A Really Short History of Nearly Everything

CONTENTS Foreword LOST IN THE COSMOS How do they know that? - finding out about our planet Cooking up a universe - recipe for an explosion The Big Bang - what came next Hi! Glad you could make it! - how did you get here? Listening to the Big Bang - cosmic radiation and you To the edge of the universe - how far is it? Journey into space - our vast solar system Looking for Pluto - the new dwarf planet Journey's end - the Voyager expeditions Who's out there? - advanced life elsewhere in the cosmos? The supernova searcher - the amazing Reverend Bob Evans THE SIZE OF THE EARTH Back on Earth - Newton and gravity Measuring the Earth - finding the circumference Earth's bulge - our planet is not a sphere How far around? - two ill-fated measuring expeditions Tracking Venus - following the Venus transit Weighing the Earth - gravity and Shiehallion Featherweight measures - Cavendish's calculations Finding Earth's age - the new science of geology The stone-breakers - the Geological Society Slow and steady does it - Lyell and tectonic plates Finding fossils - mapping Britain's rock layers Dating the rocks - the great eras of geological time Tooth and claw - digging up strange bones Dinosaur hunters - 'terrible lizards' It's bone time - bones and Earth's age The mighty atom - Dalton weighs atoms A matter of chemistry - adding the elements The Periodic Table - Mendeleyev instils some order Glowing elements - Marie Curie and deadly radiation A NEW AGE DAWNS Einstein - the genius - the Special Theory of Relativity Spacetime - time has a shape The big picture - the Hubble Space Telescope 'Bad' science - lead and CFCs A meteoric age - measuring meteorites DANGEROUS PLANET Travelling trilobites - Pangaea and the fossil record Crust crunching - the discovery of tectonic activity All adrift - where does all the sediment go? The fire below - the Earth beneath our feet Boom! the eruption of Mount St Helens Yellowstone Park - a volcano in waiting Big quakes - measuring earthquakes Impact from space - meteors and the KT extinction Asteroid hit - rocky objects heading for us? LIFE ITSELF Our tiny patch - a comfortable place to be Earth's blanket - the atmosphere that protects us Wild and windy - Earth's weather Hot-water bottle - the effect of the oceans Awash with water - a watery planet Down in the deep - living on the ocean floor Protein soup - oceans - where life started Battling bacteria - the coming of microbes Your mini world - the bacteria that feed on us Making you ill - infectious organisms Citizen cells - you and your cells How long can you stay? - adapt or die A runaway success - trilobites and other fossils Time to get started - Earth's long pre-human history Out of the sea - where creatures took to the land Where did we come from? - from reptiles to mammals Comings and goings - the great extinctions Labelling life - the classification of plants and animals Can't count? - Earth's unknown creatures Journey to the future - Darwin and On the Origin of Species The quiet monk - Mendel and the study of genes One big happy family - inheritance and chromosomes Chain of life - Crick and Watson and DNA THE ROAD TO US Hot and cold - ice sheets and climate Chilly times - living in an ice age Skull and bones - discovering early human remains Lucy - the most famous australopithecine From there to here - the rise of Homo sapiens Tool-makers - inventors of the first technology Humans take over - extermination and extinction What now? - a polluted planet Goodbye - our planet and us Index Picture credits