It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, after it was discovered that its use ‘was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling11’. For the next h...
In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: This Door Is Locked for No Reason...
In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London. Only the steady influx of ambitious provincials and Protestant refugees from the Continent kept the population growing...
In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads.
In Australia and the Americas, says Tim Flannery, the animals probably didn’t know enough to run away.
If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here – and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life at all in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achieve...
If there is one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy—something we could all do with more of in our lives. So
If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in f...
I had no idea that the Scottish so loathed the English that their favorite team in the world is whichever one is presently playing England.
I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper. Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injecte...
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves.
He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them.
For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere. The current ice age—ice epoch really—started about forty million years ago...
Don't ever do anything on principle alone. If you haven't got a better reason for doing something other than the principle of the thing, then don't do it.
Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feel...
By comparison, the practice of one Frank Huntington Beebe of keeping two mansions side by side—one to live in, one to decorate over and over—seems admirably restrained.