Comments on: Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”

By: My Biotech Life » We are very very very small

My Biotech Life » We are very very very small — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:39:32 +0000

[...] For instance, the distance between the planets is just so amazing in length that I could only explain it properly using an excerpt from Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”: Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away. [...]

By: Rick

Rick — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 19:42:19 +0000

Thanks for the link. I found his book very fun and above all interesting to read! I recommend it to all. :)

By: Sammy

Sammy — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:34:01 +0000

Have a look at this!
http://pm.gov.uk/output/Page10500.asp

By: Hsien Lei

Hsien Lei — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 12:39:54 +0000

Good to hear you gave it a thumbs up! I also have it on my shelf, which is going to collapse someday from the weight of unread books. ;)

By: Pedro Beltrao

Pedro Beltrao — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 12:53:31 +0000

I have it on the shelf but I did not pick it up yet. Most people say it’s really interesting. I have to give it a try too.