A Short History of Nearly Everything

“No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton.” 

Protons are a part of the atom, and atoms are what make up everything in the universe. Here, Bryson emphasizes that miraculous nature of existence on Earth, how everything is comprised of something invisible to the naked eye.

“The average distance between stars out there is 20 million million miles.”

This statistic emphasizes how alone we are in the universe, and yet, according to many theories, such as Drake’s equation, it’s entirely probable that humans may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. 

“He spent endless hours studying the floor plan of the lost Temple of King Solomon in Jerusalem (teaching himself Hebrew in the process, the better to scan original texts) in the belief that it held mathematical clues to the dates of the second coming of Christ and the end of the world.”

This quote is describing Isaac Newton. Like many of the other scientists described in this book, Newton was an eccentric man with interests that lay far outside the realm of science. He was also quite into alchemy and the idea that he could turn base metals into precious ones.