From "A Short History of Nearly Everything"

From Chapter 3 - The Reverend Evan's Universe

...Surprisingly little of the universe is visible to us when we incline our heads to the sky. Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from the Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot. With binaculars the number of stars you can see from a single location rises to about 50,000, and with a small telescope it leaps to 300,000.

From Chapter 4 - The Measure of Things

...eighteenth-century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available...

From Chapter 7 - Elemental Matters

To indicate the number of atoms in a molecule, Berzelius employed a superscript notation, as in H²O. Later, for no special reason, the fashion became to render the number as subscript: H₂O.

About "Atoms"

...They are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms--upto a billion for each of us, it has been suggested--probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.) So we are all reincarnations--though short-lived ones.

Rutherford..

...Physicists are notoriously scornful of scientists from other fields. ...It was a feeling Rutherford would have understood. "All science is either physics or stamp collecting," he once said in a line that has been used many times since. There is a certain engaging irony therefore that when he won the Nobel prize in 1908, it was in chemistry, not physics.

About "Electrons"

When two objects come together in the real world--billiard balls are most often used for illustration--they don't actually strike each other. "Rather," as Timothy Ferris explains, "the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other ...were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed." When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

Book: A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson)
Category: Non-Fiction