From
primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short
History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how
humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson
uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with
luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected
stale school textbooks and
dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the
smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his
distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. Each longish
chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work,
and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as "The Size
of the Earth" and "Life Itself." Bryson chats with experts
like Richard Fortey (author of Life and Trilobite ) and these interviews
are charming. But it's when Bryson dives into some of science's best and
most embarrassing fights-- Cope vs. Marsh ,Conway Morris vs. Gould --that
he finds literary gold. --Therese Littleton
Only
the first two chapters will be scanned You need to get the book. Try
the bookstores around town.
It's a very popular book. Amazon will have
it in stock.
updated:
Wednesday, July 29, 2009 6:51 PM
Introduction [1,
2-3, 4-5,
6-7,]
Tony's Black
Hole Hypothesis
A Black Hole is created in the Universe when a large star
gravitationally collapses onto itself after having fused all of it’s
nuclear fuel. According to theory, the star must have a mass ten times greater
than our own Sun for this to happen. If, astronomers discover a Black
Hole with a mass as small as a planet revolving around a star,
they can assume that an Intelligent Civilization had the ability to create
a Black Hole and that it got away from them, somehow! Maybe,
we should look for just such a scenario. Chapter
1 [8-9,
10-11, 12-13,
14-15, 16-17,
18-19]
Chapter 2
[20-21, 22-23,
24-25, 26-27,
28-29]
