A Short History of Nearly Everything

Einstein was born in Ulm... but little in his early life suggested the greatness to come.

It was, wrote C. P. Snow, as if Einstein 'had reached the conclusions by pure thought, un-aided, without listening to the opinions of others.'

It is likely that we should still be waiting for the theory today.

It was the first really universallaw of nature ever propounded by a human mind, which is why Newton is regarded with such universal esteem.

The Earth is not quite round...the centrifugal force of the Earth's spin should result in a slight flattening at the poles and a bulging at the equator.

It was an almost ludicrously ambitious undertaking—a mistake of the slightest fraction of a degree would throw the whole thing out by miles.

The French had not only to scale some of the world’s most challenging mountains...but to ford wild rivers, hack their way through jungles.

If you measured one of these passages from selected points on the Earth...you could use the principles of triangulation to work out the distance to the Sun.

Hutton was by all accounts a man of the keenest insights and liveliest conversation...he created the science of geology and transformed our understanding of the Earth.

Lyell believed that the Earth's shifts were uniform and steady—that everything that had ever happened in the past could be explained by events still going on today.