Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything

“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, H 2O , 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.

“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 = mc 2 , 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.

“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.

“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.