zealand Geographic, “Holy incisors! What a treasure!” April-June 2000, p. 17.

“the name was actually suggested to Buckland . . .” Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p. 31.

“Eventually he was forced to sell . . .” Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p. 34.

“the world’s first theme park.” Fortey, Life, p. 214.

“he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs . . .” Cadbury, p. 133.

“a freshly deceased rhinoceros filling the front hallway . . .” Cadbury, p. 200.

“some were no bigger than rabbits . . .” Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p. 5.

“the one thing they most emphatically were not . . .” Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies, p. 22.

“dinosaurs constitute not one but two orders . . .” Colbert, p. 33.

“He was the only person . . .”Nature, “Owen’s Parthian Shot,” July 12, 2001, p. 123.

“his father’s ‘lamentable coldness of heart.’ ” Cadbury, p. 321.

“Huxley was leafing through a new edition . . .” Clark, The Huxleys, p. 45.

“His deformed spine was removed . . .” Cadbury, p. 291.

“not quite as original as it appeared.” Cadbury, pp. 261-62.

“he became the driving force . . .” Colbert, p. 30.

“Before Owen, museums were designed . . .” Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum, p. 24.

“to put informative labels on each display . . .” Thackray and Press, p. 98.

“lying everywhere like logs . . .” Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p. 97.

“repeatedly taking out and replacing his false teeth.” Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, pp. 99-100.

“it was an affront that he would never forget.” Colbert, p. 73.

“increased the number of known dinosaur species . . .” Colbert, p. 93.

“Nearly every dinosaur that the average person can name . . .” Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p. 90.

“Between them they managed to ‘discover’ . . .” Psihoyos and Knoebber, Hunting Dinosaurs, p. 16.

“obliterated by a German bomb in the Blitz . . .” Cadbury, p. 325.

“much of it was taken to New Zealand . . .”Newsletter of the Geological Society of New Zealand, “Gideon Mantell-the New Zealand connection,” April 1992, and New Zealand Geographic, “Holy incisors! What a treasure!” April-June 2000, p. 17.

“hence the name.” Colbert, p. 151.

“the Earth was 89 million years old . . .” Lewis, The Dating Game, p. 37.

“Such was the confusion . . .” Hallam, p. 173.

CHAPTER 7 ELEMENTAL MATTERS

“could make himself invisible.” Ball, p. 125.

“An ounce of phosphorus retailed for six guineas” Durant and Durant, p. 516.

“and got credit for none of them.” Strathern, p. 193.

“which is why we ended up with two branches of chemistry . . .” Davies, p. 14.

“perhaps $20 million in today’s money.” White, Rivals, p. 63.

“the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of his bosses.” Brock, p. 92.

“jour de bonheur . . .” Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus, p. 366.

“Lavoisier made some dismissive remarks . . .” Brock, pp. 95-96.

“failed to uncover a single one.” Strathern, p. 239.

“taken away and melted down for scrap.” Brock, p. 124.

“a highly pleasurable thrilling . . .” Cropper, p. 139.

“Theaters put on ‘laughing gas evenings’ . . .” Hamblyn, p. 76.

“(What Brown noticed . . . )” Silver, p. 201.

“for lukewarmness in the cause of liberty . . .”Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 19, p. 686.

“a diameter of 0.00000008 centimeters . . .” Asimov, The History of Physics, p. 501.

“Even water was variously rendered . . .” Boorse et al., p. 75.

“Later, for no special reason . . .” Ball, p. 139.

“Luck was not always with the Mendeleyevs.” Brock, p. 312.

“a competent but not terribly outstanding chemist . . .” Brock, p. 111.

“this was an idea whose time had not quite yet come . . .” Carey, p. 155.

“chemistry really is just a matter of counting.” Ball, p. 139.

“the most elegant organizational chart ever devised . . .” Krebs, p. 23.

“120 or so . . .” From a review in Nature, “Mind over Matter?” by Gautum R. Desiraju, September 26, 2002.

“purely speculative . . .” Heiserman, p. 33.

“Marie Curie dubbed the effect ‘radioactivity.’ ” Bodanis, E = mc², p. 75.

“He never accepted the revised figures . . .” Lewis, The Dating Game, p. 55.

“it is an unstable element.” Strathern, p. 294.

“featured with pride the therapeutic effects . . .” Advertisement in Time magazine, January 3, 1927, p. 24.

“Radioactivity wasn’t banned in consumer products until 1938.” Biddle, p. 133.

“Her lab books are kept in lead-lined boxes . . .”Science, “We Are Made of Starstuff,” May 4, 2001, p. 863.

CHAPTER 8 EINSTEIN’S UNIVERSE

“an average of slightly over one student a semester . . .” Cropper, p. 106.

“the thermodynamic principles of, well, nearly everything . . .” Cropper, p. 109.

“thermodynamics didn’t apply simply to heat and energy . . .” Snow, The Physicists, p. 7.

“the Principia of thermodynamics . . .” Kevles, The Physicists, p. 33.

“he came to the United States with his family . . .” Kevles, pp. 27-28.

“The speed of light turned out to be the same . . .” Thorne, p. 65.

“probably the most famous negative result in the history of physics.” Cropper, p. 208.

“the work of science was nearly at an end . . .”Nature, “Physics from the Inside,” July 12, 2001, p. 121.

“were among the greatest in the history of physics . . .” Snow, The Physicists, p. 101.

“His very first paper . . .” Bodanis, E = mc², p. 6.

“J. Willard Gibbs in Connecticut had done that work as well . . .” Boorse et al., The Atomic Scientists, p. 142.

“one of the most extraordinary scientific papers ever published . . .” Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p. 193.

“had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided . . .” Snow, The Physicists, p. 101.

“no less than 7 x 10¹⁸ joules of potential energy . . .” Thorne, p. 172.

“Even a uranium bomb . . .” Bodanis, E = mc², p. 77.

“Oh, that’s not necessary . . .”Nature, “In the Eye of the Beholder,” March 21, 2002, p. 264.

“the highest intellectual achievement of humanity . . .” Boorse et al., p. 53.

“he was simply sitting in a chair . . .” Bodanis, E = mc², p. 204.

“‘Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity.’ ” Guth, p. 36.

“‘Without it,’ wrote Snow in 1979 . . .” Snow, The Physicists, p. 21.

“Crouch was hopelessly out of his depth . . .” Bodanis, E = mc², p. 215.

“I am trying to think who the third person is.” Quoted in Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 91; and Aczel, God’s Equation, p. 146.

“the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become.” Guth, p. 37.

“a baseball thrown at a hundred miles an hour . . .” Brockman and Matson, How Things Are, p. 263.

“we all commonly encounter other kinds of relativity . . .” Bodanis, E = mc², p. 83.

“the ultimate sagging mattress . . .” Overbye, p. 55.

“In some sense, gravity does not exist . . .” Kaku, “The Theory of the Universe?” in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p. 161.

“Edwin enjoyed a wealth of physical endowments, too.” Cropper, p. 423.

“At a single high school track meet . . .” Christianson, Edwin Hubble, p. 33.

“One Harvard computer, Annie Jump Cannon . . .” Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p. 258.

“elderly stars that have moved past their ‘main sequence phase’ . . .” Ferguson, Measuring the Universe, pp. 166-67.

“They could be used as ‘standard candles’ . . .” Ferguson, p. 166.

“was developing his seminal theory . . .” Moore, Fireside Astronomy, p. 63.

“In 1923 he showed that a puff of distant gossamer . . .” Overbye, p. 45; and Natural History, “Delusions of Centrality,” December 2002-January 2003, pp. 28-32.

“no one had hit on the idea of the expanding universe before.” Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, pp. 71-72.

“In 1936 Hubble produced a popular book . . .” Overbye, p. 14.

“the whereabouts of the century’s greatest astronomer . . .” Overbye, p. 28.

CHAPTER 9 THE MIGHTY ATOM

“All things are made of atoms.” Feynman, p. 4.

“forty-five billion billion molecules.” Gribbin, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science, p. 250.

“up to a billion for each of us” Davies, p. 127.

“Atoms, however, go on practically forever.” Rees, p. 96.

“a paramecium swimming in a drop of water . . .” Feynman, pp. 4-5.

“We might as well attempt to introduce . . .” Boorstin, The Discoverers, p. 679.

“In 1826, the French chemist P. J. Pelletier . . .” Gjertsen, p. 260.

“a confused Pelletier, upon beholding the great man . . .” Holmyard, Makers of Chemistry, p. 222.

“forty thousand people viewed the coffin . . .”Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 5, p. 433.

“For a century after Dalton made his proposal . . .” Von Baeyer, Taming the Atom, p. 17.

“it was said to have played a part in the suicide . . .” Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, p. 3.

“to raise a little flax and a lot of children . . .” Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, p. 104.

“Had she taken a bullfighter . . .” Quoted in Cropper, p. 259.

“It was a feeling Rutherford would have understood.” Cropper, p. 317.

“tell the students to work it out for themselves.” Wilson, Rutherford, p. 174.

“as far as he could see . . .” Wilson, Rutherford, p. 208.

“He was one of the first to see . . .” Wilson, Rutherford, p. 208.

“Why use radio?” Quoted in Cropper, p. 328.

“Every day I grow in girth.” Snow, Variety of Men, p. 47.

“persuaded by a senior colleague that radio had little future.” Cropper, p. 94.

“Some physicists thought that atoms might be cube shaped . . .” Asimov, The History of Physics, p. 551.

“The number of protons . . .” Guth, p. 90.

“Add a neutron or two and you get an isotope.” Atkins, The Periodic Kingdom, p. 106.

“only one millionth of a billionth of the full volume . . .” Gribbin, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science, p. 35.

“a fly many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral.” Cropper, p. 245.

“they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed” Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p. 288.

“Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience . . .” Feynman, p. 117.

“the delay in discovery was probably a very good thing . . .” Boorse et al., p. 338.

“(I do not even know what a matrix is . . . )” Cropper, p. 269.

“a matter of simply needing more precise instruments . . .” Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p. 288.

“at once everywhere and nowhere” David H. Freedman, from “Quantum Liaisons,” Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p. 137.

“a person who wasn’t outraged . . .” Overbye, p. 109.

“Don’t try.” Von Baeyer, p. 43.

“The cloud itself is essentially just a zone . . .” Ebbing, General Chemistry, p. 295.

“an area of the universe . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 62.

“things on a small scale . . .” Feynman, p. 33.

“matter could pop into existence . . .” Alan Lightman, “First Birth” in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p. 13.

“two identical pool balls . . .” Lawrence Joseph, “Is Science Common Sense?” in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe, pp. 42-43.

“Remarkably, the phenomenon was proved in 1997 . . .”Christian Science Monitor, “Spooky Action at a Distance,” October 4, 2001.

“one cannot ‘predict future events exactly . . .’ ” Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 61.

“Scientists have dealt with this problem . . .” David H. Freedman, from “Quantum Liaisons,” in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p. 141.

“The weak nuclear force . . .” Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p. 297.

“The grip of the strong force reaches out . . .” Asimov, Atom, p. 258.

“he wasted the second half of his life.” Snow, The Physicists, p. 89.

CHAPTER 10 GETTING THE LEAD OUT

“Among the many symptoms associated with overexposure . . .” McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p. 88.

“These men probably went insane . . .” McGrayne, p. 92.

“In fact, Midgley knew only too well . . .” McGrayne, p. 92.

“One leak from a refrigerator at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio . . .” McGrayne, p. 97.

“One pound of CFCs can capture . . .” Biddle, p. 62.

“A single CFC molecule . . .”Science, “The Ascent of Atmospheric Sciences,” October 13, 2000, p. 299.

“His death was itself memorably unusual.”Nature, September 27, 2001, p. 364.

“Up to this time, the oldest reliable dates . . .” Libby, “Radiocarbon Dating,” from Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1960.

“After eight half-lives . . .” Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age, p. 58.

“every raw radiocarbon date you read today . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 174.

“it is like miscounting by a dollar . . .” Flannery, The Future Eaters, p. 151.

“just around the time that people first came to the Americas . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, pp. 174-75.

“whether syphilis originated in the New World . . .”Science, “Can Genes Solve the Syphilis Mystery?” May 11, 2001, p. 109.

“Unfortunately, he now met yet another formidable impediment . . .” Lewis, The Dating Game, p. 204.

“led him to create a sterile laboratory . . .” Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p. 58.

“a figure that stands unchanged 50 years later . . .” McGrayne, p. 173.

“a doctor who had no specialized training . . .” McGrayne, p. 94.

“about 90 percent of it appeared to come from automobile exhaust pipes . . .”Nation, “The Secret History of Lead,” March 20, 2000.

“The notion became the foundation of ice core studies . . .” Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p. 60.

“Ethyl executives allegedly offered to endow a chair . . .”Nation, “The Secret History of Lead,” March 20, 2000.

“Almost immediately lead levels in the blood of Americans . . .” McGrayne, p. 169.

“those of us alive today have about 625 times more lead in our blood . . .”Nation, March 20, 2000.

“The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow . . .” Green, Water, Ice and Stone, p. 258.

“forty-four years after most of Europe . . .” McGrayne, p. 191.

“Ethyl continued to contend . . .” McGrayne, p. 191.

“devouring ozone long after you have shuffled off.” Biddle, pp. 110-11.

“Worse, we are still introducing huge amounts of CFCs . . .” Biddle, p. 63.

“Two recent popular books . . .” The books are Mysteries of Terra Firma and The Dating Game, both of which make his name “Claire.”

“astounding error of thinking Patterson was a woman . . .”Nature, “The Rocky Road to Dating the Earth,” January 4, 2001, p. 20.

CHAPTER 11 MUSTER MARK’S QUARKS

“In 1911, a British scientist named C. T. R. Wilson . . .” Cropper, p. 325.

“if I could remember the names of these particles . . .” Quoted in Cropper, p. 403.

“can do forty-seven thousand laps around a four-mile tunnel . . .”Discover, “Gluons,” July 2000, p. 68.

“Even the most sluggish . . .” Guth, p. 121.

“In 1998, Japanese observers reported . . .”Economist, “Heavy Stuff,” June 13, 1998, p. 82; and National Geographic, “Unveiling the Universe, October 1999, p. 36.

“Breaking up atoms . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 48.

“CERN’s new Large Hadron Collider . . .”Economist, “Cause for ConCERN,” October 28, 2000, p. 75.

“dotted along the circumference . . .” Letter from Jeff Guinn.

“A proposed neutrino observatory at the old Homestake Mine . . .”Science, “U.S. Researchers Go for Scientific Gold Mine,” June 15, 2001, p. 1979.

“A particle accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois . . .”Science, February 8, 2002, p. 942.

“Today the particle count is well over 150 . . .” Guth, p. 120, and Feynman, p. 39.

“Some people think there are particles called tachyons . . .”Nature, September 27, 2001, p. 354.

“which are themselves universes at the next level . . .” Sagan, p. 221.

“The charged pion and antipion decay . . .” Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, p. 165.

“to restore some economy to the multitude of hadrons . . .” Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, p. 167.

“wanted to call these new basic particles partons . . .” Von Baeyer, p. 17.

“the Standard Model . . .”Economist, “New Realities?” October 7, 2000, p. 95; and Nature, “The Mass Question,” February 28, 2002, pp. 969-70.

“Bosons . . . are particles that produce and carry forces . . .”Scientific American, “Uncovering Supersymmetry,” July 2002, p. 74.

“It has too many arbitrary parameters . . .” Quoted on the PBS video Creation of the Universe, 1985. Also quoted, with slightly different numbers, in Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, pp. 298-99.

“the notional Higgs boson . . .” CERN website document “The Mass Mystery,” undated.

“So we are stuck with a theory . . .” Feynman, p. 39.

“all those little things like quarks . . .”Science News, September 22, 2001, p. 185.

“tiny enough to pass for point particles . . .” Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 214.

“The heterotic string consists of a closed string . . .” Kaku, Hyperspace, p. 158.

“String theory has further spawned . . .”Scientific American, “The Universe’s Unseen Dimensions,” August 2000, pp. 62-69; and Science News, “When Branes Collide,” September 22, 2001, pp. 184-85.

“The ekpyrotic process begins far in the indefinite past . . .”New York Times, “Before the Big Bang, There Was . . . What?” May 22, 2001, p. F1.

“to discriminate between the legitimately weird and the outright crackpot.”Nature, September 27, 2001, p. 354.

“The question came interestingly to a head . . .”New York Times website, “Are They a) Geniuses or b) Jokers?: French Physicists’ Cosmic Theory Creates a Big Bang of Its Own,” November 9, 2002; and Economist, “Publish and Perish,” November 16, 2002, p. 75.

“Karl Popper . . . once suggested . . .” Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 230.

“we do not seem to be coming to the end . . .” Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 234.

“Hubble calculated that the universe was about . . .”U.S. News and World Report, “How Old Is the Universe?” August 25, 1997, p. 34.

“a new age for the universe . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 91.

“there erupted a long-running dispute . . .” Overbye, p. 268.

“a mountain of theory built on a molehill of evidence.”Economist, “Queerer Than We Can Suppose,” January 5, 2002, p. 58.

“may reflect the paucity of the data . . .”National Geographic, “Unveiling the Universe,” October 1999, p. 25.

“what they really mean . . .” Goldsmith, The Astronomers, p. 82.

“the best bets these days for the age of the universe . . .”U.S. News and World Report, “How Old Is the Universe?” August 25, 1997, p. 34.

“two-thirds of the universe is still missing . . .”Economist, “Dark for Dark Business,” January 5, 2002, p. 51.

“The theory is that empty space isn’t so empty at all . . .” PBS Nova, “Runaway Universe,” Transcript from program first broadcast November 21, 2000.

“Einstein’s cosmological constant . . .”Economist, “Dark for Dark Business,” January 5, 2002, p. 51.

CHAPTER 12 THE EARTH MOVES

“invited the reader to join him in a tolerant chuckle . . .” Hapgood, Earth’s Shifting Crust, p. 29.

“they posited ancient ‘land bridges’ . . .” Simpson, p. 98.

“Even land bridges couldn’t explain some things.” Gould, Ever Since Darwin, p. 163.

“numerous grave theoretical difficulties.”Encylopaedia Britannica, 1964, vol. 6, p. 418.

“students might actually come to believe them.” Lewis, The Dating Game, p. 182.

“about half of those present . . .” Hapgood, p. 31.

“I feel the hypothesis is a fantastic one.” Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p. 147.

“Interestingly, oil company geologists . . .” McPhee, Basin and Range, p. 175.

“Aboard this vessel was a fancy new depth sounder . . .” McPhee, Basin and Range, p. 187.

“seamounts that he called guyots . . .” Harrington, p. 208.

“probably the most significant paper . . .” Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, pp. 131-32.

“Well into the 1970s . . .” Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p. 141.

“one American geologist in eight . . .” McPhee, Basin and Range, p. 198.

“Today we know that Earth’s surface . . .” Simpson, p. 113.

“The connections between modern landmasses . . .” McPhee, Assembling California, pp. 202-8.

“at about the speed a fingernail grows . . .” Vogel, Naked Earth, p. 19.

“one-tenth of 1 percent of the Earth’s history.” Margulis and Sagan, Microscosmos, p. 44.

“an important part of the planet’s organic well-being.” Trefil, Meditations at 10,000 Feet, p. 181.

“the history of rocks and the history of life.”Science, “Inconstant Ancient Seas and Life’s Path,” November 8, 2002, p. 1165.

“the whole earth suddenly made sense.” McPhee, Rising from the Plains, p. 158.

“a habit of appearing inconveniently . . .” Simpson, p. 115.

“many surface features that tectonics can’t explain.”Scientific American, “Sculpting the Earth from Inside Out,” March 2001.

“Wegener never lived to see his ideas vindicated.” Kunzig, The Restless Sea, p. 51.

“a bright young fellow named Walter Alvarez . . .” Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p. 7.

CHAPTER 13 BANG!

“a lot of strangely deformed rock . . .” Raymond R. Anderson, Geological Society of America: GSA Special Paper 302, “The Manson Impact Structure: A Late Cretaceous Meteor Crater in the Iowa Subsurface,” Spring 1996.

“Virtually the whole town turned out . . .”Des Moines Register, June 30, 1979.

“Very occasionally we get people coming in and asking . . .” Anna Schlapkohl, interview by author, Manson, Iowa, June 18, 2001.

“G. K. Gilbert of Columbia University . . .” Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p. 38.

“Gilbert conducted these experiments . . .” Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p. 37.

“only slightly more than a dozen of these things . . .” Transcript from BBC Horizon documentary “New Asteroid Danger,” p. 4, first transmitted March 18, 1999.

“He called them asteroids-Latin for ‘starlike . . .’ ”Science News, “A Rocky Bicentennial,” July 28, 2001, pp. 61-63.

“it was finally tracked down in 2000 . . .” Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 150.

“twenty-six thousand asteroids had been named and identified . . .”Science News, “A Rocky Bicentennial,” July 28, 2001, pp. 61-63.

“cruising at sixty-six thousand miles an hour . . .” Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 147.

“all of which are capable of colliding . . .” Transcript from BBC Horizon documentary “New Asteroid Danger,” p. 5, first transmitted March 18, 1999.

“such near misses probably happen . . .”New Yorker, “Is This the End?” January 27, 1997, pp. 44-52.

“some thirty thousand metric tons of ‘cosmic spherules’ . . .” Vernon, Beneath Our Feet, p. 191.

“Well, they were very charming . . .” Frank Asaro, telephone interview by author, March 10, 2002.

“an article in Popular Astronomy magazine . . .” Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p. 184.

“the dinosaurs may have been dealt a death blow . . .” Peebles, Asteroids: A History, p. 170.

“an earlier event known as the Frasnian extinction.” Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p. 107.

“They’re more like stamp collectors . . .” Quoted by Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, p. 142.

“even while conceding in a newspaper interview . . .”Boston Globe, “Dinosaur Extinction Theory Backed,” December 16, 1985.

“continued to believe that the extinction of the dinosaurs . . .” Peebles, p. 175.

“evaluate Manure Management Plans . . .” Iowa Department of Natural Resources Publication, Iowa Geology 1999: Number 24.

“Suddenly we were at the center of things . . .” Ray Anderson and Brian Witzke, interview by author, Iowa City, June 15, 2001.

“One of those moments came . . .”Boston Globe, “Dinosaur Extinction Theory Backed,” December 16, 1985.

“The formation had been found by Pemex . . .” Peebles, pp. 177-78; and Washington Post, “Incoming,” April 19, 1998.

“I remember harboring some strong initial doubts . . .” Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, p. 162.

“Jupiter will swallow these comets up . . .” Quoted by Peebles, p. 196.

“One fragment, known as Nucleus G . . .” Peebles, p. 202.

“Shoemaker was killed instantly . . .” Peebles, p. 204.

“nearly every standing thing would be flattened . . .” Anderson, Iowa Department of Natural Resources: Iowa Geology 1999, “Iowa’s Mansion Impact Structure.”

“fleeing would mean ‘selecting a slow death over a quick one . . .’ ” Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p. 209.

“concluded that it affected Earth’s climate for about ten thousand years . . .”Arizona Republic, “Impact Theory Gains New Supporters,” March 3, 2001.

“our missiles are not designed for space work . . .” Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p. 215.

“even a year’s warning would probably be insufficient . . .”New York Times magazine, “The Asteroids Are Coming! The Asteroids Are Coming!” July 28, 1996, pp. 17-19.

“Shoemaker-Levy 9 had been orbiting Jupiter . . .” Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 168.

CHAPTER 14 THE FIRE BELOW

“It was a dumb place to look for bones . . .” Mike Voorhies, interview by author, Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park, Nebraska, June 13, 2001.

“At first they thought the animals were buried alive . . .”National Geographic, “Ancient Ashfall Creates Pompeii of Prehistoric Animals,” January 1981, p. 66.

“far better than we understand the interior of the earth.” Feynman, p. 60.

“The distance from the surface of Earth . . .” Williams and Montaigne, Surviving Galeras, p. 78.

“A modest fellow, he never referred to the scale . . .” Ozima, The Earth, p. 49.

“It rises exponentially . . .” Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, p. 33.

“sixty thousand people were dead . . .” Officer and Page, p. 52.

“the city waiting to die . . .” McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World, p. 21.

“the potential economic cost . . .” McGuire, p. 130.

“collapsed scaffolding erected around the Capitol Building . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 158.

“became known, all but inevitably, as the Mohole . . .” Vogel, p. 37.

“using a strand of spaghetti . . .”Valley News, “Drilling the Ocean Floor for Earth’s Deep Secrets,” August 21, 1995.

“about 0.3 percent of the planet’s volume . . .” Schopf, Cradle of Life, p. 73.

“We also know a little bit about the mantle . . .” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, pp. 16-18.

“Scientists are generally agreed . . .”Scientific American, “Sculpting the Earth from Inside Out,” March 2001, pp. 40-47; and New Scientist, “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” supplement, October 14, 2000, p. 1.

“By all the laws of geophysics . . .”Earth, “Mystery in the High Sierra,” June 1996, p. 16.

“The rocks are viscous . . .” Vogel, p. 31.

“The movements occur not just laterally . . .”Science, “Much About Motion in the Mantle,” February 1, 2002, p. 982.

“an English vicar named Osmond Fisher presciently suggested . . .” Tudge, The Time Before History, p. 43.

“then had suddenly found out about wind.” Vogel, p. 53.

“there are two sets of data . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 146.

“82 percent of the Earth’s volume . . .”Nature, “The Earth’s Mantle,” August 2, 2001, pp. 501-6.

“something over three million times . . .” Drury, p. 50.

“during the age of the dinosaurs . . .”New Scientist, “Dynamo Support,” March 10, 2001, p. 27.

“37 million years appears to be the longest stretch . . .”New Scientist, “Dynamo Support,” March 10, 2001, p. 27.

“the greatest unanswered question . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 150.

“Geologists and geophysicists rarely go . . .” Vogel, p. 139.

“The seismologists resolutely based their conclusions . . .” Fisher et al., Volcanoes, p. 24.

“It was the biggest landslide in human history . . .” Thompson, Volcano Cowboys, p. 118.

“the force of five hundred Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs,” Williams and Montaigne, p. 7.

“Fifty-seven people were killed.” Fisher et al., p. 12.

“only shake my head in wonder . . .” Williams and Montaigne, p. 151.

“An airliner . . . reported being pelted with rocks.” Thompson, p. 123.

“Yet Yakima had no volcano emergency procedures.” Fisher et al., p. 16.

CHAPTER 15 DANGEROUS BEAUTY

“In 1943, at Parícutin in Mexico . . .” Smith, The Weather, p. 112.

“you wouldn’t be able to get within a thousand kilometers . . .” BBC Horizon documentary “Crater of Death,” first broadcast May 6, 2001.

“a bang that reverberated around the world . . .” Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p. 152.

“The last supervolcano eruption on Earth . . .” McGuire, p. 104.

“for the next twenty thousand years . . .” McGuire, p. 107.

“you’re standing on the largest active volcano in the world . . .” Paul Doss, interview with author, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, June 16, 2001.

“devastatingly evident on the night of August 17, 1959 . . .” Smith and Siegel, pp. 5-6.

“as little as a single molecule . . .” Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve, p. 12.

“scientists were finding even hardier microbes . . .” Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p. 275.

“As NASA scientist Jay Bergstralh has put it . . .” PBS NewsHour transcript, August 20, 2002.

CHAPTER 16 LONELY PLANET

“99.5 percent of the world’s habitable space . . .”New York Times Book Review, “Where Leviathan Lives,” April 20, 1997, p. 9.

“water is about 1,300 times heavier than air . . .” Ashcroft, p. 51.

“your veins would collapse . . .”New Scientist, “Into the Abyss,” March 31, 2001.

“the pressure is equivalent to being squashed . . .”New Yorker, “The Pictures,” February 15, 2000, p. 47.

“Because we are made largely of water ourselves . . .” Ashcroft, p. 68.

“humans may be more like whales . . .” Ashcroft, p. 69.

“all that is left in the suit . . .” Haldane, What is Life? p. 188.

“the directors of a new tunnel under the Thames . . .” Ashcroft, p. 59.

“he had discovered himself disrobing . . .” Norton, Stars Beneath the Sea, p. 111.

“Haldane’s gift to diving . . .” Haldane, What Is Life? p. 202.

“his blood saturation level had reached 56 percent . . .” Norton, p. 105.

“But is it oxyhaemoglobin . . .” Quoted in Norton, p. 121.

“the cleverest man I ever knew.” Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech, p. 305.

“a very enjoyable experience . . .” Norton, p. 124.

“seizure, bleeding or vomiting.” Norton, p. 133.

“Perforated eardrums were quite common . . .” Haldane, What is Life? p. 192.

“left Haldane without feeling . . .” Haldane, What Is Life? p. 202.

“It also produced wild mood swings.” Ashcroft, p. 78.

“the tester was usually as intoxicated . . .” Haldane, What Is Life? p. 197.

“The cause of the inebriation . . .” Ashcroft, p. 79.

“half the calories you burn . . .” Attenborough, The Living Planet, p. 39.

“the portions of Earth . . .” Smith, p. 40.

“Had our sun been ten times as massive . . .” Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p. 81.

“The Sun’s warmth reaches it . . .” Grinspoon, p. 9.

“Venus was only slightly warmer than Earth . . .”National Geographic, “The Planets,” January 1985, p. 40.

“the atmospheric pressure at the surface . . .” McSween, Stardust to Planets, p. 200.

“The Moon is slipping from our grasp . . .” Ward and Browniee, Rare Earth, p. 33.

“The most elusive element of all . . .” Atkins, The Periodic Kingdom, p. 28.

“discarded the state silver dinner service . . .” Bodanis, The Secret House, p. 13.

“a very modest 0.048 percent . . .” Krebs, p. 148.

“If it wasn’t for carbon . . .” Davies, p. 126.

“Of every 200 atoms in your body . . .” Snyder, The Extraordinary Chemistry of Ordinary Things, p. 24.

“The degree to which organisms require . . .” Parker, Inscrutable Earth, p. 100.

“Drop a small lump of pure sodium . . .” Snyder, p. 42.

“The Romans also flavored their wine with lead . . .” Parker, p. 103.

“The physicist Richard Feynman . . .” Feynman, p. xix.

CHAPTER 17 INTO THE TROPOSPHERE

“Earth would be a lifeless ball of ice.” Stevens, p. 7.

“and was discovered in 1902 by a Frenchman in a balloon . . .” Stevens, p. 56; and Nature, “1902 and All That,” January 3, 2002, p. 15.

“from the same Greek root as menopause.” Smith, p. 52.

“severe cerebral and pulmonary edemas . . .” Ashcroft, p. 7.

“The temperature six miles up . . .” Smith, p. 25.

“about three-millionths of an inch . . .” Allen, Atmosphere, p. 58.

“it could well bounce back into space . . .” Allen, p. 57.

“Howard Somervell ‘found himself choking to death’ . . .” Dickinson, The Other Side of Everest, p. 86.

“The absolute limit of human tolerance . . .” Ashcroft, p. 8.

“even the most well-adapted women . . .” Attenborough, The Living Planet, p. 18.

“nearly half a ton has been quietly piled upon us . . .” Quoted by Hamilton-Paterson, p. 177.

“a typical weather front . . .” Smith, p. 50.

“equivalent to four days’ use of electricity . . .” Junger, The Perfect Storm, p. 128.

“At any one moment 1,800 thunderstorms . . .” Stevens, p. 55.

“Much of our knowledge . . .” Biddle, p. 161.

“a wind blowing at two hundred miles an hour . . .” Bodanis, E = mc², p. 68.

“as much energy ‘as a medium-size nation.’ ” Ball, p. 51.

“The impulse of the atmosphere to seek equilibrium . . .”Science, “The Ascent of Atmospheric Sciences,” October 13, 2000, p. 300.

“Coriolis’s other distinction . . .” Trefil, The Unexpected Vista, p. 24.

“gives weather systems their curl . . .” Drury, p. 25.

“Celsius made boiling point zero . . .” Trefil, The Unexpected Vista, p. 107.

“Howard is chiefly remembered . . .”Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 10, pp. 51-52.

“Howard’s system has been much added to . . .” Trefil, Meditations at Sunset, p. 62.

“the source of the expression ‘to be on cloud nine.’ ” Hamblyn, p. 252.

“A fluffy summer cumulus . . .” Trefil, Meditations at Sunset, p. 66.

“Only about 0.035 percent of the Earth’s fresh water . . .” Ball, p. 57.

“the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely.” Dennis, p. 8.

“Even something as large as the Mediterranean . . .” Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human, p. 123.

“Such an event occurred . . .”New Scientist, “Vanished,” August 7, 1999.

“equivalent to the world’s output of coal . . .” Trefil, Meditations at 10,000 Feet, p. 122.

“a lag in the official, astronomical start of a season . . .” Stevens, p. 111.

“how long it takes a drop of water . . .”National Geographic, “New Eyes on the Oceans,” October 2000, p. 101.

“about twenty thousand times as much carbon . . .” Stevens, p. 7.

“the ‘natural’ level of carbon dioxide . . .”Science, “The Ascent of Atmospheric Sciences,” October 13, 2000, p. 303.

CHAPTER 18 THE BOUNDING MAIN

“a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide . . .” Margulis and Sagan, p. 100.

“A potato is 80 percent water . . .” Schopf, p. 107.

“Almost nothing about it can be used . . .” Green, p. 29; and Gribbin, In the Beginning, p. 174.

“By the time it is solid . . .” Trefil, Meditations at 10,000 Feet, p. 121.

“an utterly bizarre property . . .” Gribbin, In the Beginning, p. 174.

“like the ever-changing partners in a quadrille . . .” Kunzig, p. 8.

“only 15 percent of them are actually touching.” Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p. 152.

“Within days, the lips vanish . . .”Economist, May 13, 2000, p. 4.

“A typical liter of seawater will contain . . .” Dennis, p. 248.

“we sweat and cry seawater . . .” Margulis and Sagan, pp. 183-84.

“There are 320 million cubic miles of water . . .” Green, p. 25.

“By 3.8 billion years ago . . .” Ward and Brownlee, p. 36.

“Altogether the Pacific holds just over half . . .” Dennis, p. 226.

“we would better call our planet not Earth but Water.” Ball, p. 21.

“Of the 3 percent of Earth’s water that is fresh . . .” Dennis, p. 6; and Scientific American, “On Thin Ice,” December 2002, pp. 100-105.

“Go to the South Pole and you will be standing . . .” Smith, p. 62.

“enough to raise the oceans . . .” Schultz, Ice Age Lost, p. 75.

“driven to distraction by the mind-numbing routine . . .” Weinberg, A Fish Caught in Time, p. 34.

“But they sailed across almost seventy thousand nautical miles . . .” Hamilton-Paterson, The Great Deep, p. 178.

“female assistants whose jobs were inventively described . . .” Norton, p. 57.

“Soon afterward he teamed up with Barton . . .” Ballard, The Eternal Darkness, pp. 14-15.

“The sphere had no maneuverability . . .” Weinberg, A Fish Caught in Time, p. 158, and Ballard, p. 17.

“Whatever it was, nothing like it has been seen since . . .” Weinberg, A Fish Caught in Time, p. 159.

“In 1958, they did a deal with the U.S. Navy . . .” Broad, The Universe Below, p. 54.

“We didn’t learn a hell of a lot from it . . .” Quoted in Underwater magazine, “The Deepest Spot On Earth,” Winter 1999.

“the designers couldn’t find anyone willing to build it.” Broad, p. 56.

“In 1994, thirty-four thousand ice hockey gloves . . .”National Geographic, “New Eyes on the Oceans,” October 2000, p. 93.

“perhaps a millionth or a billionth of the sea’s darkness.” Kunzig, p. 47.

“tube worms over ten feet long . . .” Attenborough, The Living Planet, p. 30.

“Before this it had been thought . . .”National Geographic, “Deep Sea Vents,” October 2000, p. 123.

“enough to bury every bit of land . . .” Dennis, p. 248.

“it can take up to ten million years . . .” Vogel, p. 182.

“our psychological remoteness from the ocean depths . . .” Engel, The Sea, p. 183.

“When they failed to sink . . .” Kunzig, pp. 294-305.

“Blue whales will sometimes break off a song . . .” Sagan, p. 225.

“Consider the fabled giant squid.”Good Weekend, “Armed and Dangerous,” July 15, 2000, p. 35.

“as many as thirty million species . . .”Time, “Call of the Sea,” October 5, 1998, p. 60.

“Even at a depth of three miles . . .” Kunzig, pp. 104-5.

“Altogether less than a tenth of the ocean . . .”Economist survey, “The Sea,” May 23, 1998, p. 4.

“doesn’t even make it into the top fifty . . .” Flannery, The Future Eaters, p. 104.

“Many fishermen ‘fin’ sharks . . .”Audubon, May-June 1998, p. 54.

“nets big enough to hold a dozen jumbo jets.”Time, “The Fish Crisis,” August 11, 1997, p. 66.

“We’re still in the Dark Ages.”Economist, “Pollock Overboard,” January 6, 1996, p. 22.

“Perhaps as much as twenty-two million metric tons . . .”Economist survey, “The Sea,” May 23, 1998, p. 12.

“Large areas of the North Sea floor . . .”Outside, December 1997, p. 62.

“By 1990 this had sunk to 22,000 metric tons . . .”Economist survey, “The Sea,” May 23, 1998, p. 8.

“Fishermen . . . had caught them all.” Kurlansky, Cod, p. 186.

“had not staged a comeback”Nature, “How Many More Fish in the Sea?” October 17, 2002, p. 662.

“‘fish’ is ‘whatever is left.’ ” Kurlansky, p. 138.

“90 percent of lobsters are caught . . .”New York Times magazine, “A Tale of Two Fisheries,” August 27, 2000, p. 40.

“As many as fifteen million of them . . .” BBC Horizon transcript, “Antarctica: The Ice Melts,” p. 16.

CHAPTER 19 THE RISE OF LIFE

“After a few days, the water in the flasks . . .”Earth, “Life’s Crucible,” February 1998, p. 34.

“Repeating Miller’s experiments . . .” Ball, p. 209.

“as many as a million types of protein . . .”Discover, “The Power of Proteins,” January 2002, p. 38.

“the odds against all two hundred . . .” Crick, Life Itself, p. 51.

“Hemoglobin is only 146 amino acids long . . .” Sulston and Ferry, The Common Thread, p. 14.

“DNA is a whiz at replicating . . .” Margulis and Sagan, p. 63.

“If everything needs everything else . . .” Davies, p. 71.

“some kind of cumulative selection process . . .” Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 45.

“Lots of molecules in nature get together . . .” Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 115.

“an obligatory manifestation of matter . . .” Quoted in Nuland, How We Live, p. 121.

“If you wished to create another living object . . .” Schopf, p. 107.

“There is nothing special about the substances . . .” Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 112.

“As one leading biology text puts it . . .” Wallace et al., Biology: The Science of Life, p. 428.

“Well into the 1950s . . .” Margulis and Sagan, p. 71.

“We can only infer from this rapidity . . .”New York Times, “Life on Mars? So What?” August 11, 1996.

“was chemically destined to be.” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 328.

“when tens of thousands of Australians . . .”Sydney Morning Herald, “Aerial Blast Rocks Towns,” September 29, 1969; and “Farmer Finds ‘Meteor Soot,’ ” September 30, 1969.

“it was studded with amino acids . . .” Davies, pp. 209-10.

“A few other carbonaceous chondrites . . .”Nature, “Life’s Sweet Beginnings?” December 20-27, 2001, p. 857, and Earth, “Life’s Crucible,” February 1998, p. 37.

“at the very fringe of scientific respectability . . .” Gribbin, In the Beginning, p. 78.

“suggested that our noses evolved . . .” Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 190.

“Wherever you go in the world . . .” Ridley, Genome, p. 21.

“We can’t be certain that what you are holding . . .” Victoria Bennett interview, Australia National University, Canberra, August 21, 2001.

“full of noxious vapors . . .” Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 200.

“the most important single metabolic innovation . . .” Margulis and Sagan, p. 78.

“Our white cells actually use oxygen . . .” Note provided by Dr. Laurence Smaje.

“But about 3.5 billion years ago . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 186.

“This is truly time traveling . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 66.

“the slowest-evolving organisms on Earth . . .” Schopf, p. 212

“Animals could not summon up the energy to work,” Fortey, Life, p. 89.

“nothing more than a sludge of simple microbes.” Margulis and Sagan, p. 17.

“you could pack a billion . . .” Brown, The Energy of Life, p. 101.

“Such fossils have been found just once . . .” Ward and Brownlee, p. 10.

“little more than ‘bags of chemicals’. . .” Drury, p. 68.

“to fill eighty books of five hundred pages.” Sagan, p. 227.

CHAPTER 20 SMALL WORLD

“Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist . . .” Biddle, p. 16.

“a herd of about one trillion bacteria . . .” Ashcroft, p. 248; and Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p. 4.

“Your digestive system alone . . .” Biddle, p. 57.

“no detectable function at all.”National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 51.

“about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells.” Margulis and Sagan, p. 67.

“We couldn’t survive a day without them.”New York Times, “From Birth, Our Body Houses a Microbe Zoo,” October 15, 1996, p. C3.

“Algae and other tiny organisms . . .” Sagan and Margulis, p. 11.

“Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism . . .”Outside, July 1999, p. 88.

“a single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring . . .” Margulis and Sagan, p. 75.

“a single bacterial cell can generate . . .” De Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 2, p. 320.

“all bacteria swim in a single gene pool.” Margulis and Sagan, p. 16.

“microbes known as Thiobacillus concretivorans . . .” Davies, p. 145.

“Some bacteria break down chemical materials . . .”National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 39.

“like the scuttling limbs of an undead creature . . .”Economist, “Human Genome Survey,” July 1, 2000, p. 9.

“Perhaps the most extraordinary survival . . .” Davies, p. 146.

“their tireless nibblings created the Earth’s crust.”New York Times, “Bugs Shape Landscape, Make Gold,” October 15, 1996, p. C1.

“it would cover the planet . . .”Discover, “To Hell and Back,” July 1999, p. 82.

“The liveliest of them may divide . . .”Scientific American, “Microbes Deep Inside the Earth,” October 1996, p. 71.

“The key to long life . . .”Economist, “Earth’s Hidden Life,” December 21, 1996, p. 112.

“Other microorganisms have leapt back to life . . .”Nature, “A Case of Bacterial Immortality?” October 19, 2000, p. 844.

“claimed to have revived bacteria frozen in Siberian permafrost . . .”Economist, “Earth’s Hidden Life,” December 21, 1996, p. 111.

“But the record claim for durability . . .”New Scientist, “Sleeping Beauty,” October 21, 2000, p. 12.

“The more doubtful scientists suggested . . .” BBC News online, “Row over Ancient Bacteria,” June 7, 2001.

“Bacteria were usually lumped in with plants . . .” Sagan and Margulis, p. 22.

“In 1969, in an attempt to bring some order . . .” Sagan and Margulis, p. 23.

“By one calculation it contained . . .” Sagan and Margulis, p. 24.

“only about 500 species of bacteria were known . . .”New York Times, “Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,” October 15, 1996, p. C3.

“Only about 1 percent will grow in culture.”Science, “Microbiologists Explore Life’s Rich, Hidden Kingdoms,” March 21, 1997, p. 1740.

“like learning about animals from visiting zoos.”New York Times, “Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,” October 15, 1996, p. C7.

“Woese . . . ‘felt bitterly disappointed.’ ” Ashcroft, pp. 274-75.

“Biology, like physics before it . . .”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Default Taxonomy; Ernst Mayr’s View of the Microbial World,” September 15, 1998.

“Woese was not trained as a biologist . . .”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Two Empires or Three?” August 18, 1998.

“Of the twenty-three main divisions of life . . .” Schopf, p. 106.

“microbes would account for at least 80 percent . . .”New York Times, “Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,” October 15, 1996, p. C7.

“the most rampantly infectious organism on Earth . . .”Nature, “Wolbachia: A Tale of Sex and Survival,” May 11, 2001, p. 109.

“only about one microbe in a thousand . . .”National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 39.

“microbes are still the number three killer . . .”Outside, July 1999, p. 88.

“once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared . . .” Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, p. 208.

“a disease called necrotizing fasciitis . . .” Gawande, Complications, p. 234.

“The time has come to close the book . . .”New Yorker, “No Profit, No Cure,” November 5, 2001, p. 46.

“some 90 percent of those strains . . .”Economist, “Disease Fights Back,” May 20, 1995, p. 15.

“in 1997 a hospital in Tokyo reported the appearance . . .”Boston Globe, “Microbe Is Feared to Be Winning Battle Against Antibiotics,” May 30, 1997, p. A7.

“America’s National Institutes of Health . . .”Economist, “Bugged by Disease,” March 21, 1998, p. 93.

“Hundreds, even thousands of people . . .”Forbes, “Do Germs Cause Cancer?” November 15, 1999, p. 195.

“a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders . . .” Science, “Do Chronic Diseases Have an Infectious Root?” September 14, 2001, pp. 1974-76.

“a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news . . .” Quoted in Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues and History, p. 8.

“About five thousand types of virus are known . . .” Biddle, pp. 153-54.

“Smallpox in the twentieth century alone . . .” Oldstone, p. 1.

“In ten years the disease killed some five million people . . .” Kolata, Flu, p. 292.

“World War I killed twenty-one million people in four years . . .”American Heritage, “The Great Swine Flu Epidemic of 1918,” June 1976, p. 82.

“In an attempt to devise a vaccine . . .”American Heritage, “The Great Swine Flu Epidemic of 1918,” June 1976, p. 82.

“Researchers at the Manchester Royal Infirmary . . .”National Geographic, “The Disease Detectives,” January 1991, p. 132.

“In 1969, a doctor at a Yale University lab . . .” Oldstone, p. 126.

“In 1990, a Nigerian living in Chicago . . .” Oldstone, p. 128.

CHAPTER 21 LIFE GOES ON

“The fate of nearly all living organisms . . .” Schopf, p. 72.

“Only about 15 percent of rocks can preserve fossils . . .” Lewis, The Dating Game, p. 24.

“less than one species in ten thousand . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 280.

“there are 250,000 species of creature in the fossil record . . .” Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 45.

“About 95 percent of all the fossils we possess . . .” Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 45.

“It seems like a big number . . .” Richard Fortey, interview by author, Natural History Museum, London, February 19, 2001.

“one-half of 1 percent as long.” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 24.

“a whole Profallotaspis or Elenellus as big as a crab . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 121.

“built up a collection of sufficient distinction . . .” “From Farmer-Laborer to Famous Leader: Charles D. Walcott (1850-1927),” GSA Today, January 1996.

“In 1879 he took a job as a field researcher . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, pp. 242-43.

“His books fill a library shelf . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 53.

“our sole vista upon the inception of modern life . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 56.

“Gould, ever scrupulous, discovered . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 71.

“140 species in all, by one count.” Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 27.

“a range of disparity . . . never again equaled . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 208.

“Under such an interpretation,’ Gould sighed . . .” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 225.

“Then in 1973 a graduate student from Cambridge . . .”National Geographic, “Explosion of Life,” October 1993, p. 126.

“There was so much unrecognized novelty . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 123.

“they all use architecture first created . . .”U.S. News and World Report, “How Do Genes Switch On?” August 18/25, 1997, p. 74.

“at least fifteen and perhaps as many as twenty . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 25.

“Wind back the tape of life . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 14.

“In 1946 Sprigg was a young assistant government geologist . . .” Corfield, Architects of Eternity, p. 287.

“it failed to find favor with the association’s head . . .” Corfield, p. 287.

“Nine years later, in 1957 . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 85.

“There is nothing closely similar alive today . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 88.

“They are difficult to interpret . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 125.

“If only Stephen Gould could think as clearly as he writes!” Dawkins review, Sunday Telegraph, February 25, 1990.

“One, writing in the New York Times Book Review . . .”New York Times Book Review, “Survival of the Luckiest,” October 22, 1989.

“Dawkins attacked Gould’s assertions . . .” Review of Full House in Evolution, June 1997.

“startled many in the paleontological community . . .”New York Times Book Review, “Rock of Ages,” May 10, 1998, p. 15.

“I have never encountered such spleen in a book by a professional . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 138.

“the idea of comparing a shrew and an elephant.” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 132.

“None was as strange as a present day barnacle . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 111.

“no less interesting, or odd, just more explicable.” Fortey, “Shock Lobsters,” London Review of Books, October 1, 1998.

“to have one well-formed creature like a trilobite . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 137.

CHAPTER 22 GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT

“In areas of Antarctica where virtually nothing else will grow . . .” Attenborough, The Living Planet, p. 48.

“Spontaneously, inorganic stone becomes living plant!” Marshall, Mosses and Lichens, p. 22.

“more than twenty thousand species of lichens.” Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants, p. 214.

“Those the size of dinner plates . . .” Attenborough, The Living Planet, p. 42.

“compressed into a normal earthly day . . .” Adapted from Schopf, p. 13.

“stretch your arms to their fullest extent . . .” McPhee, Basin and Range, p. 126.

“Oxygen levels . . . were as high as 35 percent . . .” Officer and Page, p. 123.

“the isotopes accumulate at different rates . . .” Officer and Page, p. 118.

“put them in wind tunnels to see how they do it . . .” Conniff, Spineless Wonders, p. 84.

“dragonflies grew as big as ravens.” Fortey, Life, p. 201.

“Luckily the team found just such a creature . . .” BBC Horizon, “The Missing Link,” first aired February 1, 2001.

“The names simply refer to the number and location of holes . . .” Tudge, The Variety of Life, p. 411.

“as high as 4,000 billion.” Tudge, The Variety of Life, p. 9.

“To a first approximation . . . all species are extinct.” Quoted by Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 46.

“the average lifespan of a species . . .” Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 38.

“The alternative to extinction is stagnation . . .” Ian Tattersall, interviewed at American Museum of Natural History, New York, May 6, 2002.

“invariably associated with dramatic leaps afterward . . .” Stanley, p. 95; and Stevens, p. 12.

“In the Permian, at least 95 percent of animals . . .”Harper’s, “Planet of Weeds,” October 1998, p. 58.

“Even about a third of insect species . . .” Stevens, p. 12.

“It was, truly, a mass extinction . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 235.

“Estimates for the number of animal species alive . . .” Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, p. 340.

“For individuals the death toll could be much higher . . .” Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p. 143.

“Grazing animals, including horses, were nearly wiped out . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 100.

“At least two dozen potential culprits . . .”Earth, “The Mystery of Selective Extinctions,” October 1996, p. 12.

“tons of conjecture and very little evidence. . . .”New Scientist, “Meltdown,” August 7, 1999.

“Such an outburst is not easily imagined . . .” Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p. 19.

“The KT meteor had the additional advantage . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 17.

“Why should these delicate creatures . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 43.

“In the seas it was much the same story.” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 304.

“Somehow it does not seem satisfying . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 292.

“could well be known as the Age of Turtles.” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 39.

“Evolution may abhor a vacuum . . .” Stanley, p. 92.

“For perhaps as many as ten million years . . .” Novacek, Time Traveler, p. 112.

“guinea pigs the size of rhinos . . .” Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 102.

“a gigantic, flightless, carnivorous bird . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 138.

“built in 1903 in Pittsburgh . . .” Colbert, p. 164.

“came from only about three hundred specimens . . .” Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, pp. 168-69.

“There is no reason to believe . . .” BBC Horizon, “Crater of Death,” first broadcast May 6, 2001.

“Humans are here today because . . .” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 229.

CHAPTER 23 THE RICHNESS OF BEING

“The spirit room alone holds fifteen miles of shelving . . .” Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum, p. 90.

“forty-four years after the expedition had concluded.” Thackray and Press, p. 74.

“still to be found on many library shelves . . .” Conard, How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts, p. 5.

“The tropics are where you find the variety . . .” Len Ellis interview, Natural History Museum, London, April 18, 2002.

“he sifted through a bale of fodder . . .” Barber, p. 17.

“To the parts of one species of clam . . .” Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, p. 79.

“Love comes even to the plants.” Quoted by Gjertsen, p. 237; and at University of California/UCMP Berkeley website.

“Linnaeus lopped it back to Physalis angulata . . .” Kastner, p. 31.

“The first edition of his great Systema Naturae . . .” Gjertsen, p. 223.

“John Ray’s three-volume Historia Generalis Plantarum . . .” Durant and Durant, p. 519.

“a kind of father figure to British naturalists.” Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 65.

“gullibly accepted from seamen and other imaginative travelers.” Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p. 59.

“he saw that whales belonged with cows . . .” Schwartz, p. 59.

“mare’s fart, naked ladies, twitch-ballock . . .” Thomas, pp. 82-85.

. . . “Edward O. Wilson in The Diversity of Life . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 157.

“transferred, amid howls, to the genus Pelargonium.” Elliott, The Potting-Shed Papers, p. 18

“Estimates range from 3 million to 200 million.”Audubon, “Earth’s Catalogue,” January-February 2002, and Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 132.

“as much as 97 percent . . .”Economist, “A Golden Age of Discovery,” December 23, 1996, p. 56.

“he estimated the number of known species of all types . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 133.

“Other authorities have put the number . . .”U.S. News and World Report, August 18, 1997, p. 78.

“It took Groves four decades to untangle everything . . .”New Scientist, “Monkey Puzzle,” October 6, 2001, p. 54.

“about fifteen thousand new species of all types . . .”Wall Street Journal, “Taxonomists Unite to Catalog Every Species, Big and Small,” January 22, 2001.

“It’s not a biodiversity crisis, it’s a taxonomist crisis!” Ken Maes, interview with author, National Museum, Nairobi, October 2, 2002.

“many species are being described poorly . . .”Nature, “Challenges for Taxonomy,” May 2, 2002, p. 17.

“an enterprise called the All Species Foundation . . .”The Times (London), “The List of Life on Earth,” July 30, 2001.

“your mattress is home to perhaps two million microscopic mites . . .” Bodanis, The Secret House, p. 16.

“to quote the man who did the measuring . . .”New Scientist, “Bugs Bite Back,” February 17, 2001, p. 48.

“These mites have been with us since time immemorial . . .” Bodanis, The Secret House, p. 15.

“Your sample will also contain perhaps a million plump yeasts . . .”National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 39.

“If over 9,000 microbial types exist . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 144.

“it could be as high as 400 million.” Tudge, The Variety of Life, p. 8.

“discovered a thousand new species of flowering plant . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 197.

“tropical rain forests cover only about 6 percent . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 197.

“over three and a half billion years of evolution.”Economist, “Biotech’s Secret Garden,” May 30, 1998, p. 75.

“found on the wall of a country pub . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 75.

“about 500 species have been identified . . .” Ridley, The Red Queen, p. 54.

“all the fungi found in a typical acre of meadow . . .” Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants, p. 176.

“the number could be as high as 1.8 million.”National Geographic, “Fungi,” August 2000, p. 60; and Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 117.

“The large flightless New Zealand bird . . .” Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p. 2.

“was considered a rarity in the wider world.”New York Times, “A Stone-Age Horse Still Roams a Tibetan Plateau,” November 12, 1995.

“a sort of giant ground sloth . . .”Economist, “A World to Explore,” December 23, 1995, p. 95.

“A single line of text in a Crampton table . . .” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, pp. 32-34.

“he hiked 2,500 miles to assemble a collection . . .” Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile, pp. 159-60.

CHAPTER 24 CELLS

“about the same number of components . . .”New Scientist, title unnoted, December 2, 2000, p. 37.

“no more than about 2 percent . . .” Brown, p. 83.

“scientists began to find it all over the place . . .” Brown, p. 229.

“It is converted into nitric oxide in the bloodstream . . .” Alberts et al., Essential Cell Biology, p. 489.

“‘some few hundred’ different types of cell . . .” De Duve, vol. 1, p. 21.

“If you are an average-sized adult . . .” Bodanis, The Secret Family, p. 106.

“Liver cells can survive for years . . .” De Duve, vol. 1, p. 68.

“not so much as a stray molecule . . .” Bodanis, The Secret Family, p. 81.

“Hooke calculated that a one-inch square of cork . . .” Nuland, p. 100.

“After he reported finding ‘animalcules’ . . .” Jardine, p. 93.

“there were 8,280,000 of these tiny beings . . .” Thomas, p. 167.

“He called the little beings ‘homunculi’ . . .” Schwartz, p. 167.

“In one of his least successful experiments . . .” Carey (ed.), The Faber Book of Science, p. 28.

“all living matter is cellular.” Nuland, p. 101.

“The cell has been compared to many things . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 133; and Brown, p. 78.

“a jolt of twenty million volts per meter.” Brown, p. 87.

“approximate consistency ‘of a light grade of machine oil’ . . .” Nuland, p. 103.

“up to a billion times a second . . .” Brown, p. 80.

“the molecular world must necessarily remain . . .” De Duve, vol. 2, p. 293.

“100 million protein molecules in each cell . . .” Nuland, p. 157.

“At any given moment, a typical cell . . .” Alberts et al., p. 110.

“Every day you produce and use up . . .”Nature, “Darwin’s Motors,” May 2, 2002, p. 25.

“On average, humans suffer one fatal malignancy . . .” Ridley, Genome, p. 237.

“the single best idea that anyone has ever had . . .” Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p. 21.

CHAPTER 25 DARWIN’S SINGULAR NOTION

“Everyone is interested in pigeons . . .” quoted in Boorstin, Cleopatra’s Nose, p. 176.

“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching . . .” Quoted in Boorstin, The Discoverers, p. 467.

“The experience of witnessing an operation . . .” Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p. 27.

“some ‘bordering on insanity’ . . .” Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, p. 199.

“In five years . . . he had not once hinted . . .” Desmond and Moore, p. 197.

“atolls could not form in less than a million years . . .” Moorehead, Darwin and the Beagle, p. 239.

“It wasn’t until . . . Darwin was back in England . . .” Gould, Ever Since Darwin, p. 21.

“How stupid of me not to have thought of it!”Sunday Telegraph, “The Origin of Darwin’s Genius,” December 8, 2002.

“It was his friend the ornithologist John Gould . . .” Desmond and Moore, p. 209.

“These he expanded into a 230-page ‘sketch’ . . .”Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 5, p. 526.

“I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before.” Quoted in Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p. 239.

“Some wondered if Darwin himself might be the author.” Barber, p. 214.

“he could not have made a better short abstract.”Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 5, p. 528.

“This summer will make the 20th year (!) . . .” Desmond and Moore, pp. 454-55.

“whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.” Desmond and Moore, p. 469.

“all that was new in them was false . . .” Quoted by Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 150.

“Much less amenable to Darwin’s claim of priority . . .” Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile, p. 336.

“He referred to himself as “the Devil’s Chaplain’. . .” Cadbury, p. 305.

“felt ‘like confessing a murder.’ ” Quoted in Desmond and Moore, p. xvi.

“The case at present must remain inexplicable . . .” Quoted by Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 57.

“By way of explanation he speculated . . .” Gould, Ever Since Darwin, p. 126.

“Darwin goes too far.” Quoted by McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p. 190.

“Huxley . . . was a saltationist . . .” Schwartz, pp. 81-82.

“The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder.” Quoted in Keller, The Century of the Gene, p. 97.

“absurd in the highest possible degree . . .” Darwin, On the Origin of Species (facsimile edition), p. 217.

“Darwin lost virtually all the support that still remained . . .” Schwartz, p. 89.

“It had a library of twenty thousand books . . .” Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So, p. 91.

“known to have studied Focke’s influential paper . . .” Ridley, Genome, p. 44.

“Huxley had been urged to attend by Robert Chambers . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 79.

“bravely slogged his way through two hours of introductory remarks . . .” Clark, p. 142.

“One of his experiments was to play the piano to them . . .” Conniff, p. 147.

“Having married his own cousin . . .” Desmond and Moore, p. 575.

“Darwin was often honored in his lifetime . . .” Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin, p. 148.

Darwin’s theory didn’t really gain widespread acceptance . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p. 45.

“seemed set to claim Mendel’s insights as his own . . .” Schwartz, p. 187.

CHAPTER 26 THE STUFF OF LIFE

“roughly one nucleotide base in every thousand . . .” Sulston and Ferry, p. 198.

“The exceptions are red blood cells . . .” Woolfson, Life Without Genes, p. 12.

“guaranteed to be unique against all conceivable odds . . .” De Duve, vol. 2, p. 314.

“to stretch from the Earth to the Moon . . .” Dennett, p. 151.

“twenty million kilometers of DNA . . .” Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human, p. 8.

“among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules . . .” Lewontin, p. 142.

“It was discovered as far back as 1869 . . .” Ridley, Genome, p. 48.

“DNA didn’t do anything at all . . .” Wallace et al., Biology: The Science of Life, p. 211.

“The necessary complexity, it was thought . . .” De Duve, vol. 2, p. 295.

“Working out of a small lab . . .” Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin, p. 259.

“no consensus ‘as to what the genes are’ . . .” Keller, p. 2.

“we are in much the same position today . . .” Wallace et al., p. 211.

“worth two Nobel Prizes . . .” Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, p. 327.

“not to give Avery a Nobel Prize.” White, Rivals, p. 251.

“a member of a highly popular radio program called The Quiz Kids . . .” Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation, p. 46.

“without my learning any chemistry . . .” Watson, The Double Helix, p. 28.

“the results of which were obtained ‘fortuitously’ . . .” Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p. 356.

“In a severely unflattering portrait . . .” Watson, The Double Helix, p. 26.

“in the summer of 1952 she posted a mock notice . . .” White, Rivals, p. 257; and Maddox, p. 185.

“apparently without her knowledge or consent.” PBS website, “A Science Odyssey,” undated.

“Years later Watson conceded. . .” Quoted in Maddox, p. 317.

“a 900-word article by Watson and Crick titled ‘A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.’ ” De Duve, vol. 2, p. 290.

“It received a small mention in the News Chronicle . . .” Ridley, Genome, p. 50.

“Franklin rarely wore a lead apron . . .” Maddox, p. 144.

“It took over twenty-five years . . .” Crick, What Mad Pursuit, p. 74.

“That Was the Molecular Biology That Was.” Keller, p. 25.

“rather like the keys of a piano . . .”National Geographic, “Secrets of the Gene,” October 1995, p. 55.

“Guanine, for instance, is the same stuff . . .” Pollack, p. 23.

“you could say all humans share nothing . . .”Discover, “Bad Genes, Good Drugs,” April 2002, p. 54.

“they are good at getting themselves duplicated.” Ridley, Genome, p. 127.

“Altogether, almost half of human genes . . .” Woolfson, p. 18.

“Empires fall, ids explode . . .” Nuland, p. 158.

“Here were two creatures . . .” BBC Horizon, “Hopeful Monsters,” first transmitted 1998.

“At least 90 percent correlate at some level . . .”Nature, “Sorry, Dogs-Man’s Got a New Best Friend,” December 19-26, 2002, p. 734.

“We even have the same genes for making a tail . . .”Los Angeles Times (reprinted in Valley News), December 9, 2002.

“dubbed homeotic (from a Greek word meaning “similar”) . . .” BBC Horizon, “Hopeful Monsters,” first transmitted 1998.

“We have forty-six chromosomes . . .” Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 53.

“The lungfish, one of the least evolved . . .” Schopf, p. 240.

“Perhaps the apogee (or nadir) . . .” Lewontin, p. 215.

“How fast a man’s beard grows . . .”Wall Street Journal, “What Distinguishes Us from the Chimps? Actually, Not Much,” April 12, 2002, p. 1.

“the proteome is much more complicated than the genome.”Scientific American, “Move Over, Human Genome,” April 2002, pp. 44-45.

“they will allow themselves to be phosphorylated, glycosylated, acetylated, ubiquitinated . . .”The Bulletin, “The Human Enigma Code,” August 21, 2001, p. 32.

“Drink a glass of wine . . .”Scientific American, “Move Over, Human Genome,” April 2002, pp. 44-45.

“Anything that is true of E. coli . . .”Nature, “From E. coli to Elephants,” May 2, 2002, p. 22.

CHAPTER 27 ICE TIME

“The Times ran a small story . . .” Williams and Montaigne, p. 198.

“Spring never came and summer never warmed.” Officer and Page, pp. 3-6.

“One French naturalist named de Luc . . .” Hallam, p. 89.

“and the other abundant clues . . .” Hallam, p. 90.

“The naturalist Jean de Charpentier told the story . . .” Hallam, p. 90.

“He lent Agassiz his notes . . .” Hallam, pp. 92-93.

“there are three stages in scientific discovery . . .” Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p. 173.

“In his quest to understand the dynamics of glaciation . . .” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p. 182.

“William Hopkins, a Cambridge professor . . .” Hallam, p. 98.

“He began to find evidence for glaciers . . .” Hallam, p. 99.

“ice had once covered the whole Earth . . .” Gould, Time’s Arrow, p. 115.

“When he died in 1873 Harvard felt it necessary . . .” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p. 197.

“Less than a decade after his death . . .” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p. 197.

“For the next twenty years . . .” Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age, p. 51.

“The cause of ice ages . . .” Chorlton, Ice Ages, p. 101.

“It is not necessarily the amount of snow . . .” Schultz, p. 72.

“The process is self-enlarging . . .” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p. 205.

“you would have been hard pressed to find a geologist . . .” Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age, p. 60.

“we are still very much in an ice age . . .” Schultz, Ice Age Lost, p. 5.

“a situation that may be unique in Earth’s history.” Gribbin and Gribbin, Fire on Earth, p. 147.

“at least seventeen severe glacial episodes . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 148.

“about fifty more glacial episodes . . .” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p. 4.

“Earth had no regular ice ages . . .” Stevens, p. 10.

“the Cryogenian, or super ice age.” McGuire, p. 69.

“The entire surface of the planet . . .”Valley News (from Washington Post), “The Snowball Theory,” June 19, 2000, p. C1.

“the wildest weather it has ever experienced . . .” BBC Horizon transcript, “Snowball Earth,” February 22, 2001, p. 7.

“known to science as the Younger Dryas,” Stevens, p. 34.

“a vast unsupervised experiment . . .”New Yorker, “Ice Memory,” January 7, 2002, p. 36.

“a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates . . .” Schultz, p. 72.

“No less intriguing are the known ranges . . .” Drury, p. 268.

“a retreat to warmer climes wasn’t possible.” Thomas H. Rich, Patricia Vickers-Rich, and Roland Gangloff, “Polar Dinosaurs,” unpublished manuscript.

“there is a lot more water for them to draw on . . .” Schultz, p. 159.

“If so, sea levels globally would rise . . .” Ball, p. 75.

“‘Did you have a good ice age?’ ” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 267.

CHAPTER 28 THE MYSTERIOUS BIPED

“Just before Christmas 1887 . . .”National Geographic, May 1997, p. 87.

“found by railway workers in a cave . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 149.

“The first formal description . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 173.

“the name and credit for the discovery . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, pp. 3-6.

“T. H. Huxley in England drily observed . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 59.

“He did no digging himself . . .” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, pp. 126-27.

“In fact, many anthropologists think it is modern . . .” Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p. 47.

“If it is an erectus bone . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 144.

“with nothing but a scrap of cranium and one tooth . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 154.

“Schwalbe thereupon produced a monograph . . .” Walker and Shipman, p. 50.

“Dart could see at once . . .” Walker and Shipman, p. 90.

“he would sometimes bury their bodies . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 233.

“Dart spent five years working up a monograph . . .” Lewin, Bones of Contention, p. 82.

“sat as a paperweight on a colleague’s desk.” Walker and Shipman, p. 93.

“announced the discovery of Sinanthropus pekinensis . . .” Swisher, et al., Java Man, p. 75.

“enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones . . .” Swisher et al., p. 77.

“Solo People were known . . .” Swisher, et al., p. 211.

“in 1960 F. Clark Howell of the University of Chicago . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, pp. 267-68.

“our understanding of human prehistory . . .”Washington Post, “Skull Raises Doubts About Our Ancestry.” March 22, 2001.

“You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck . . .” Ian Tattersall interview, American Museum of Natural History, New York, May 6, 2002.

“early hand tools were mostly made by antelopes.” Walker and Shipman, p. 82.

“males and females evolving at different rates . . .” Walker and Shipman, p. 133.

“dismiss it as a mere ‘wastebasket species’ . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 111.

“have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer.” Quoted by Gribbin and Cherfas, The First Chimpanzee, p. 60.

“perhaps the largest share of egos . . .” Swisher et al., p. 17.

“unpredictable and high-decibel personal verbal assaults . . .” Swisher et al., p. 140.

“For the first 99.99999 percent of our history . . .” Tattersall, The Human Odyssey, p. 60.

“She is our earliest ancestor . . .” PBS Nova, June 3, 1997, “In Search of Human Origins.”

“discounted the 106 bones of the hands and feet . . .” Walker and Shipman, p. 181.

“Lucy and her kind did not locomote . . .” Tattersall, The Monkey in the Mirror, p. 89.

“Only when these hominids had to travel . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 91.

“Lucy’s hips and the muscular arrangement of her pelvis . . .”National Geographic, “Face-to-Face with Lucy’s Family,” March 1996, p. 114.

“One, discovered by Meave Leakey . . .”New Scientist, March 24, 2001, p. 5.

“the oldest hominid yet found . . .”Nature, “Return to the Planet of the Apes,” July 12, 2001, p. 131.

“found a hominid almost seven million years old . . .”Scientific American, “An Ancestor to Call Our Own,” January 2003, pp. 54-63.

“Some critics believe that it was not human . . .”Nature, “Face to Face with Our Past,” December 19-26, 2002, p. 735.

“when you are a small, vulnerable australopithecine . . .” Stevens, p. 3; and Drury, pp. 335-36.

“but that the forests left them . . .” Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human, p. 135.

“For over three million years . . .” PBS Nova, “In Search of Human Origins,” first broadcast August 1999.

“yet the australopithecines never took advantage . . .” Drury, p. 338.

“‘Perhaps,’ suggests Matt Ridley, ‘we ate them.’ ” Ridley, Genome, p. 33.

“they make up only 2 percent of the body’s mass . . .” Drury, p. 345.

“The body is in constant danger . . .” Brown, p. 216.

“C. Loring Brace stuck doggedly to the linear concept . . .” Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, p. 204.

“Homo erectus is the dividing line . . .” Swisher et al., p. 131.

“It was of a boy aged between about nine and twelve . . .”National Geographic, May 1997, p. 90.

“the Turkana boy was ‘very emphatically one of us.’ ” Tattersall, The Monkey in the Mirror, p. 105.

“Someone had looked after her.” Walker and Shipman, p. 165.

“they were unprecedentedly adventurous . . .”Scientific American, “Food for Thought,” December 2002, pp. 108-15.

“couldn’t be compared with anything else . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 132.

“Tattersall and Schwartz don’t believe that goes nearly far enough.” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 169.

CHAPTER 29 THE RESTLESS APE

“They made them in the thousands . . .” Ian Tattersall, interview by author, American Museum of Natural History, New York, May 6, 2002.

“people may have first arrived substantially earlier . . .”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 16, 2001.

“There’s just a whole lot we don’t know . . .” Alan Thorne, interview by author, Canberra, August 20, 2001.

“the most recent major event in human evolution . . .” Tattersall, The Human Odyssey, p. 150.

“whether any or all of them actually represent our species . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 226.

“odd, difficult-to-classify and poorly known . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 412.

“No Neandertal remains have ever been found in north Africa . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 209.

“known to paleoclimatology as the Boutellier interval . . .” Fagan, The Great Journey, p. 105.

“They survived for at least a hundred thousand years . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 204.

“In 1947, while doing fieldwork in the Sahara . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 300.

“Neandertals lacked the intelligence or fiber to compete . . .”Nature, “Those Elusive Neanderthals,” October 25, 2001, p. 791.

“Modern humans neutralized this advantage . . .” Stevens, p. 30.

“1.8 liters for Neandertals versus 1.4 for modern people . . .” Flannery, The Future Eaters, p. 301.

“Rhodesian man . . . lived as recently as 25,000 years ago . . .” Canby, The Epic of Man, page unnoted.

“the front end looking like a donkey . . .”Science, “What-or Who-Did In the Neandertals?” September 14, 2001, p. 1981.

“all present-day humans are descended from that population . . .” Swisher et al., p. 189.

“people began to look a little more closely . . .”Scientific American, “Is Out of Africa Going Out the Door?” August 1999.

“DNA from the arm bone of the original Neandertal man . . .”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Ancient DNA and the Origin of Modern Humans,” January 16, 2001.

“all modern humans emerged from Africa . . .”Nature, “A Start for Population Genomics,” December 7, 2000, p. 65, and Natural History, “What’s New in Prehistory,” May 2000, pp. 90-91.

“more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps . . .”Science, “A Glimpse of Humans’ First Journey Out of Africa,” May 12, 2000, p. 950.

“In early 2001, Thorne and his colleagues . . .”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Mitochondrial DNA Sequences in Ancient Australians: Implications for Modern Human Origins,” January 16, 2001.

“the genetic record supports the out of Africa hypothesis.” Rosalind Harding interview, Institute of Biological Anthropology, February 28, 2002.

“whether he thought an old skull was varnished or not . . .”Nature, September 27, 2001, p. 359.

“had inserted a visit to Olorgesailie. . .” Just for the record, the name is also commonly spelled Olorgasailie, including in some official Kenyan materials. It was this spelling that I used in a small book I wrote for CARE concerning the visit. I am now informed by Ian Tattersall that the correct spelling is with a median e.

CHAPTER 30 GOOD-BYE

“a handful of crude descriptions by ‘unscientific voyagers . . .’ ” Quoted in Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, pp. 237-38.

“Australia . . . lost no less than 95 percent . . .” Flannery and Schouten, p. xv.

“there are only so many mammoth steaks you can eat.”New Scientist, “Mammoth Mystery,” May 5, 2001, p. 34.

“only four types of really hefty . . . land animals . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 195.

“human-caused extinction now may be running . . .” Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 241.

“He set off at once for the island . . .” Flannery, The Future Eaters, pp. 62-63.

“At each successive discharge . . .” Quoted in Matthiessen, Wildlife in America, pp. 114-115.

“the zoo lost it . . .” Flannery and Schouten, p. 125.

“as many as four hundred at a time . . .” Gould, The Book of Life, p. 79.

“Hugh Cuming, who became so preoccupied . . .” Desmond and Moore, p. 342.

“Millions of years of isolation . . .”National Geographic, “On the Brink: Hawaii’s Vanishing Species,” September 1995, pp. 2-37.

“if someone imitated its song . . .” Flannery and Schouten, p. 84.

“a bird so sublimely rare . . .” Flannery and Schouten, p. 76.

“By the early 1990s he had raised the figure . . .” Easterbrook, A Moment on the Earth, p. 558.

“A United Nations report of 1995 . . .”Valley News, quoting Washington Post, “Report Finds Growing Biodiversity Threat,” November 27, 1995.

“One planet, one experiment.“ Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 182.