A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

 As I go more through this book, I get more amazed seeing its wide coverage over so many topic in so simpler yet brilliant way. I love it more and more. The book is almost 600 page thick, and I have just gone through 115 pages, and its really good. Whether its astronomy, geology or anything, it covers them all. And I am looking forward to finish the book very soon, and I am excited about the fact that how brilliant it would feel. In this short article I would be presenting some of good facts and paragraphs through this book.

Chapter one- Lost in the cosmos (Summary)

-Timespan of Paleozoic era- 545 to 245 Millions of Years ago

-Timespan of Mesozoic era- 245 to 66.4 Millions of years ago

-Average species on earth, lasts for only about 4 Million years. So if you wish for billions of years of life you must be as fickle as atoms that made you.

-Not one of your ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest to deliver tiny charge of genetic material to right partner at right moment to perpetuate only possible sequence of hereditary combination to result an astounding you.

-Talking about other things, the dot in ‘i’ holds 500000000000 protons.

-When universe expands it won’t be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is space it creates as it goes.

-They say that the first lively second after big bang produced gravity and other forces governing physics. In less than a minute universe was growing millions and billions miles across and growing fast.

- The big bang produced tens of billions of temperature enough to begin nuclear reaction creating lighter elements such as Hydrogen and helium.

- Many scientists are involved to know the beginning of everything in this universe. Inflation theory was given by Robert Dicke. They explained the fact that after creation universe went on to double its size in every 10^-34 seconds. Other scientists such as Penzious and Wilson didn’t understood the hissing sound in their experimental set off later found to be different waves that linked with the universe beginning.

- Can you get to the edge of Universe? Off course practically we can’t but can we make our head pop out of universe to see what’s out there beyond universe? The answer may disappoint you because you would never arrive at the boundary, instead you would come back to where you begin because the universe bends in a way we can’t adequately imagine. Spaces curves in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite. Space itself is not expanding rather galaxies are running apart.

- Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.

-Not one stuff so vital to our own existence like carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen and rest emerged from gaseous brew of creation. But to form such heavy elements other forces as big as big bang is necessary. Yet there’s been only one big bang and it didn’t produce them, so where did they come from?

-Coming to the solar system, Pluto is no longer considered as planet, the reason comes to be that Pluto has moon comparative to the planets size much bigger. It is so far that no one could actually tell its random motion, its composition, its atmospheric composition, or even what it really is. They say its even smaller than the combined area of USA.

-We have up to now been able to have maximum speed of 56000 km per hour in super rockets. And approximately 90 moons in our solar system.

- Do you know how our solar system ends? It ends with the Oort cloud, which starts beyond Pluto and extends somewhat 2 light years beyond.

-Our nearest neighbor Proxima Centauri is even 4.3 light years away.

-There are 4 hundred billion stars in Milky Way Galaxy. And altogether there are 140 billion galaxies out there. Probability suggests there are millions of intelligent life like us present throughout the universe, that the life is not so much rare or scares.

-We may only be one of millions of advanced civilization, with spacing in between at least 2 hundred light years.

-If star collapsed to sort of densities found in core of atoms, the result would be an unimaginable compact core. Atoms would be crushed so that electrons would be forced into nucleus forming neutron. Hence we call it neutron star.

-Zwicky formed concept of dark matter. And neutron star shrank forming black hole.

-Did you know, only 6000 stars visible from earth through naked eye, two thousands from one spot?

-Evans was one of Supernova freak. He would even place telescope in kitchen room, in his dining table to look at sky occasionally to hunt supernova.

- For blast of supernova to kill you, you would have to be ridiculously close, within 10 light years. The closest detected supernova candidate star is Betelgeuse which is 50000 light years from earth, so we don’t need to worry about being killed by such accidents.

-As discussed earlier, the big bang had produced light elements like hydrogen and helium but failed to create heavier and essential components of life like oxygen, carbon, iron etc. Later on, we found something astonishing, we found out that to forge such heavy elements we need something even hotter than middle of hottest star- supernova. That means star explosion resulted in the formation of heavy elements.

-Coming to solar system, condensation of 98% of nebular mass formed sun and rest formed the planets. 4.4 billions Of years ago, object size of mars crashed into the earth to form moon.