NOTES

Chapter 1: How to Build a Universe

1 Protons are so small that: Bodanis, E = mc², p.111.

2 Now pack into that tiny, tiny space: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.254.

3 The consensus seems to be heading for a figure of about 13.7 billion years: New York Times, “Cosmos Sits for Early Portrait, Gives Up Secrets,” 12 Feb. 2003, p.1; US News and World Report, “How Old Is the Universe?,” 18–25 Aug. 1997, pp.34–6.

4 there came the moment known to science as t = 0: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.86.

5 They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean: Lawrence M. Krauss, “Rediscovering Creation,” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p.50.

6 an instrument that might do the job: the Bell antenna: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.153.

7 They had found the edge of the universe: Scientific American, “Echoes from the Big Bang,” Jan. 2001, pp.38–43.

8 Penzias and Wilson’s finding pushed our acquaintance with the visible: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.101.

9 about 1 per cent of the dancing static you see: Gribbin, In the Beginning, p.18.

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

11 or one ten million trillion trillion trillionths: Alan Lightman, “First Birth,” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p.13.

12 He was thirty-two years old and, by his own admission, had never: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.216.

13 The lecture inspired Guth to take an interest: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.89.

14 doubling in size every 10⁻³⁴ seconds: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.242.

15 it changed the universe from something you could hold in your hand to something at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger: New Scientist, “The First Split Second,” 31 March 2001, pp.27–30.

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

17 “Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts”: quoted by Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.14.

18 He makes an analogy with a very large clothing store: Discover, “Why Is There Life?,” Nov. 2000, p.66.

19 with the slightest tweaking of the numbers the universe: Rees, Just Six Numbers, p.147.

20 In the long term, gravity may turn out to be a little too strong: Financial Times, “Riddle of the Flat Universe,” 1–2 July 2000; Economist, “The World is Flat after All,” 20 May 2000, p.97.

21 the galaxies are rushing apart: Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p.26.

22 Scientists just assume that we can’t really be the centre: Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p.47.

23 This visible universe—the universe we know and can talk about: Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p.13.

24 the number of light years to the edge of this larger, unseen universe: Rees, Just Six Numbers, p.147.

Chapter 2: Welcome to the Solar System

1 From the tiniest throbs and wobbles of distant stars: New Yorker, “Among Planets,” 9 Dec. 1996, p.84.

2 “less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground”: Sagan, Cosmos, p.261.

3 In the summer of that year, a young astronomer named James Christy: US Naval Observatory press release, “20th Anniversary of the Discovery of Pluto’s Moon Charon,” 22 June 1998.

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

5 In the words of the astronomer Clark Chapman: quoted on PBS Nova, “Doomsday Asteroid,” first broadcast 29 April 1997.

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

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

8 A few astronomers continue to think there may yet be a Planet X out there: Economist, “X marks the spot,” 16 Oct. 1999, p.83.

9 The Kuiper belt was actually theorized by an astronomer named F. C. Leonard in 1930: Nature, “Almost Planet X,” 24 May 2001, p.423.

10 Only on 11 February 1999 did Pluto return to the outside lane: Economist, “Pluto Out in the Cold,” 6 Feb. 1999, p.85.

11 as of early December 2002 had found over six hundred additional Trans-Neptunian Objects: Nature, “Seeing Double in the Kuiper Belt,” 12 Dec. 2002, p.618.

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

13 now flying away from us at about 56,000 kilometres an hour: PBS News Hour transcript, 20 Aug. 2002.

14 but all the visible stuff in it … fills less than a trillionth of the available space: Natural History, “Between the Planets,” Oct. 2001, p.20.

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

16 we won’t reach the Oort cloud for another … ten thousand years: Sagan and Druyan, Comet, p.198.

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

18 so the comets drift in a stately manner, moving at only about 220 miles an hour: Sagan and Druyan, Comet, p.195.

19 The most perfect vacuum ever created by humans is not as empty as the emptiness of interstellar space: Ball, H₂O, p.15.

20 Our nearest neighbour in the cosmos, Proxima Centauri: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.1; Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p.39.

21 The average distance between stars: Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, p.251.

22 “If we were randomly inserted into the universe,” Sagan wrote: Sagan, Cosmos, p.5.

Chapter 3: The Reverend Evans’s Universe

1 releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns: Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p.37.

2 “It’s like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once”: Robert Evans, interviewed Hazelbrook, Australia, 2 Sept. 2001.

3 devotes a passage to him in a chapter on autistic savants: Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, p.189.

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

5 refused to be left alone with him: Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p.125.

6 On at least one occasion Zwicky threatened to kill Baade: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.18.

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

8 enough to make the biggest bang in the universe: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.171.

9 hasn’t been verified yet: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.174.

10 “one of the most prescient documents in the history of physics and astronomy”: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.174.

11 “he did not understand the laws of physics”: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.175.

12 wouldn’t attract serious attention for nearly four decades: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.18.

13 Only about six thousand stars are visible to the naked eye: Harrison, Darkness at Night, p.3.

14 In 1987 Saul Perlmutter … set out to find a more systematic method of searching for them: BBC Horizon documentary, “From Here to Infinity,” transcript of programme first broadcast 28 Feb. 1999.

15 “The news of such an event travels out at the speed of light, but so does the destructiveness”: interview with John Thorstensen, Hanover, NH, 5 Dec. 2001.

16 Only half a dozen times in recorded history have supernovae been close enough to be visible to the naked eye: note from Evans, 3 Dec. 2002.

17 “cosmologist and controversialist”: Nature, “Fred Hoyle (1915–2001),” 17 Sept. 2001, p.270.

18 humans evolved projecting noses … as a way of keeping cosmic pathogens from falling into them: Gribbin and Cherfas, The First Chimpanzee, p.190.

19 continually creating new matter as it went: Rees, Just Six Numbers, p.75.

20 100 million degrees or more: Bodanis, E = mc², p.187.

21 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system: Asimov, Atom, p.294.

22 In just 200 million years, possibly less: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.6.

23 Most of the lunar material, it is thought, came from the Earth’s crust, not its core: New Scientist supplement, “Firebirth,” 7 Aug. 1999, n.p.

24 in fact it was first proposed in the 1940s by Reginald Daly of Harvard: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p.38.

25 the Earth might well have frozen over permanently: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.144.

Chapter 4: The Measure of Things

1 In the course of a long and productive career: Sagan, Comet, p.52.

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

3 Hooke … claimed that he had solved the problem already: Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p.219.

4 and rubbed it around “betwixt my eye and the bone”: quoted by Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.106.

5 but then told no-one about it for twenty-seven years: Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, p.538.

6 Even the great German mathematician Gottfried von Leibniz: Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, p.546.

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

8 “proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.69.

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

10 He was to be paid instead in copies of The History of Fishes: Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p.36.

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

12 The Earth was 43 kilometres stouter when measured equatorially than when measured from top to bottom around the poles: Asimov, Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos, p.86.

13 Unluckier still was Guillaume le Gentil: Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.134.

14 Mason and Dixon sent a note to the Royal Society: Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p.141.

15 “said to have been born in a coal mine”: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 12, p.1302.

16 We know that in 1772: American Heritage, “Mason and Dixon: Their Line and its Legend,” Feb. 1964, pp.23–9.

17 For convenience, Hutton had assumed: Jungnickel and McCormmach, Cavendish, p.449.

18 it was Michell to whom he turned for instruction in making telescopes: Calder, The Comet Is Coming!, p.71.

19 to a “degree bordering on disease”: Jungnickel and McCormmach, Cavendish, p.306.

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

21 he also foreshadowed “the work of Kelvin and G. H. Darwin on the effect of tidal friction”: Crowther, Scientists of the Industrial Revolution, pp.214–15.

22 At the heart of the machine were two 350-pound lead balls: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 3, p.1261.

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

Chapter 5: The Stone-Breakers

1 Hutton was by all accounts a man of the keenest insights and liveliest conversation: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 10, pp.354–6.

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

3 He became a leading member of a society called the Oyster Club: McPhee, Basin and Range, p.99.

4 quotations from French sources, still in the original French: Gould, Time’s Arrow, p.66.

5 A third volume was so unenticing that it wasn’t published until 1899: Oldroyd, Thinking About the Earth, pp.96–7.

6 Even Charles Lyell … couldn’t get through it: Schneer (ed.), Toward a History of Geology, p.128.

7 In the winter of 1807: Geological Society papers, A Brief History of the Geological Society of London.

8 The members met twice a month from November until June: Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy, p.25.

9 As even a Murchison supporter conceded: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.28.

10 In 1794 he was implicated in a faintly lunatic-sounding conspiracy: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.39.

11 known ever since as Parkinson’s disease: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 15, pp.314–15.

12 because his mother was convinced that Scots were feckless drunks: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.26.

13 Once Mrs. Buckland found herself being shaken awake: Annan, The Dons, p.27.

14 His other slight peculiarity: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.30.

15 Often when lost in thought: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.202.

16 but it was Lyell most people read: Schneer (ed.), Toward a History of Geology, p.139.

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

18 “Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence”: quoted in Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, p.167.

19 He failed to explain … how mountain ranges were formed: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.135.

20 “the refrigeration of the globe”: Gould, Ever since Darwin, p.151.

21 He rejected the notion that animals and plants suffered sudden annihilations: Stanley, Extinction, p.5.

22 “one yet saw it partially through his eyes”: quoted in Schneer (ed.), Toward a History of Geology, p.288.

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

24 with the perky name of J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.190.

25 Lyell originally intended to employ “-synchronous” for his endings: Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p.305.

26 these number in the “tens of dozens”: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.50.

27 Rocks are divided into quite separate units: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p.200.

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

29 When Buckland speculated: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.149.

30 The most well known early attempt: Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p.185.

31 “most thinking people accepted the idea that the earth was young”: cited in Gould, Time’s Arrow, p.114.

32 “No geologist of any nationality whose work was taken seriously”: Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy, p.42.

33 Even the Reverend Buckland: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.192.

34 somewhere between 75,000 and 168,000 years old: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.105 and Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, pp.246–7.

35 Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald: Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p.335.

36 The German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.78.

37 and written (in French and English) a dozen papers in pure and applied mathematics of such dazzling originality that he had to publish them anonymously: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.79.

38 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

1 who described it at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.4.

2 The cause of this froth was a strange assertion by the great French naturalist the Comte de Buffon: Kastner, A Species of Eternity, p.123.

3 A Dutchman named Corneille de Pauw: Kastner, A Species of Eternity, p.124.

4 in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species of Living and Fossil Elephants: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.15.

5 Jefferson for one couldn’t abide the thought that whole species would ever be permitted to vanish: Simpson, Fossils and the History of Life, p.7.

6 On the evening of 5 January 1796, he was sitting in a coaching inn in Somerset: Harrington, Dance of the Continents, p.175.

7 “The whys and wherefores cannot come within the Province of a Mineral Surveyor”: Lewis, The Dating Game, pp.17–18.

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

9 In 1806 the Lewis and Clark expedition passed through the Hell Creek formation: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.5.

10 She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue-twister: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.3.

11 The plesiosaur alone took her ten years of patient excavation: Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, p.127.

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

13 the name was actually suggested to Buckland by his friend Dr. James Parkinson: Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p.31.

14 Eventually he was forced to sell most of his collection to pay off his debts: Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p.34.

15 the world’s first theme park: Fortey, Life, p.214.

16 he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs and other parts: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.133.

17 Once his wife returned home to find a freshly deceased rhinoceros filling the front hallway: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.200.

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

19 the one thing they most emphatically were not was lizards: Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies, p.22.

20 dinosaurs constitute not one but two orders of reptiles: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.33.

21 He was the only person Charles Darwin was ever known to hate: Nature, “Owen’s Parthian shot,” 12 July 2001, p.123.

22 referred to his father’s “lamentable coldness of heart”: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.321.

23 Huxley was leafing through a new edition of Churchill’s Medical Directory: Clark, The Huxleys, p.45.

24 His deformed spine was removed and sent to the Royal College of Surgeons: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.291.

25 “not quite as original as it appeared”: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, pp.261–2.

26 he became the driving force behind the creation of London’s Natural History Museum: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.30.

27 Before Owen, museums were designed primarily for … the elite: Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum, p.24.

28 He even proposed, very radically, to put informative labels on each display: Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum, p.98.

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

30 he managed to win them over by repeatedly taking out and replacing his false teeth: Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, p.100.

31 it was an affront that he would never forget: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.73.

32 increased the number of known dinosaur species in America from nine to almost one hundred and fifty: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.93.

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

34 Between them they managed to “discover” a species called Uintatheres anceps no fewer than twenty-two times: Psihoyos and Knoebber, Hunting Dinosaurs, p.16.

35 mercifully obliterated by a German bomb in the Blitz: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.325.

36 much of it was taken to New Zealand by his son Walter: Newsletter of the Geological Society of New Zealand, “Gideon Mantell—The New Zealand Connection,” April 1992; New Zealand Geographic, “Holy Incisors! What a Treasure!” April-June 2000, p.17.

37 hence the name: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.151.

38 He calculated that the Earth was 89 million years old: Lewis, The Dating Game, p.37.

39 Such was the confusion: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.173.

Chapter 7: Elemental Matters

1 could make himself invisible: Ball, H₂O, p.125.

2 An ounce of phosphorus retailed for 6 guineas: Durant, Age of Louis XIV, p.516.

3 and got credit for none of them: Strathern, Mendeleyev’s Dream, p.193.

4 which is why we ended up with two branches of chemistry: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p.14.

5 perhaps £12 million in today’s money: White, Rivals, p.63.

6 the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of his bosses: Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry, p.92.

7 jour de bonheur: Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus, p.366.

8 It was in such a capacity in 1780 that Lavoisier made some dismissive remarks: Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry, pp.95–6.

9 failed to uncover a single one: Strathern, Mendeleyev’s Dream, p.239.

10 taken away and melted down for scrap: Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry, p.124.

11 “a highly pleasurable thrilling”: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.139.

12 Theatres put on “laughing gas evenings”: Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, p.76.

13 What Brown noticed: Silver, The Ascent of Science, p.201.

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

15 a diameter of 0.00000008 centimetres: Asimov, The History of Physics, p.501.

16 Later, for no special reason: Ball, H₂O, p.139.

17 Luck was not always with the Mendeleyevs: Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry, p.312.

18 There he was a competent but not terribly outstanding chemist: Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry, p.111.

19 this was an idea whose time had not quite yet come: Carey (ed.), The Faber Book of Science, p.155.

20 chemistry really is just a matter of counting: Ball, H₂O, p.139.

21 “the most elegant organizational chart ever devised”: Krebs, The History and Use of our Earth’s Chemical Elements, p.23.

22 “120 or so” known elements: from a review in Nature, “Mind over Matter?,” by Gautum R. Desiraju, 26 Sept. 2002.

23 “purely speculative”: Heiserman, Exploring Chemical Elements and their Compounds, p.33.

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

25 He never accepted the revised figures: Lewis, The Dating Game, p.55.

26 “Appropriately … it is an unstable element”: Strathern, Mendeleyev’s Dream, p.294.

27 featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its “Radio-active mineral springs”: advertisement in Time magazine, 3 Jan. 1927, p.24.

28 It wasn’t banned in consumer products until 1938: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, p.133.

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

Chapter 8: Einstein’s Universe

1 a deck of cards: Ebbing, General Chemistry, p.755.

2 his courses attracted an average of slightly over one student a semester: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.106.

3 which dazzlingly elucidated the thermodynamic principles of, well, nearly everything: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.109.

4 In essence, what Gibbs did was show that thermodynamics didn’t apply simply to heat and energy: Snow, The Physicists, p.7.

5 Gibbs’s Equilibrium has been called “the Principia of thermodynamics”: Kevles, The Physicists, p.33.

6 he came to the United States with his family as an infant and grew up in a mining camp in California’s gold rush country: Kevles, The Physicists, pp.27–8.

7 “The speed of light turned out to be the same in all directions and at all seasons”: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.64.

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

9 Michelson counted himself among those who believed that the work of science was nearly at an end: Nature, “Physics from the Inside,” 12 July 2001, p.121.

10 of which three, according to C. P. Snow, “were among the greatest in the history of physics”: Snow, The Physicists, p.101.

11 His very first paper, on the physics of fluids in drinking straws: Bodanis, E = mc², p.6.

12 only to discover that the quietly productive J. Willard Gibbs in Connecticut had done that work as well: Boorse et al., The Atomic Scientists, p.142.

13 is one of the most extraordinary scientific papers ever published: Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.193.

14 It was … as if Einstein “had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided”: Snow, The Physicists, p.101.

15 you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7×10¹⁸ joules of potential energy: Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, p.172.

16 Even a uranium bomb … releases less than 1 per cent of the energy it could release: Bodanis, E = mc², p.77.

17 “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied. “It’s so seldom I have one”: Nature, “In the Eye of the Beholder,” 21 March 2002, p.264.

18 “it is undoubtedly the highest intellectual achievement of humanity”: Boorse et al., The Atomic Scientists, p.53.

19 According to Einstein himself, he was simply sitting in a chair when the problem of gravity occurred to him: Bodanis, E = mc², p.204.

20 the publication in early 1917 of a paper entitled “Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity”: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.36.

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

22 Crouch was hopelessly out of his depth, and got nearly everything wrong: Bodanis, E = mc², p.215.

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

24 and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.37.

25 a baseball thrown at 160 kilometres an hour will pick up 0.000000000002 grams of mass on its way to home plate: Brockman and Matson, How Things Are, p.263.

26 However, to turn to Bodanis again, we all commonly encounter other kinds of relativity: Bodanis, E = mc², p.83.

27 “the ultimate sagging mattress”: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.55.

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

29 and Edwin enjoyed a wealth of physical endowments, too: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.423.

30 At a single high-school track meeting: Christianson, Edwin Hubble, p.33.

31 One Harvard computer, Annie Jump Cannon, used her repetitive acquaintance with the stars to devise a system of stellar classifications: Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.258.

32 they are elderly stars that have moved past their “main sequence phase”: Ferguson, Measuring the Universe, pp.166–7.

33 They could be used as standard candles: Ferguson, Measuring the Universe, p.166.

34 was developing his seminal theory that dark patches on the Moon were caused by swarms of seasonally migrating insects: Moore, Fireside Astronomy, p.63.

35 In 1923 he showed that a puff of distant gossamer in the Andromeda constellation known as M31 wasn’t a gas cloud at all: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.45; Natural History, “Delusions of Centrality,” Dec. 2002-Jan. 2003, pp.28–32.

36 The wonder, as Stephen Hawking has noted, is that no-one had hit on the idea of the expanding universe before: Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, pp.71–2.

37 In 1936 Hubble produced a popular book called The Realm of the Nebulae: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.13.

38 Half a century later the whereabouts of the century’s greatest astronomer remain unknown: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.28.

Chapter 9: The Mighty Atom

1 “All things are made of atoms”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.4.

2 45 billion billion molecules: Gribbin, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science, p.250.

3 up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p.127.

4 Atoms themselves, however, go on practically for ever: Rees, Just Six Numbers, p.96.

5 If you wanted to see … a paramecium swimming in a drop of water: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, pp.4–5.

6 “We might as well attempt to introduce a new planet into the solar system”: Boorstin, The Discoverers, p.679.

7 In 1826, the French chemist P. J. Pelletier travelled to Manchester: Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p.260.

8 a confused Pelletier, upon beholding the great man, stammered: Holmyard, Makers of Chemistry, p.222.

9 forty thousand people viewed the coffin and the funeral cortège stretched for two miles: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 5, p.433.

10 For a century after Dalton made his proposal: von Baeyer, Taming the Atom, p.17.

11 it was said to have played a part in the suicide of … Ludwig Boltzmann: Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, p.3.

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

13 “Had she taken a bullfighter”: quoted in Cropper, Great Physicists, p.259.

14 It was a feeling Rutherford would have understood: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.317.

15 would give up halfway through and tell the students to work it out for themselves: Wilson, Rutherford, p.174.

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

17 He was one of the first … to see: Wilson, Rutherford, p.208.

18 “Why use radio?”: quoted in Cropper, Great Physicists, p.328.

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

20 gave it up when he was persuaded by a senior colleague that radio had little future: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.94.

21 Some physicists thought that atoms might be cube-shaped: Asimov, The History of Physics, p.551.

22 The number of protons is what gives an atom its chemical identity: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.90.

23 Add or subtract a neutron or two and you get an isotope: Atkins, The Periodic Kingdom, p.106.

24 only one-millionth of a billionth of the full volume of the atom: Gribbin, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science, p.35.

25 but a fly many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.245.

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

27 “Because atomic behaviour is so unlike ordinary experience”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.117.

28 the delay in discovery was probably a very good thing: Boorse et al., The Atomic Scientists, p.338.

29 “I do not even know what a matrix is”: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.269.

30 This isn’t a matter of simply needing more precise instruments: Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.288.

31 until it is observed an electron must be regarded as being “at once everywhere and nowhere”: David H. Freedman, “Quantum Liaisons,” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p.137.

32 “a person who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what had been said”: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.109.

33 “Don’t try”: Von Baeyer, Taming the Atom, p.43.

34 The cloud itself is essentially just a zone of statistical probability: Ebbing, General Chemistry, p.295.

35 “an area of the universe that our brains just aren’t wired to understand”: Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p.62.

36 “things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.33.

37 where matter could pop into existence from nothing at all: Alan Lightman, “First Birth,” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p.13.

38 It is as if … you had two identical pool balls: Lawrence Joseph, “Is Science Common Sense?” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, pp.42–3.

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

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

41 Scientists have dealt with this problem … “by not thinking about it”: David H. Freedman, “Quantum Liaisons,” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p.141.

42 The weak nuclear force … is ten billion billion billion times stronger than gravity: Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p.297.

43 The grip of the strong force reaches out only to about one-hundred-thousandth of the diameter of an atom: Asimov, Atom, p.258.

44 He devoted the rest of his life: Snow, The Physicists, p.89.

Chapter 10: Getting the Lead Out

1 Among the many symptoms associated with over-exposure are blindness, insomnia, kidney failure, hearing loss, cancer: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.88.

2 “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard”: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.92.

3 In fact, Midgley knew only too well the perils of lead poisoning: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.92.

4 One leak from a refrigerator at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929 killed more than a hundred people: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.96.

5 A single kilogram of CFCs can capture and annihilate 70,000 kilograms of atmospheric ozone: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, p.62.

6 A single CFC molecule is about ten thousand times more efficient at exacerbating greenhouse effects than a molecule of carbon dioxide: Science, “The Ascent of Atmospheric Sciences,” 13 Oct. 2000, p.299.

7 His death was itself memorably unusual: Nature, 27 Sept. 2001, p.364.

8 Up to this time, the oldest reliable dates went back no further than the First Dynasty in Egypt: Willard Libby, “Radiocarbon Dating,” from Nobel Lecture, 12 Dec. 1960.

9 After eight half-lives, only 0.39 per cent of the original radioactive carbon remains: Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age, p.58.

10 “every raw radiocarbon date you read today is given as too young by around 3 per cent”: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.174.

11 it is like miscounting by a dollar when counting to a thousand: Flannery, The Future Eaters, p.151.

12 Among the more dubious are dates just around the time that people first came to the Americas: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, pp.174–5.

13 the long-running debate over whether syphilis originated in the New World or the Old: Science, “Can Genes Solve the Syphilis Mystery?,” 11 May 2001, p.109.

14 Unfortunately, he now met yet another formidable impediment to acceptance: Lewis, The Dating Game, p.204.

15 It was this that eventually led him to create a sterile laboratory: Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p.58.

16 “a figure that stands unchanged 50 years later”: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.173.

17 In one such study, a doctor who had no specialized training in chemical pathology: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.94.

18 about 90 per cent of it appeared to come from car exhaust pipes: Nation, “The Secret History of Lead,” 20 March 2000.

19 The notion became the foundation of ice core studies, on which much modern climatological work is based: Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p.60.

20 Ethyl executives allegedly offered to endow a chair at Caltech “if Patterson was sent packing”: Nation, “The Secret History of Lead,” 20 March 2000.

21 Almost immediately lead levels in the blood of Americans fell by 80 per cent: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.169.

22 Americans alive today each have about 625 times more lead in their blood than people did a century ago: Nation, 20 March 2000.

23 The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow, quite legally, by about a hundred thousand tonnes a year: Green, Water, Ice and Stone, p.258.

24 “44 years after most of Europe”: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.191.

25 continued to contend “that research has failed to show that leaded gasoline poses a threat to human health”: McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, p.191.

26 will almost certainly be around and devouring ozone long after you and I have shuffled off: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, pp.110–11.

27 Worse, we are still introducing huge amounts of CFCs into the atmosphere every year: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, p.63.

28 Two recent popular books on the history of the dating of the Earth actually manage to misspell his name: The books are Mysteries of Terra Firma and The Dating Game, both of which make his name “Claire.” (Since this note first appeared, I have received a rather severe rebuke from the author of the latter book, Cherry Lewis, informing me that her choice of spelling was intentional and arose from correspondence she had had with Patterson’s widow. Except for the other cited book, Lewis’s choice of spelling accords with no other published sources I can find, including Patterson’s many obituaries in leading journals—which were, after all, literally the last word on the man and his name. Nonetheless I am happy to accept that Ms. Lewis’s variant spelling of Patterson’s name was done intentionally and I unreservedly apologize to her for any dismay caused.)

29 made the additional, rather astounding error of thinking Patterson was a woman: Nature, “The Rocky Road to Dating the Earth,” 4 Jan. 2001, p.20.

Chapter 11: Muster Mark’s Quarks

1 In 1911, a British scientist named C. T. R. Wilson: Cropper, Great Physicists, p.325.

2 “if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist”: quoted in Cropper, Great Physicists, p.403.

3 can do 47,000 laps around a 7-kilometre tunnel in under a second: Discover, “Gluons,” July 2000, p.68.

4 Even the most sluggish: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.121.

5 In 1998, Japanese observers reported that neutrinos do have mass: Economist, “Heavy Stuff,” 13 June 1998, p.82; National Geographic, “Unveiling the Universe,” Oct. 1999, p.36.

6 Breaking up atoms … is easy: Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p.48.

7 CERN’s new Large Hadron Collider … will achieve 14 trillion volts of energy: Economist, “Cause for conCERN,” 28 Oct. 2000, p.75.

8 “dotted along the circumference by a series of disappointed small towns”: letter from Jeff Guinn.

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

10 A particle accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois … cost $260 million: Science, 8 Feb. 2002, p.942.

11 Today the particle count is well over 150: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.120; Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.39.

12 Some people think there are particles called tachyons: Nature, 27 Sept. 2001, p.354.

13 “which are themselves universes at the next level and so on forever”: Sagan, Cosmos, pp.265–6.

14 “The charged pion and antipion decay respectively”: Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, p.163.

15 “to restore some economy to the multitude of hadrons”: Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, p.165.

16 wanted to call these new basic particles partons: von Baeyer, Taming the Atom, p.17.

17 Eventually out of all this emerged what is called the Standard Model: Economist, “New realities?,” 7 Oct. 2000, p.95; Nature, “The Mass Question,” 28 Feb. 2002, pp.969–70.

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

19 “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.298–9.

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

21 “So we are stuck with a theory”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.39.

22 This postulates that all those little things like quarks: Science News, 22 Sept. 2001, p.185.

23 tiny enough to pass for point particles: Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p.168.

24 “The heterotic string consists of a closed string that has two types of vibrations”: Kaku, Hyperspace, p.158.

25 String theory has further spawned something called M theory: Scientific American, “The Universe’s Unseen Dimensions,” Aug. 2000, pp.62–9; Science News, “When Branes Collide,” 22 Sept. 2001, pp.184–5.

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

27 it is “almost impossible for the non-scientist to discriminate between the legitimately weird and the outright crackpot”: Nature, 27 Sept. 2001, p.354.

28 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,” 9 Nov. 2002; Economist, “Publish and Perish,” 16 Nov. 2002, p.75.

29 Karl Popper … once suggested that there may not in fact be an ultimate theory: Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p.184.

30 “we do not seem to be coming to the end of our intellectual resources”: Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p.187.

31 Hubble calculated that the universe was about two billion years old: US News and World Report, “How Old Is the Universe?,” 25 Aug. 1997, p.34.

32 a new age for the universe of between seven billion and twenty billion years: Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p.91.

33 In the years that followed there erupted a dispute that would run and run: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.268.

34 In February 2003, a team from NASA: New York Times, “Cosmos Sits for Early Portrait, Gives up Secrets,” 12 Feb. 2003, p.1.

35 “a mountain of theory built on a molehill of evidence”: Economist, “Queerer than we can suppose,” 5 Jan. 2002, p.58.

36 “may reflect the paucity of the data rather than the excellence of the theory”: National Geographic, “Unveiling the Universe,” Oct. 1999, p.25.

37 what they really mean: Goldsmith, The Astronomers, p.82.

38 “two-thirds of the universe is still missing from the balance sheet”: Economist, “Dark for Dark Business,” 5 Jan. 2002, p.51.

39 The theory is that empty space isn’t so empty at all: PBS Nova, “Runaway Universe,” transcript of programme first broadcast 21 Nov. 2000.

40 the one thing that resolves all this is Einstein’s cosmological constant: Economist, “Dark for Dark Business,” 5 Jan. 2002, p.51.

Chapter 12: The Earth Moves

1 In a tone that all but invited the reader to join him in a tolerant chuckle: Hapgood, Earth’s Shifting Crust, p.29.

2 they posited ancient “land bridges” wherever they were needed: Simpson, Fossils and the History of Life, p.98.

3 Even land bridges couldn’t explain some things: Gould, Ever since Darwin, p.163.

4 full of “numerous grave theoretical difficulties”: Encylopaedia Britannica, vol. 6, p.418.

5 One reviewer there fretted … that students might actually come to believe them: Lewis, The Dating Game, p.182.

6 about half of those present now embraced the idea of continental drift: Hapgood, Earth’s Shifting Crust, p.31.

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

8 Interestingly, oil company geologists had known for years: McPhee, Basin and Range, p.175.

9 Aboard this vessel was a fancy new depth sounder called a fathometer: McPhee, Basin and Range, p.187.

10 seamounts that he called guyots after an earlier Princeton geologist: Harrington, Dance of the Continents, p.208.

11 “probably the most significant paper in the earth sciences ever to be denied publication”: Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, pp.131–2.

12 Well into the 1970s: Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p.141.

13 one American geologist in eight still didn’t believe in plate tectonics: McPhee, Basin and Range, p.198.

14 Today we know that the Earth’s surface is made up of eight to twelve big plates: Simpson, Fossils and the History of Life, p.113.

15 The connections … were found to be infinitely more complex than anyone had imagined: McPhee, Assembling California, pp.202–8.

16 at about the speed a fingernail grows: Vogel, Naked Earth, p.19.

17 one-tenth of 1 per cent of the Earth’s history: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.44.

18 It is thought … that tectonics is an important part of the planet’s organic well-being: Trefil, Meditations at 10,000 Feet, p.181.

19 suggesting that there may well be a relationship between the history of rocks and the history of life: Science, “Inconstant Ancient Seas and Life’s Path,” 8 Nov. 2002, p.1165.

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

21 a habit of appearing inconveniently where they shouldn’t and failing to be where they ought: Simpson, Fossils and the History of Life, p.115.

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

23 Alfred Wegener never lived to see his ideas vindicated: Kunzig, The Restless Sea, p.51.

24 One of his students was a bright young fellow named Walter Alvarez: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p.7.

Chapter 13: Bang!

1 In 1912, a man drilling a well for the town water supply reported bringing up 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.

2 Virtually the whole town turned out: Des Moines Register, 30 June 1979.

3 “Very occasionally we get people coming in and asking where they should go to see the crater”: Interview with Schlapkohl, Manson, Iowa, 18 June 2001.

4 The leading early investigator, G. K. Gilbert of Columbia University: Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p.38.

5 Gilbert conducted these experiments not in a laboratory at Columbia but in a hotel room: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p.37.

6 “At the time we started, only slightly more than a dozen of these things had ever been discovered”: transcript from BBC Horizon documentary, “New Asteroid Danger,” p.4; programme first transmitted 18 March 1999.

7 He called them asteroids—Latin for “starlike”: Science News, “A Rocky Bicentennial,” 28 July 2001, pp.61–3.

8 it was finally tracked down in 2000 after being missing for eighty-nine years: Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p.150.

9 As of July 2001, 26,000 asteroids had been named and identified: Science News, “A Rocky Bicentennial,” 28 July 2001, pp.61–3.

10 down which we are cruising at over 100,000 kilometres an hour: Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p.147.

11 “all of which are capable of colliding with the Earth and all of which are moving on slightly different courses through the sky at different rates”: transcript from BBC Horizon documentary “New Asteroid Danger,” p.5; first transmitted 18 March 1999.

12 such near misses probably happen two or three times a week and go unnoticed: New Yorker, “Is This the End?,” 27 Jan. 1997, pp.44–52.

13 Every year the Earth accumulates some 30,000 tonnes of “cosmic spherules”: Vernon, Beneath our Feet, p.191.

14 “Well, they were very charming, very persuasive”: telephone interview with Asaro, 10 March 2002.

15 a Northwestern University astrophysicist named Ralph B. Baldwin had suggested such a possibility in an article in Popular Astronomy magazine: Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma, p.184.

16 In 1956 a professor at Oregon State University, M. W. de Laubenfels: Peebles, Asteroids: A History, p.170.

17 may have been the cause of an earlier event known as the Frasnian extinction: Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p.107.

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

19 even while conceding in a newspaper interview that he had no actual evidence of it: Boston Globe, “Dinosaur Extinction Theory Backed,” 16 Dec. 1985.

20 continued to believe that the extinction of the dinosaurs was in no way related to an asteroid or cometary impact: Peebles, Asteroids: A History, p.175.

21 a big part of the work you do is to evaluate Manure Management Plans: Iowa Department of Natural Resources Publication, Iowa Geology 1999, Number 24.

22 “Suddenly we were at the centre of things”: interview with Anderson and Witzke, Iowa City, 15 June 2001.

23 One of those moments came at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in 1985: Boston Globe, “Dinosaur Extinction Theory Backed,” 16 Dec. 1985.

24 The formation had been found by Pemex, the Mexican oil company, in 1952: Peebles, Asteroids: A History, pp.177–8; Washington Post, “Incoming,” 19 April 1998.

25 “I remember harboring some strong initial doubts about the efficacy of such an event”: Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, p.162.

26 “Jupiter will swallow these comets up without so much as a burp”: quoted by Peebles, Asteroids: A History, p.196.

27 One fragment, known as Nucleus G, struck with the force of about six million megatonnes: Peebles, Asteroids: A History, p.202.

28 Shoemaker was killed instantly, his wife injured: Peebles, Asteroids: A History, p.204.

29 nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead: Anderson, Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Iowa Geology 1999, “Iowa’s Mansion Impact Structure.”

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

31 analysed helium isotopes from sediments left from the later KT impact and concluded that it affected the Earth’s climate for about ten thousand years: Arizona Republic, “Impact Theory Gains New Supporters,” 3 March 2001.

32 First, as John S. Lewis notes, our missiles are not designed for space work: Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p.215.

33 Tom Gehrels … thinks that even a year’s warning would probably be insufficient: New York Times magazine, “The Asteroids Are Coming! The Asteroids Are Coming!,” 28 July 1996, pp.17–19.

34 Shoemaker-Levy 9 had been orbiting Jupiter in a fairly conspicuous manner since 1929, but it was over half a century before anyone noticed: Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p.168.

Chapter 14: The Fire Below

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

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

3 “far better than we understand the interior of the earth”: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.60.

4 The distance from the surface of Earth to the middle is 6,370 kilometres: Williams and Montaigne, Surviving Galeras, p.78.

5 A modest fellow, he never referred to the scale by his own name: Ozima, The Earth, p.49.

6 It rises exponentially: Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, p.33.

7 sixty thousand people were dead: Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, p.52.

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

9 the potential economic cost has been put as high as $7 trillion: McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World, p.130.

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

11 The project became known, all but inevitably, as the Mohole: Vogel, Naked Earth, p.37.

12 “like trying to drill a hole … using a strand of spaghetti”: Valley News, “Drilling the Ocean Floor for Earth’s Deep Secrets,” 21 August 1995.

13 the crust of the Earth represents only about 0.3 per cent of the planet’s volume: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.73.

14 We know a little bit about the mantle from what are known as kimberlite pipes: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, pp.16–18.

15 Scientists are generally agreed: Scientific American, “Sculpting the Earth from Inside Out,” March 2001, pp.40–7, and New Scientist, “Journey to the Centre of the Earth,” supplement, 14 Oct. 2000, p.1.

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

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

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

19 “then had suddenly found out about wind”: Vogel, Naked Earth, p.53.

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

21 82 per cent of the Earth’s volume and 65 per cent of its mass: Nature, “The Earth’s Mantle,” 2 Aug. 2001, pp.501–6.

22 something over three million times those found at the surface: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.50.

23 during the age of the dinosaurs, it was up to three times as strong as it is now: New Scientist, “Dynamo Support,” 10 March 2001, p.27.

24 37 million years appears to be the longest stretch: New Scientist, “Dynamo Support,” 10 March 2001, p.27.

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

26 “Geologists and geophysicists rarely go to the same meetings”: Vogel, Naked Earth, p.139.

27 The seismologists resolutely based their conclusions on the behaviour of Hawaiian volcanoes: Fisher et al., Volcanoes, p.24.

28 It was the biggest landslide in human history: Thompson, Volcano Cowboys, p.118.

29 with the force of five hundred Hiroshimasized atomic bombs: Williams and Montaigne, Surviving Galeras, p.7.

30 Fifty-seven people were killed: Fisher et al., Volcanoes, p.12.

31 “only shake my head in wonder”: Williams and Montaigne, Surviving Galeras, p.151.

32 An airliner … reported being pelted with rocks: Thompson, Volcano Cowboys, p.123.

33 Yet Yakima had no volcano emergency procedures: Fisher et al., Volcanoes, p.16.

Chapter 15: Dangerous Beauty

1 In 1943 at Paricutín in Mexico: Smith, The Weather, p.112.

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

3 a bang that reverberated around the world for nine days: Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p.152.

4 The last supervolcano eruption on Earth was at Toba: McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World, p.104.

5 there is some evidence to suggest that for the next twenty thousand years the total number of people on Earth was never more than a few thousand: McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World, p.107.

6 “It may not feel like it, but you’re standing on the largest active volcano in the world”: interview with Paul Doss, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 16 June 2001.

7 as was made devastatingly evident on the night of 17 August 1959, at a place called Hebgen Lake: Smith and Siegel, Windows into the Earth, pp.5–6.

8 as little as a single molecule in ideal conditions: Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve, p.12.

9 Meanwhile, scientists were finding even hardier microbes: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.275.

10 As NASA scientist Jay Bergstralh has put it: PBC NewsHour transcript, 20 Aug. 2002.

Chapter 16: Lonely Planet

1 no less than 99.5 per cent of the world’s habitable space by volume: New York Times Book Review, “Where Leviathan Lives,” 20 April 1997, p.9.

2 water is about 1,300 times heavier than air: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.51.

3 your veins would collapse and your lungs would compress to the approximate dimensions of a Coke can: New Scientist, “Into the Abyss,” 31 March 2001.

4 the pressure is equivalent to being squashed beneath a stack of fourteen loaded cement trucks: New Yorker, “The Pictures,” 15 Feb. 2000, p.47.

5 Because we are made largely of water ourselves: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.68.

6 “humans may be more like whales and dolphins than had been expected”: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.69.

7 “all that is left in the suit are his bones and some rags of flesh”: Haldane, What Is Life?, p.188.

8 Ashcroft relates a story concerning the directors of a new tunnel under the Thames who held a celebratory banquet: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.59.

9 When roused, Haldane explained that he had found himself disrobing and assumed it was bedtime: Norton, Stars beneath the Sea, p.111.

10 Haldane’s gift to diving was to work out the rest intervals necessary to manage an ascent from the depths without getting the bends: Haldane, What Is Life?, p.202.

11 his blood saturation level had reached 56 per cent: Norton, Stars beneath the Sea, p.105.

12 “But is it oxyhaemoglobin or carboxyhaemoglobin?”: quoted in Norton, Stars beneath the Sea, p.121.

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

14 the younger Haldane found the First World War “a very enjoyable experience”: Norton, Stars beneath the Sea, p.124.

15 “Almost every experiment … ended with someone having a seizure, bleeding or vomiting”: Norton, Stars beneath the Sea, p.133.

16 Perforated eardrums were quite common: Haldane, What Is Life?, p.192.

17 left Haldane without feeling in his buttocks and lower spine for six years: Haldane, What Is Life?, p.202.

18 It also produced wild mood swings: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.78.

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

20 The cause of the inebriation is even now a mystery: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.79.

21 Even in quite mild weather half the calories you burn go to keep your body warm: Attenborough, The Living Planet, p.39.

22 the portions of the Earth on which we are prepared or able to live are modest indeed: Smith, The Weather, p.40.

23 Had our sun been ten times as massive, it would have exhausted itself after ten million years instead of ten billion: Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p.81.

24 The Sun’s warmth reaches it just two minutes before it touches us: Grinspoon, Venus Revealed, p.9.

25 It appears that during the early years of the solar system Venus was only slightly warmer than the Earth and probably had oceans: National Geographic, “The Planets,” Jan. 1985, p.40.

26 the atmospheric pressure at the surface is ninety times that of Earth: McSween, Stardust to Planets, p.200.

27 The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 4 centimetres a year: Ward and Brownlee, Rare Earth, p.33.

28 The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium: Atkins, The Periodic Kingdom, p.28.

29 discarded the state silver dinner service and replaced it with an aluminium one: Bodanis, The Secret House, p.13.

30 accounting for a very modest 0.048 per cent of the Earth’s crust: Krebs, The History and Use of our Earth’s Chemical Elements, p.148.

31 “If it wasn’t for carbon, life as we know it would be impossible”: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p.126.

32 Of every 200 atoms in your body, 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen, and just 19 are carbon: Snyder, The Etraordínary Chemistry of Ordinary Things, p.24.

33 The degree to which organisms require or tolerate certain elements is a relic of their evolution: Parker, Inscrutable Earth, p.100.

34 Drop a small lump of pure sodium into ordinary water and it will explode with enough force to kill: Snyder, The Extraordinary Chemistry of Ordinary Things, p.42.

35 The Romans also flavoured their wine with lead: Parker, Inscrutable Earth, p.103.

36 The physicist Richard Feynman used to make a joke: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.xix.

Chapter 17: Into the Troposphere

1 Without it, Earth would be a lifeless ball of ice: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.7. p.319 and was discovered in 1902 by a Frenchman in a balloon, Léon-Philippe Teisserenc de Bort: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.56; Nature, “1902 and All That,” 3 Jan. 2002, p.15.

2 it’s from the same Greek root as menopause: Smith, The Weather, p.52.

3 would, at the very least, result in severe cerebral and pulmonary oedemas: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.7.

4 The temperature 10 kilometres up can be minus 57 degrees Celsius: Smith, The Weather, p.25.

5 about eight-millionths of a centimetre, to be precise: Allen, Atmosphere, p.58.

6 if an incoming vehicle hit the thermosphere at too shallow an angle, it could well bounce back into space: Allen, Atmosphere, p.57.

7 Dickinson records how Howard Somervell … “found himself choking to death after a piece of infected flesh came loose and blocked his windpipe”: Dickinson, The Other Side of Everest, p.86.

8 The absolute limit of human tolerance for continuous living appears to be about 5,500 metres: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.8.

9 above 5,500 metres even the most well-adapted women cannot provide a growing foetus with enough oxygen: Attenborough, The Living Planet, p.18.

10 “nearly half a ton has been quietly piled upon us during the night”: quoted by Hamilton-Paterson, The Great Deep, p.177.

11 a typical weather front may consist of 750 million tonnes of cold air pinned beneath a billion tonnes of warmer air: Smith, The Weather, p.50.

12 an amount of energy equivalent to four days’ use of electricity for the whole United States: Junger, The Perfect Storm, p.102.

13 At any one moment 1,800 thunderstorms are in progress around the globe: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.55.

14 Much of our knowledge of what goes on up there is surprisingly recent: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, p.161.

15 a wind blowing at 300 kilometres an hour is not simply ten times stronger than a wind blowing at 30 kilometres an hour, but a hundred times stronger: Bodanis, E = mc², p.68.

16 as much energy as a rich, medium-sized nation … uses in a year: Ball, H₂O, p.51.

17 The impulse of the atmosphere to seek equilibrium was first suspected by Edmond Halley: Science, “The Ascent of Atmospheric Sciences,” 13 Oct. 2000, p.300.

18 Coriolis’s other distinction at the school was to introduce water coolers, which are still known there as Corios: Trefil, The Unexpected Vista, p.24.

19 gives weather systems their curl and sends hurricanes spinning off like tops: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.25.

20 Celsius made boiling point zero and freezing point 100: Trefil, The Unexpected Vista, p.107.

21 Howard is chiefly remembered now for giving cloud types their names in 1803: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 10, pp.51–2.

22 Howard’s system has been much added to over the years: Trefil, Meditations at Sunset, p.62.

23 That seems to have been the source of the expression “to be on cloud nine”: Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, p.252.

24 A fluffy summer cumulus several hundred metres to a side may contain no more than 100–150 litres of water: Trefil, Meditations at Sunset, p.66.

25 Only about 0.035 per cent of the Earth’s fresh water is floating around above us at any moment: Ball, H₂O, p.57.

26 Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely: Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p.8.

27 Even something as large as the Mediterranean would dry out in a thousand years if it were not continually replenished: Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human, p.123.

28 Such an event occurred a little under six million years ago: New Scientist, “Vanished,” 7 Aug. 1999.

29 equivalent to the world’s output of coal for ten years: Trefil, Meditations at 10,000 Feet, p.122.

30 For that reason there tends to be a lag in the official, astronomical start of a season and the actual feeling that that season has started: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.111.

31 As for the question of how anyone could possibly figure out how long it takes a drop of water to get from one ocean to another: National Geographic, “New Eyes on the Oceans,” Oct. 2000, p.101.

32 Altogether there is about twenty thousand times as much carbon locked away in the Earth’s rocks as in the atmosphere: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.7.

33 the “natural” level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: Science, “The Ascent of Atmospheric Sciences,” 13 Oct. 2000, p.303.

Chapter 18: The Bounding Main

1 Imagine trying to live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.100.

2 A potato is 80 per cent water, a cow 74 per cent, a bacterium 75 per cent: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.107.

3 Almost nothing about it can be used to make reliable predictions about the properties of other liquids: Green, Water, Ice and Stone, p.29; Gribbin, In the Beginning, p.174.

4 By the time it is solid, it is almost a tenth more voluminous than it was before: Trefil, Meditations at 10,000 Feet, p.121.

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

6 like the ever-changing partners in a quadrille: Kunzig, The Restless Sea, p.8.

7 At any given moment only 15 per cent of them are actually touching: Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p.152.

8 Within days, the lips vanish “as if amputated, the gums blacken, the nose withers to half its length”: Economist, 13 May 2000, p.4.

9 A typical litre of sea water will contain only about 2.5 teaspoons of common salt: Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p.248.

10 we sweat and cry sea water: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.184.

11 There are 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water on Earth and that is all we’re ever going to get: Green, Water, Ice and Stone, p.25.

12 By 3.8 billion years ago, the oceans had (at least more or less) achieved their present volumes: Ward and Brownlee, Rare Earth, p.360.

13 Altogether the Pacific holds just over half of all the ocean water: Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p.226.

14 we would better call our planet not Earth but Water: Ball, H₂O, p.21.

15 Of the 3 per cent of Earth’s water that is fresh: Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p.6; Scientific American, “On Thin Ice,” Dec. 2002, pp.100–5.

16 Go to the South Pole and you will be standing on over 2 miles of ice, at the North Pole just 15 feet of it: Smith, The Weather, p.62.

17 enough to raise the oceans by a height of 200 feet if it all melted: Schultz, Ice Age Lost, p.75.

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

19 But they sailed across almost 70,000 nautical miles of sea: Hamilton-Paterson, The Great Deep, p.178.

20 female assistants whose jobs were inventively described as “historian and technicist” or “assistant in fish problems”: Norton, Stars beneath the Sea, p.57.

21 Soon afterwards he teamed up with Barton, who came from an even wealthier family: Ballard, The Eternal Darkness, pp.14–15.

22 The sphere had no manoeuvrability … and only the most primitive breathing system: Weinberg, A Fish Caught in Time, p.158; Ballard, The Eternal Darkness, p.17.

23 Whatever it was, nothing like it has been seen by anyone since: Weinberg, A Fish Caught in Time, p.159.

24 In 1958, they did a deal with the US Navy: Broad, The Universe Below, p.54.

25 “We didn’t learn a hell of a lot from it, other than that we could do it”: quoted in Underwater magazine, “The Deepest Spot on Earth,” Winter 1999.

26 There was just one problem: the designers couldn’t find anyone willing to build it: Broad, The Universe Below, p.56.

27 In 1994, 34,000 ice hockey gloves were swept overboard from a Korean cargo ship during a storm in the Pacific: National Geographic, “New Eyes on the Oceans,” Oct. 2000, p.93.

28 humans may have scrutinized “perhaps a millionth or a billionth of the sea’s darkness”: Kunzig, The Restless Sea, p.47.

29 tube worms over 3 metres long, clams 30 centimetres wide, shrimps and mussels in profusion: Attenborough, The Living Planet, p.30.

30 Before this it had been thought that no complex organisms could survive in water warmer than about 54 degrees Celsius: National Geographic, “Deep Sea Vents,” Oct. 2000, p.123.

31 enough to bury every bit of land on the planet to a depth of about 150 metres: Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p.248.

32 it can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean: Vogel, Naked Earth, p.182.

33 Perhaps nothing speaks more clearly of our psychological remoteness from the ocean depths: Engel, The Sea, p.183.

34 When they failed to sink, which was usually, navy gunners riddled them with bullets to let water in: Kunzig, The Restless Sea, pp.294–305.

35 Blue whales will sometimes break off a song, then pick it up again at exactly the same spot six months later: Sagan, Cosmos, p.271.

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

37 there could be as many as 30 million species of animals living in the sea, most still undiscovered: Time, “Call of the Sea,” 5 Oct. 1998, p.60.

38 Even at a depth of nearly 5 kilometres, they found some 3,700 creatures: Kunzig, The Restless Sea, pp.104–5.

39 Altogether less than a tenth of the ocean is considered naturally productive: Economist survey, “The Sea,” 23 May 1998, p.4.

40 it doesn’t even make it into the top fifty among fishing nations: Flannery, The Future Eaters, p.104.

41 Many fishermen “fin” sharks: Audubon, May-June 1998, p.54.

42 and haul behind them nets big enough to hold a dozen jumbo jets: Time, “The Fish Crisis,” 11 Aug. 1997, p.66.

43 “We’re still in the Dark Ages. We just drop a net down and see what comes up”: Economist, “Pollock Overboard,” 6 Jan. 1996, p.22.

44 Perhaps as much as 22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses: Economist survey, “The Sea,” 23 May 1998, p.12.

45 Large areas of the North Sea floor are dragged clean by beam trawlers as many as seven times a year: Outside, Dec. 1997, p.62.

46 sailors scooped them up in baskets: National Geographic, Oct. 1993, p.18.

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

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

49 stocks had still not staged a comeback: Nature, “How Many More Fish in the Sea?,” 17 Oct. 2002, p.662.

50 These days, he notes drily, “fish” is “whatever is left”: Kurlansky, Cod, p.138.

51 “Biologists … estimate that 90 per cent of lobsters are caught within a year after they reach the legal minimum size”: New York Times magazine, “A Tale of Two Fisheries,” 27 Aug. 2000, p.40.

52 As many as 15 million of them may live on the pack ice around Antarctica: BBC Horizon transcript, “Antarctica: The Ice Melts,” p.16.

Chapter 19: The Rise of Life

1 After a few days, the water in the flasks had turned green and yellow in a hearty broth of amino acids: Earth, “Life’s Crucible,” Feb. 1998, p.34.

2 Repeating Miller’s experiments with these more challenging inputs has so far produced only one fairly primitive amino acid: Ball, H₂O, p.209.

3 there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body: Discover, “The Power of Proteins,” Jan. 2002, p.38.

4 the odds against all 200 coming up in a prescribed sequence are 1 in 10²⁶⁰: Crick, Life Itself, p.51.

5 Haemoglobin is only 146 amino acids long, a runt by protein standards: Sulston and Ferry, The Common Thread, p.14.

6 DNA is a whiz at replicating—it can make a copy of itself in seconds: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.63.

7 “If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?”: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p.71.

8 there must have been some kind of cumulative selection process that allowed amino acids to assemble: Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p.45.

9 Lots of molecules in nature get together to form long chains called polymers: Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p.115.

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

11 If you wished to create another living object … you would need really only four principal elements: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.107.

12 “There is nothing special about the substances from which living things are made”: Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p.112.

13 As one leading biology text puts it, with perhaps just a tiny hint of discomfort: Wallace et al., Biology, p.428.

14 Well into the 1950s, it was thought that life was less than six hundred million years old: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.71.

15 “We can only infer from this rapidity that it is not ‘difficult’ for life of bacterial grade to evolve”: New York Times, “Life on Mars? So What?,” 11 Aug. 1996.

16 “life, arising as soon as it could, was chemically destined to be”: Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p.328.

17 when tens of thousands of Australians were startled by a series of sonic booms and the sight of a fireball streaking from east to west across the sky: Sydney Morning Herald, “Aerial Blast Rocks Towns,” 29 Sept. 1969, and “Farmer Finds ‘Meteor Soot’,” 30 Sept. 1969.

18 it was studded with amino acids—seventy-four types in all: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, pp.209–10.

19 A few other carbonaceous chondrites have strayed into the Earth’s path since: Nature, “Life’s Sweet Beginnings?,” 20–27 Dec. 2001, p.857; Earth, “Life’s Crucible,” Feb.1998, p.37.

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

21 “Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug or blob you look at”: Ridley, Genome, p.21.

22 “We can’t be certain that what you are holding once contained living organisms”: interview with Victoria Bennett, Australia National University, Canberra, 21 Aug. 2001.

23 full of noxious vapours from hydrochloric and sulphuric acids powerful enough to eat through clothing and blister skin: Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p.200.

24 “undoubtedly the most important single metabolic innovation in the history of life on the planet”: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.78.

25 Our white blood cells actually use oxygen to kill invading bacteria: note provided by Dr Laurence Smaje.

26 But about 3.5 billion years ago something more emphatic became apparent: Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.186.

27 “This is truly time travelling”: Fortey, Life, p.66.

28 the cyanobacteria at Shark Bay are perhaps the most slowly evolving organisms on Earth: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.212.

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

30 would be nothing more than a sludge of simple microbes: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.128.

31 you could pack a billion into the space occupied by a grain of sand: Brown, The Energy of Life, p.101.

32 Such fossils have been found just once and then no more are known for 500 million years: Ward and Brownlee, Rare Earth, p.10.

33 little more than “bags of chemicals”: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.68.

34 enough, as Carl Sagan noted, to fill eighty books of five hundred pages: Sagan, Cosmos, p.273.

Chapter 20: Small World

1 Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with his that he took to peering critically at every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, p.16.

2 If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.248; Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p.4.

3 Your digestive system alone is host to more than a hundred trillion microbes, of at least four hundred types: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, p.57.

4 A surprising number … have no detectable function at all: National Geographic, “Bacteria,” Aug. 1993, p.51.

5 Every human body consists of about ten quadrillion cells, but is host to about a hundred quadrillion bacterial cells: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.67.

6 We couldn’t survive a day without them: New York Times, “From Birth, Our Body Houses a Microbe Zoo,” 15 Oct. 1996, p. C-3.

7 Algae and other tiny organisms bubbling away in the sea blow out about 150 billion kilograms of the stuff every year: Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p.11.

8 Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism that causes gangrene, can reproduce in nine minutes: Outside, July 1999, p.88.

9 At such a rate, a single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring in two days than there are protons in the universe: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.75.

10 “a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day”: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 2, p.320.

11 Essentially … all bacteria swim in a single gene pool: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.16.

12 Scientists in Australia found microbes known as Thiobacillus concretivorans: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p.145.

13 Some bacteria break down chemical materials from which, as far as we can tell, they gain no benefit at all: National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p.39.

14 “like the scuttling limbs of an undead creature from a horror movie”: Economist, “Human Genome Survey,” 1 July 2000, p.9.

15 Perhaps the most extraordinary survival yet found was that of a Streptococcus bacterium that was recovered from the sealed lens of a camera that had stood on the Moon for two years: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p.146.

16 It has even been suggested that their tireless nibblings created the Earth’s crust: New York Times, “Bugs Shape Landscape, Make Gold,” 15 Oct. 1996, p. C-1.

17 if you took all the bacteria out of the Earth’s interior and dumped them on the surface, they would cover the planet to a depth of 15 metres: Discover, “To Hell and Back,” July 1999, p.82.

18 The liveliest of them may divide no more than once a century: Scientific American, “Microbes Deep Inside the Earth,” Oct. 1996, p.71.

19 “The key to long life, it seems, is not to do too much”: Economist, “Earth’s Hidden Life,” 21 Dec. 1996, p.112.

20 Other micro-organisms have leaped back to life after being released from a 118-year-old can of meat and a 166-year-old bottle of beer: Nature, “A Case of Bacterial Immortality?,” 19 Oct. 2000, p.844.

21 claimed to have revived bacteria frozen in Siberian permafrost for three million years: Economist, “Earth’s hidden life,” 21 Dec. 1996, p.111.

22 But the record claim for durability so far is one made by Russell Vreeland and colleagues at West Chester University: New Scientist, “Sleeping Beauty,” 21 Oct. 2000, p.12.

23 The more doubtful scientists suggested that the sample might have been contaminated: BBC News online, “Row over Ancient Bacteria,” 7 June 2001.

24 Bacteria were usually lumped in with plants, too: Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p.22.

25 In 1969, in an attempt to bring some order to the growing inadequacies of classification: Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p.23.

26 By one calculation it contained as many as two hundred thousand species of organism: Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p.24.

27 At that time, according to Woese, only about five hundred species of bacteria were known: New York Times, “Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,” 15 Oct. 1996, p. C-3.

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

29 “like learning about animals from visiting zoos”: New York Times, “Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,” 15 Oct. 1996, p. C-7.

30 Woese … “felt bitterly disappointed”: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, pp.274–5.

31 “Biology, like physics before it … has moved to a level where the objects of interest and their interactions often cannot be perceived through direct observation”: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Default Taxonomy: Ernst Mayr’s View of the Microbial World,” 15 Sept. 1998.

32 “Woese was not trained as a biologist and quite naturally does not have an extensive familiarity with the principles of classification”: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Two Empires or Three?,” 18 Aug. 1998.

33 Of the twenty-three main divisions of life only three … are large enough to be seen by the human eye: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.106.

34 if you totalled up all the biomass of the planet … microbes would account for at least 80 per cent of all there is: New York Times, “Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,” 15 Oct. 1996, p. C-7.

35 the most rampantly infectious organism on Earth, a bacterium called Wolbachia: Nature, “Wolbachia: a tale of sex and survival,” 11 May 2001, p.109.

36 only about one microbe in a thousand is a pathogen for humans: National Geographic, “Bacteria,” Aug. 1993, p.39.

37 microbes are still the number three killer in the Western world: Outside, July 1999, p.88.

38 History … is full of diseases that “once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come”: Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, p.208.

39 a disease called necrotizing fasciitis in which bacteria essentially eat the victim from the inside out: Gawande, Complications, p.234.

40 “The time has come to close the book on infectious diseases”: New Yorker, “No Profit, No Cure,” 5 Nov. 2001, p.46.

41 Even as he spoke, however, some 90 per cent of those strains were in the process of developing immunity to penicillin: Economist, “Disease Fights Back,” 20 May 1995, p.15.

42 in 1997 a hospital in Tokyo reported the appearance of a strain that could resist even that: Boston Globe, “Microbe Is Feared to Be Winning Battle Against Antibiotics,” 30 May 1997, p. A-7.

43 As James Surowiecki noted: New Yorker, “No Profit, No Cure,” 5 Nov. 2001, p.46.

44 America’s National Institutes of Health … didn’t officially endorse the idea until 1994: Economist, “Bugged by Disease,” 21 March 1998, p.93.

45 “Hundreds, even thousands of people must have died from ulcers who wouldn’t have”: Forbes, “Do Germs Cause Cancer?,” 15 Nov. 1999, p.195.

46 Since then, further research has shown that there is or may well be a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders: Science, “Do Chronic Diseases Have an Infectious Root?,” 14 Sept. 2001, pp.1974–6.

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

48 About five thousand types of virus are known: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, pp.153–4.

49 Smallpox in the twentieth century alone killed an estimated three hundred million people: Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues and History, p.1.

50 In ten years the disease killed some five million people and then quietly went away: Kolata, Flu, p.292.

51 The First World War killed 21 million people in four years; swine flu did the same in its first four months: American Heritage, “The Great Swine Flu Epidemic of 1918,” June 1976, p.82.

52 In an attempt to devise a vaccine, medical authorities conducted experiments on volunteers at a military prison on Deer Island in Boston Harbor: American Heritage, “The Great Swine Flu Epidemic of 1918,” June 1976, p.82.

53 Researchers at the Manchester Royal Infirmary discovered that a sailor who had died of mysterious, untreatable causes in 1959 in fact had AIDS: National Geographic, “The Disease Detectives,” Jan. 1991, p.132.

54 In 1969, a doctor at a Yale University lab in New Haven, Connecticut, who was studying Lassa fever: Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues and History, p.126.

55 In 1990, a Nigerian living in Chicago was exposed to Lassa fever on a visit to his homeland: Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues and History, p.128.

Chapter 21: Life Goes On

1 The fate of nearly all living organisms: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.72.

2 Only about 15 per cent of rocks can preserve fossils: Lewis, The Dating Game, p.24.

3 less than one species in ten thousand has made it into the fossil record: Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science, p.280.

4 statement … that there are 250,000 species of creature in the fossil record: Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p.45.

5 About 95 per cent of all the fossils we possess are of animals that once lived under water: Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p.45.

6 “It seems like a big number,” he agreed: interview with Richard Fortey, Natural History Museum, London, 19 Feb. 2001.

7 Humans … have survived so far for one-half of 1 per cent as long: Fortey, Trilobite!, p.24.

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

9 and built up a collection of sufficient distinction that it was bought by Louis Agassiz: “From Farmer-Laborer to Famous Leader: Charles D. Walcott (1850–1927),” GSA Today, Jan. 1996.

10 In 1879 Walcott took a job as a field researcher: Gould, Wonderful Life, pp.242–3.

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

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

13 Gould, ever scrupulous, discovered: Gould, Wonderful Life, p.71.

14 140 species, by one count: Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p.27.

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

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

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

18 There was so much unrecognized novelty … that at one point: Fortey, Trilobite!, p.123.

19 they all use architecture first created in the Cambrian party: US News and World Report, “How Do Genes Switch On?,” 18–25 Aug. 1997, p.74.

20 at least fifteen and perhaps as many as twenty: Gould, Wonderful Life, p.25.

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

22 In 1946 Sprigg, a young assistant government geologist: Corfield, Architects of Eternity, p.287.

23 but it failed to find favour with the association’s head: Corfield, Architects of Eternity, p.287.

24 Nine years later, in 1957: Fortey, Life, p.85.

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

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

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

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

29 Dawkins attacked Gould’s assertions: review of Full House in Evolution, June 1997.

30 who startled many in the palaeontological community by rounding abruptly on Gould in a book of his own, The Crucible of Creation: New York Times Book Review, “Rock of Ages,” 10 May 1998, p.15.

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

32 Fortey gives as an example the idea of comparing a shrew and an elephant: Fortey, Trilobite!, p.132.

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

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

35 It is one thing to have one well-formed creature like a trilobite burst forth in isolation: Fortey, Trilobite!, p.137.

Chapter 22: Goodbye to All That

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

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

3 The world has more than twenty thousand species of lichens: Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants, p.214.

4 Those the size of dinner plates … are therefore “likely to be hundreds if not thousands of years old”: Attenborough, The Living Planet, p.42.

5 If you imagine the 4,500 million or so years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day: adapted from Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.13.

6 stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth: McPhee, Basin and Range, p.126.

7 Oxygen levels … were as high as 35 per cent: Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, p.123.

8 the isotopes accumulate at different rates depending on how much oxygen or carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere: Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, p.118.

9 “The U.S. Air Force … has put them in wind tunnels to see how they do it, and despaired”: Conniff, Spineless Wonders, p.84.

10 In Carboniferous forests dragonflies grew as big as ravens: Fortey, Life, p.201.

11 Luckily the team found just such a creature: BBC Horizon, “The Missing Link,” first broadcast 1 Feb. 2001.

12 The names simply refer to the number and location of small holes found in the sides of their owners’ skulls: Tudge, The Variety of Life, p.411.

13 but the number has been put as high as 4,000 billion: Tudge, The Variety of Life, p.9.

14 “To a first approximation … all species are extinct”: quoted by Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p.46.

15 the average lifespan of a species is only about four million years: Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p.38.

16 “The alternative to extinction is stagnation”: interview with Ian Tattersall, American Museum of Natural History, New York, 6 May 2002.

17 Crises in the Earth’s history are invariably associated with dramatic leaps afterwards: Stanley, Extinction, p.95; Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.12.

18 In the Permian, at least 95 per cent of animals known from the fossil record checked out, never to return: Harper’s, “Planet of Weeds,” Oct. 1998, p.58.

19 Even about a third of insect species went—the only occasion on which they were lost en masse: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.12.

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

21 Estimates for the number of animal species alive at the end of the Permian range from as low as 45,000 to as high as 240,000: Gould, Hens Teeth and Horse’s Toes, p.340.

22 For individuals the death toll could be much higher—in many cases, practically total: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p.143.

23 Grazing animals, including horses, were nearly wiped out in the Hemphillian event: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.100.

24 At least two dozen potential culprits have been identified as causes or prime contributors: Earth, “The Mystery of Selective Extinctions,” Oct. 1996, p.12.

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

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

27 The KT meteor had the additional advantage—advantage if you are a mammal, that is: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.17.

28 “Why should these delicate creatures have emerged unscathed from such an unparalleled disaster?”: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.43.

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

30 “Somehow it does not seem satisfying just to call them ‘lucky ones’ and leave it at that”: Fortey, Life, p.292.

31 the period immediately after the dinosaur extinction could well be known as the Age of Turtles: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.39.

32 “Evolution may abhor a vacuum … but it often takes a long time to fill it”: Stanley, Extinction, p.92.

33 For perhaps as many as ten million years mammals remained cautiously small: Novacek, Time Traveler, p.112

34 For a time, there were guinea pigs the size of rhinos and rhinos the size of a two-storey house: Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p.102.

35 For millions of years, a gigantic, flightless, carnivorous bird called Titanis was possibly the most ferocious creature in North America: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.138.

36 built in 1903 in Pittsburgh and presented to the museum by Andrew Carnegie: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.164.

37 Until very recently, everything we know about the dinosaurs of this period came from only about three hundred specimens: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, pp.168–9.

38 “There is no reason to believe that the dinosaurs were dying out gradually”: BBC Horizon, “Crater of Death,” first broadcast 6 May 2001.

39 “Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured”: Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p.229.

Chapter 23: The Richness of Being

1 The spirit room alone holds 15 miles of shelving: Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum, p.90.

2 forty-four years after the expedition had concluded: Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum, p.74.

3 published in 1956 and still to be found on many library shelves as almost the only attempt: Conard, How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts, p.5.

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

5 he sifted through a bale of fodder sent for the ship’s livestock and made new discoveries: Barber, The Heyday of Natural History: 1820–1870, p.17.

6 To the parts of one species of clam he gave the names: Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, p.79.

7 “Love comes even to the plants. Males and females … hold their nuptials”: quoted by Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p.237, and at University of California/UCMP Berkeley website.

8 Linnaeus lopped it back to Physalis angulata: Kastner, A Species of Eternity, p.31.

9 The first edition of his great Systema Naturae: Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p.223.

10 John Ray’s three-volume Historia Generalis Plantarum in England: Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, p.519.

11 just in time to make Linnaeus a kind of father figure to British naturalists: Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p.65.

12 gullibly accepted from seamen and other imaginative travellers, Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p.59.

13 he saw that whales belonged with cows, mice and other common terrestrial animals in the order quadrupedia (later changed to mammalia): Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p.59.

14 other names in everyday use included mare’s fart, naked ladies, twitch-ballock, hound’s piss, open arse, and bum-towel: Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp.82–5.

15 while Edward O. Wilson in The Diversity of Life puts the number at a surprisingly robust eighty-nine: Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.157.

16 were transferred, amid howls, to the genus Pelargonium: Elliott, The Potting-Shed Papers, p.18.

17 Estimates range from three million to two hundred million: Audubon, “Earth’s Catalogue,” Jan.-Feb. 2002; Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.132.

18 as much as 97 per cent of the world’s plant and animal species may still await discovery: Economist, “A Golden Age of Discovery,” 23 Dec. 1996, p.56.

19 he estimated the number of known species of all types—plants, insects, microbes, algae, everything—at 1.4 million: Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.133.

20 Other authorities have put the number of known species slightly higher, at around 1.5 million to 1.8 million: US News and World Report, 18 Aug. 1997, p.78.

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

22 only about fifteen thousand new species of all types are logged per year: Wall Street Journal, “Taxonomists Unite to Catalog Every Species, Big and Small,” 22 Jan. 2001.

23 “It’s not a biodiversity crisis, it’s a taxonomist crisis!”: interview with Koen Maes, National Museum, Nairobi, 2 Oct. 2002.

24 “many species are being described poorly in isolated publications”: Nature, “Challenges for Taxonomy,” 2 May 2002, p.17.

25 launched an enterprise called the All Species Foundation: The Times, “The List of Life on Earth,” 30 July 2001.

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

27 to quote the man who did the measuring, Dr. John Maunder of the British Medical Entomology Centre: New Scientist, “Bugs Bite Back,” 17 Feb. 2001, p.48.

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

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

30 “If over 9,000 microbial types exist in two pinches of substrate from two localities in Norway”: Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.144.

31 according to one estimate, it could be as many as 400 million: Tudge, The Variety of Life, p.8.

32 and discovered a thousand new species of flowering plant: Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.197.

33 Overall, tropical rainforests cover only about 6 per cent of Earth’s surface: Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.197.

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

35 one ancient bacterium was found on the wall of a country pub: Fortey, Life, p.75.

36 about 500 species have been identified (though other sources say 360): Ridley, The Red Queen, p.54.

37 Gather together all the fungi found in a typical hectare of meadowland: Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants, p.177.

38 it is thought the total number could be as high as 1.8 million: National Geographic, “Fungi,” Aug. 2000, p.60; Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p.117.

39 The large, flightless New Zealand bird called the takahe: Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p.2.

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

41 “a megatherium, a sort of giant ground sloth which may stand as high as a giraffe”: Economist, “A World to Explore,” 23 Dec. 1995, p.95.

42 A single line of text in a Crampton table: Gould, Eight Little Piggies, pp.32–4.

43 he hiked 4,000 kilometres to assemble a collection of three hundred thousand wasps: Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile, pp.159–60.

Chapter 24: Cells

1 you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner: New Scientist, 2 Dec. 2000, p.37.

2 we understand what no more than about 2 per cent of them do: Brown, The Energy of Life, p.83.

3 Its purpose was at first a mystery, but then scientists began to find it all over the place: Brown, The Energy of Life, p.229.

4 It is converted into nitric oxide in the bloodstream, relaxing the muscle linings of vessels, allowing blood to flow more freely: Alberts, et al., Essential Cell Biology, p.489.

5 You possess “some few hundred” different types of cell: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 1, p.21.

6 If you are an average-sized adult you are lugging around over 2 kilograms of dead skin: Bodanis, The Secret Family, p.106.

7 Liver cells can survive for years: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 1, p.68.

8 not so much as a stray molecule: Bodanis, The Secret Family, p.81.

9 Hooke calculated that a one-inch square of cork would contain 1,259,712,000 of these tiny chambers: Nuland, How We Live, p.100.

10 After he reported finding “animalcules” in a sample of pepper-water in 1676: Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p.93.

11 He calculated that there were 8,280,000 of these tiny beings in a single drop of water: Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p.167.

12 He called the little beings “homunculi”: Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p.167.

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

14 Only in 1839, however, did anyone realize that all living matter is cellular: Nuland, How We Live, p.101.

15 The cell has been compared to many things: Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p.33; Brown, The Energy of Life, p.78.

16 However, scale that up and it would translate as a jolt of 20 million volts per metre: Brown, The Energy of Life, p.87.

17 has the approximate consistency “of a light grade of machine oil”: Nuland, How We Live, p.103.

18 and flying into each other up to a billion times a second: Brown, The Energy of Life, p.80.

19 “the molecular world must necessarily remain entirely beyond the powers of our imagination”: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 2, p.293.

20 “the total is still a very minimum of 100 million protein molecules in each cell”: Nuland, How We Live, p.157.

21 At any given moment, a typical cell in your body will have about one billion ATP molecules in it: Alberts et al., Essential Cell Biology, p.110.

22 Every day you produce and use up a volume of ATP equivalent to about half your body weight: Nature, “Darwin’s Motors,” 2 May 2002, p.25.

23 On average, humans suffer one fatal malignancy for each 100 million billion cell divisions: Ridley, Genome, p.237.

24 what has been called “the single best idea that anyone has ever had”: Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p.21.

Chapter 25: Darwin’s Singular Notion

1 “Everyone is interested in pigeons”: quoted in Boorstin, Cleopatra’s Nose, p.176.

2 “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching”: quoted in Boorstin, The Discoverers, p.467.

3 The experience of witnessing an operation on an understandably distressed child: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.27.

4 some “bordering on insanity”: Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, p.199.

5 In five years … he had not once hinted at an attachment: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.197.

6 which suggested, not incidentally, that atolls could not form in less than a million years: Moorehead, Darwin and the Beagle, p.191.

7 It wasn’t until the younger Darwin was back in England and read Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population: Gould, Ever since Darwin, p.21.

8 “How stupid of me not to have thought of it!”: quoted in Sunday Telegraph, “The Origin of Darwin’s Genius,” 8 Dec. 2002.

9 It was his friend the ornithologist John Gould: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.209.

10 These he expanded into a 230-page “sketch”: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 5, p.526.

11 “I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before”: quoted in Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.239.

12 Some wondered if Darwin himself might be the author: Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, p.214.

13 “he could not have made a better short abstract”: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 5, p.528.

14 “This summer will make the 20th year (!) since I opened my first note-book”: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, pp.454–5.

15 “whatever it may amount to, will be smashed”: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.469.

16 “all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old”: quoted by Gribbin and Cherfas, The First Chimpanzee, p.150.

17 Much less amenable to Darwin’s claim of priority was a Scottish gardener named Patrick Matthew: Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile, p.336.

18 He referred to himself as “the Devil’s Chaplain”: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.305.

19 felt “like confessing a murder”: quoted in Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.xvi.

20 “The case at present must remain inexplicable”: quoted by Gould, Wonderful Life, p.57.

21 By way of explanation he speculated: Gould, Ever Since Darwin, p.126.

22 “Darwin goes too far”: quoted by McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.190.

23 Huxley was a saltationist: Schwartz, Sudden Origins, pp.81–2.

24 “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder”: quoted in Keller, The Century of the Gene, p.97.

25 it “seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree” that natural selection could produce such an instrument in gradual steps: Darwin, On the Origin of Species (facsimile ed.), p.217.

26 “Eventually … Darwin lost virtually all the support that still remained”: Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p.89.

27 It had a library of twenty thousand books: Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So, p.91.

28 And Darwin, for his part, is known to have studied Focke’s influential paper: Ridley, Genome, p.44.

29 Huxley had been urged to attend by Robert Chambers: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.79.

30 bravely slogged his way through two hours of introductory remarks: Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin, p.142.

31 One of his experiments was to play the piano to them: Conniff, Spineless Wonders, p.147.

32 Having married his own cousin: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.575.

33 Darwin was often honoured in his lifetime, but never for On the Origin of Species: Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin, p.148.

34 Darwin’s theory didn’t really gain widespread acceptance until the 1930s and 1940s: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.45.

35 seemed set to claim Mendel’s insights as his own: Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p.187.

Chapter 26: The Stuff of Life

1 “roughly one nucleotide base in every thousand”: Sulston and Ferry, The Common Thread, p.198.

2 The exceptions are red blood cells, some immune system cells, and egg and sperm cells: Woolfson, Life without Genes, p.12.

3 “guaranteed to be unique against all conceivable odds”: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 2, p.314.

4 there would be enough of it to stretch from the Earth to the Moon and back, not once or twice but again and again: Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p.151.

5 you may have as much as 20 million kilometres of DNA bundled up inside you: Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human, p.8.

6 “among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules”: Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So, p.142.

7 It was discovered as far back as 1869: Ridley, Genome, p.48.

8 DNA didn’t do anything at all, as far as anyone could tell: Wallace et al., Biology, p.211.

9 The necessary complexity, it was thought, had to exist in proteins in the nucleus: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 2, p.295.

10 Working out of a small lab (which became known, inevitably, as the Fly Room): Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin, p.259.

11 no consensus “as to what the genes are—whether they are real or purely fictitious”: Keller, The Century of the Gene, p.2.

12 we are in much the same position today in respect of mental processes such as thought and memory: Wallace et al., Biology, p.211.

13 Chargaff … suggested that Avery’s discovery was worth two Nobel Prizes: Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, p.327.

14 including, it has been said, lobbying the authorities … not to give Avery a Nobel Prize: White, Rivals, p.251.

15 a member of a highly popular radio programme called The Quiz Kids: Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation, p.46.

16 “it was my hope that the gene might be solved without my learning any chemistry”: Watson, The Double Helix, p.21.

17 the results of which were obtained “fortuitously”: Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p.356.

18 In a severely unflattering portrait: Watson, The Double Helix, p.17.

19 “gratuitously hurtful”: Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p.354.

20 To Wilkins’s presumed dismay and embarrassment, in the summer of 1952 she posted a mock notice: White, Rivals, p.257; Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, p.185.

21 “apparently without her knowledge or consent”: PBS website, “A Science Odyssey,” n.d.

22 Years later, Watson conceded that it “was the key event … it mobilized us”: quoted in Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, p.317.

23 a 900-word article by Watson and Crick titled “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid”: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 2, p.290.

24 It received a small mention in the News Chronicle and was ignored elsewhere: Ridley, Genome, p.50.

25 Franklin rarely wore a lead apron and often stepped carelessly in front of a beam: Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, p.144.

26 “It took over twenty-five years for our model of DNA to go from being only rather plausible, to being very plausible”: Crick, What Mad Pursuit, p.73–4.

27 by 1968 the journal Science could run an article entitled “That Was the Molecular Biology That Was”: Keller, The Century of the Gene, p.25.

28 In this sense, they are rather like the keys of a piano, each playing a single note and nothing else: National Geographic, “Secrets of the Gene,” Oct. 1995, p.55.

29 Guanine, for instance, is the same stuff that abounds in, and gives its name to, guano: Pollack, Signs of Life, p.22–3.

30 “you could say all humans share nothing, and that would be correct, too”: Discover, “Bad Genes, Good Drugs,” April 2002, p.54.

31 “exist for the pure and simple reason that they are good at getting themselves duplicated”: Ridley, Genome, p.127.

32 Altogether, almost half of human genes … don’t do anything at all, as far as we can tell: Woolfson, Life without Genes, p.18.

33 Junk DNA does have a use: National Geographic, “The New Science of Identity,” May 1992, p.118.

34 “Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction”: Nuland, How We Live, p.158.

35 Here were two creatures that hadn’t shared a common ancestor for five hundred million years: BBC Horizon, “Hopeful Monsters,” first transmitted 1998.

36 At least 90 per cent correlate at some level with those found in mice: Nature, “Sorry, dogs—man’s got a new best friend,” 19–26 Dec. 2002, p.734.

37 We even have the same genes for making a tail, if only they would switch on: Los Angeles Times (reprinted in Valley News), 9 Dec. 2002.

38 dubbed homeotic (from a Greek word meaning “similar”) or hox genes: BBC Horizon, “Hopeful Monsters,” first transmitted 1998.

39 We have forty-six chromosomes, but some ferns have more than six hundred: Gribbin and Cherfas, The First Chimpanzee, p.53.

40 The lungfish, one of the least evolved of all complex animals, has forty times as much DNA as we have: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.240.

41 Perhaps the apogee (or nadir) of this faith in biodeterminism was a study published in the journal Science in 1980: Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So, p.215.

42 How fast a man’s beard grows … is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex: Wall Street Journal, “What Distinguishes Us from the Chimps? Actually, Not Much,” 12 April 2002, p.1.

43 “the proteome is much more complicated than the genome”: Scientific American, “Move Over, Human Genome,” April 2002, pp.44–5.

44 Depending on mood and metabolic circumstance, they will allow themselves to be phosphorylated, glycosylated, acetylated, ubiquitinated: The Bulletin, “The Human Enigma Code,” 21 Aug. 2001, p.32.

45 Drink a glass of wine … and you materially alter the number and types of proteins at large in your system: Scientific American, “Move Over, Human Genome,” April 2002, pp.44–5.

46 “Anything that is true of E. coli must be true of elephants, except more so”: Nature, “From E. coli to Elephants,” 2 May 2002, p.22.

Chapter 27: Ice Time

1 In London, The Times ran a small story: Williams, Surviving Galeras, p.198.

2 Spring never came and summer never warmed: Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, pp.3–6.

3 One French naturalist named de Luc: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.89.

4 and the other abundant clues that point to passing ice sheets: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.90.

5 The naturalist Jean de Charpentier told the story: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.90.

6 He lent Agassiz his notes: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, pp.92–3.

7 Humboldt … observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p.173.

8 In his quest to understand the dynamics of glaciation, he went everywhere: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.182.

9 William Hopkins, a Cambridge professor and leading member of the Geological Society: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.98.

10 He began to find evidence for glaciers practically everywhere: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.99.

11 Eventually he became convinced that ice had once covered the whole Earth: Gould, Time’s Arrow, p.115.

12 When he died in 1873 Harvard felt it necessary to appoint three professors to take his place: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.197.

13 Less than a decade after his death: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.197.

14 For the next twenty years, even while on holiday: Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age, p.51.

15 The cause of ice ages, Köppen decided, is to be found in cool summers, not brutal winters: Chorlton, Ice Ages, p.101.

16 “It is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow, however little, lasts”: Schultz, Ice Age Lost, p.72.

17 “The process is self-enlarging”: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.205.

18 “you would have been hard pressed to find a geologist or meteorologist who regarded the model as being anything more than an historical curiosity”: Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age, p.60.

19 The fact is, we are still very much in an ice age: Schultz, Ice Age Lost, p.5.

20 a situation that may be unique in the Earth’s history: Gribbin and Gribbin, Fire on Earth, p.147.

21 it appears that we have had at least seventeen severe glacial episodes in the last 2.5 million years: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.148.

22 about fifty more glacial episodes can be expected: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.4.

23 Before fifty million years ago the Earth had no regular ice ages: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.10.

24 the Cryogenian, or super ice age: McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World, p.69.

25 The entire surface of the planet may have frozen solid: Valley News(from Washington Post), “The Snowball Theory,” 19 June 2000, p. C1.

26 the wildest weather it has ever experienced: BBC Horizon transcript, “Snowball Earth,” broadcast 22 Feb. 2001, p.7.

27 in an event known to science as the Younger Dryas: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.34.

28 “the last thing you’d want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it”: New Yorker, “Ice Memory,” 7 Jan. 2002, p.36.

29 The idea is that a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates: Schultz, Ice Age Lost, p.72.

30 No less intriguing are the known ranges of some late dinosaurs: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.268.

31 In Australia—which at that time was more polar in its orientation—a retreat to warmer climes wasn’t possible: Thomas H. Rich, Patricia Vickers-Rich and Roland Gangloff, “Polar Dinosaurs,” manuscript, n.d.

32 there is a lot more water for them to draw on this time: Schultz, Ice Age Lost, p.159.

33 If so, sea levels globally would rise—and pretty quickly—by between 4.5 and 6 metres on average: Ball, H₂O, p.75.

34 “Did you have a good ice age?”: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.267.

Chapter 28: The Mysterious Biped

1 Just before Christmas 1887: National Geographic, May 1997, p.87.

2 found by railway workers in a cave at a cliff called Cro-Magnon: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.149.

3 The first formal description: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.173.

4 So instead the name and credit for the discovery of the first early humans went to the Neander valley in Germany: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, pp.3–6.

5 Hearing of this, T. H. Huxley in England drily observed: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.59.

6 He did no digging himself, but instead used fifty convicts lent by the Dutch authorities: Gould, Eight Little Piggies, pp.126–7.

7 In fact, many anthropologists think it is modern, and has nothing to do with Java man: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.39.

8 If it is an erectus bone, it is unlike any other found since: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.144.

9 He also produced, with nothing but a scrap of cranium and one tooth, a model of the complete skull, which also proved uncannily accurate: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.154.

10 To Dubois’ dismay, Schwalbe thereupon produced a monograph: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.42.

11 Dart could see at once that the Taung skull was not of a Homo erectus: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.74.

12 he would sometimes bury their bodies in his back garden to dig up for study later: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.233.

13 Dart spent five years working up a monograph, but could find no-one to publish it: Lewin, Bones of Contention, p.82.

14 For years, the skull … sat as a paperweight on a colleague’s desk: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.93.

15 found a single fossilized molar and on the basis of that alone quite brilliantly announced the discovery of Sinanthropus pekinensis: Swisher et al., Java Man, p.75.

16 then discovered to his horror that they had been enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones: Swisher et al., Java Man, p.77.

17 The Solo People were known variously as Homo soloensis, Homo primigenius asiaticus: Swisher et al., Java Man, p.211.

18 in 1960 F. Clark Howell of the University of Chicago, following the suggestions of Ernst Mayr and others the previous decade: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, pp.267–8.

19 the whole of our understanding of human prehistory is based on the remains, often exceedingly fragmentary, of perhaps five thousand individuals: Washington Post, “Skull Raises Doubts about our Ancestry,” 22 March 2001.

20 “You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck if you didn’t mind how much you jumbled everything up”: interview with Ian Tattersall, American Museum of Natural History, New York, 6 May 2002.

21 you would have to conclude that early hand tools were mostly made by antelopes: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.66.

22 they show males and females evolving at different rates and in different directions: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.194.

23 dismiss it as a mere “wastebasket species”: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.111.

24 “it is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer”: quoted by Gribbin and Cherfas, The First Chimpanzee, p.60.

25 “And of all the disciplines in science, paleoanthropology boasts perhaps the largest share of egos”: Swisher et al., Java Man, p.17.

26 For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees: Tattersall, The Human Odyssey, p.60.

27 “She is our earliest ancestor, the missing link between ape and human”: PBS Nova, “In Search of Human Origins,” first broadcast Aug. 1999.

28 Johanson breezily replied that he had discounted the 106 bones of the hands and feet: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.147.

29 “Lucy and her kind did not locomote in anything like the modern human fashion”: Tattersall, The Monkey in the Mirror, p.88.

30 “Only when these hominids had to travel between arboreal habitats would they find themselves walking bipedally”: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.91.

31 “Lucy’s hips and the muscular arrangement of her pelvis,” he has written: National Geographic, “Face-to-Face with Lucy’s Family,” March 1996, p.114.

32 One, discovered by Meave Leakey of the famous fossil-hunting family at Lake Turkana in Kenya: New Scientist, 24 March 2001, p.5.

33 making it the oldest hominid yet found—but only for a brief while: Nature, “Return to the Planet of the Apes,” 12 July 2001, p.131.

34 In the summer of 2002 a French team working in the Djurab Desert of Chad … found a hominid almost seven million years old: Scientific American, “An Ancestor to Call our Own,” Jan. 2003, pp.54–63.

35 Some critics believe that it was not human but an early ape: Nature, “Face to Face with our Past,” 19–26 Dec. 2002, p.735.

36 when you are a small, vulnerable australopithecine, with a brain about the size of an orange, the risk must have been enormous: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.3; Drury, Stepping Stones, pp.335–6.

37 “but that the forests left them”: Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human, p.135.

38 For over three million years, Lucy and her fellow australopithecines scarcely changed at all: PBS Nova, “In Search of Human Origins,” first broadcast Aug. 1999.

39 Absolute brain size: Gould, Ever since Darwin, pp.181–3.

40 yet the australopithecines never took advantage of this useful technology that was all around them: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.338.

41 “Perhaps,” suggests Matt Ridley, “we ate them”: Ridley, Genome, p.33.

42 they make up only 2 per cent of the body’s mass, but devour 20 per cent of its energy: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.345.

43 “The body is in constant danger of being depleted by a greedy brain”: Brown, The Energy of Life, p.216.

44 C. Loring Brace stuck doggedly to the linear concept: Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, p.204.

45 Homo erectus is the dividing line: Swisher et al., Java Man, p.131.

46 It was from a boy aged between about nine and twelve who had died 1.54 million years ago: National Geographic, May 1997, p.90.

47 The Turkana boy was “very emphatically one of us”: Tattersall, The Monkey in the Mirror, p.132.

48 Someone had looked after her: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.165.

49 They were unprecedentedly adventurous and spread across the globe with what seems to have been breathtaking rapidity: Scientific American, “Food for Thought,” Dec. 2002, pp.108–15.

Chapter 29: The Restless Ape

1 “They made them in their thousands”: interview with Ian Tattersall, American Museum of Natural History, New York, 6 May 2002.

2 “people may have first arrived substantially earlier than 60,000 years ago”: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 Jan. 2001.

3 “There’s just a whole lot we don’t know about the movements of people before recorded history”: interview with Alan Thorne, Canberra, 20 Aug. 2001.

4 “the most recent major event in human evolution—the emergence of our own species—is perhaps the most obscure of all”: Tattersall, The Human Odyssey, p.150.

5 “whether any or all of them actually represent our species still awaits definitive clarification”: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.226.

6 “odd, difficult-to-classify and poorly known”: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.412.

7 No Neandertal remains have ever been found in north Africa, but their tool kits turn up all over the place: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.209.

8 known to palaeoclimatology as the Boutellier interval: Fagan, The Great Journey, p.105.

9 They survived for at least a hundred thousand years, and perhaps twice that: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.204.

10 In 1947, while doing fieldwork in the Sahara: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.300.

11 It is still commonly held that Neandertals lacked the intelligence or fibre to compete on equal terms with the continent’s slender and more cerebrally nimble newcomers, Homo sapiens: Nature, “Those Elusive Neanderthals,” 25 Oct. 2001, p.791.

12 “Modern humans neutralized this advantage … with better clothing, better fires and better shelter”: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.30.

13 1.8 litres for Neandertals versus 1.4 for modern people: Flannery, The Future Eaters, p.301.

14 “Rhodesian man … lived as recently as 25,000 years ago and may have been an ancestor of the African Negroes”: Canby, The Epic of Man, page unnoted.

15 “you don’t have the front end looking like a donkey and the back end looking like a horse”: Science, “What—or Who—Did In the Neandertals?,” 14 Sept. 2001, p.1981.

16 “all present-day humans are descended from that population”: Swisher et al., Java Man, p.189.

17 But then people began to look a little more closely at the data: Scientific American, “Is Out of Africa Going Out the Door?,” August 1999.

18 in 1997 scientists from the University of Munich managed to extract and analyse some 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,” 16 Jan. 2001.

19 suggested that all modern humans emerged from Africa within the past hundred thousand years and came from a breeding stock of no more than ten thousand individuals: Nature, “A Start for Population Genomics,” 7 Dec. 2000, p.65; Natural History, “What’s New in Prehistory,” May 2000, pp.90–1.

20 “there’s more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps than in the entire human population”: Science, “A Glimpse of Humans’ First Journey out of Africa,” 12 May 2000, p.950.

21 In early 2001, Thorne and his colleagues at the Australian National University reported that they had recovered DNA from the oldest of the Mungo specimens: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Mitochondrial DNA sequences in Ancient Australians: Implications for Modern Human Origins,” 16 Jan. 2001.

22 “On the whole … the genetic record supports the out of Africa hypothesis”: interview with Rosalind Harding, Institute of Biological Anthropology, Oxford, 28 Feb. 2002.

23 had noted how a palaeontologist, asked by a colleague whether he thought an old skull was varnished or not, had licked its top and announced that it was: Nature, 27 Sept. 2001, p.359.

24 knowing of my interest in human origins for the present volume, 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: Goodbye

1 “unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments”: quoted in Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, p.237.

2 Australia … lost no less than 95 per cent: Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p.xv.

3 “There’s no material benefit to hunting dangerous animals more often than you need to—there are only so many mammoth steaks you can eat”: New Scientist, “Mammoth Mystery,” 5 May 2001, p.34.

4 only four types of really hefty … land animals: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.195.

5 human-caused extinction now may be running at as much as 120,000 times that level: Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p.241.

6 He set off at once for the island, but by the time he got there the cat had killed them all: Flannery, The Future Eaters, pp.62–3.

7 “At each successive discharge”: quoted in Matthiessen, Wildlife in America, pp.114–15.

8 The zoo lost it: Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p.125.

9 Hugh Cuming, who became so preoccupied with accumulating objects that he built a large ocean-going ship and employed a crew to sail the world full-time picking up whatever they could find: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.342.

10 Millions of years of isolation had allowed Hawaii: National Geographic, “On the Brink: Hawaii’s Vanishing Species,” Sept. 1995, pp.2–37.

11 The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family: Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p.84.

12 a bird so sublimely rare that only one has ever been seen: Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p.76.

13 By the early 1990s he had raised the figure to some six hundred per week: Easterbrook, A Moment on the Earth, p.558.

14 “almost certainly an underestimate”: Washington Post, in Valley News, 27 Nov. 1995, “Report Finds Growing Biodiversity Threat.”

15 “One planet, one experiment”: Wilson, Diversity of Life, p.182.