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So why, out of all the thousands of impacts Earth has endured, was the KT event of 65 million years ago, which put paid to the dinosaurs, so singularly devastating? Well, first, it was positively enormous. It struck with the force of 100 million megatonnes. Such an outburst is not easily imagined, but, as James Lawrence Powell has pointed out, if you exploded one Hiroshima-sized bomb for every person alive on Earth today you would still be about a billion bombs short of the size of the KT impact.

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.

There was one other major problem with Earth theories that no one had resolved, or even come close to resolving. That was the question of where all the sediments went. Every year the Earth’s rivers carried massive volumes of eroded material—500 million tonnes of calcium, for instance—to the seas. If you multiplied the rate of deposition by the number of years it had been going on, you arrived at a disturbing figure: there should be about 20 kilometres of sediments on the ocean bottoms—or, put another way, the ocean bottoms should by now be well above the ocean tops. Scientists dealt with this paradox in the handiest possible way. They ignored it.

[Rumford] abandoned his wife and child and fled just ahead of a mob of anti-royalists armed with buckets of hot tar, bags of feathers and an earnest desire to adorn him with both.

Nedstammet fra apene! Kjære vene, la oss håpe det ikke er sant. Men hvis det er det, la oss folde hendene og be om at det det ikke blir allment kjent.

Darts eneste støttespiller av en viss anseelse var Robert Broom, en skotskfødt lege og paleontolog som var utstyrt med et betydelig intellekt og et opplivende eksentrisk lynne. For eksempel hadde han for vane å gjøre feltarbeid naken når det var varmt i været, og det var ofte.

En sjelden gang, noen få ganger i historien, gjør en menneskehjerne en observasjon så skarpsindig og uventet at folk ikke kan bestemme seg for hva som er mest forbløffende - observasjonen eller tenkningen rundt den.

Man har fryktet at forskerne i ren entusiasme uforvarende skal kunne skape et svart hull, eller til og med noe man kaller "fremmede kvarker", som teoretisk sett kunne interagere med andre subatomiske partikler og spre seg ukontrollert. Hvis du leser dette, så har det ikke skjedd.

En favoritt! Spennende innføring i naturvitenskapen og oppdagelsenes mange aktører...

Welcome. And gratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, co-operative efforts to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under appreciated state known as existence.