A short history of nearly everything

Watson, James.

Watt, James

weather and climate; cloud types.; evaporation; Holocene period; hurricane; ice ages; lightning; jet streams; meteorology; Milankovitch cycles; oceans and; rain; storm cloud, anvil shape; Tambora eruption, 1816; temperature, measuring; thunderstorms, energy; variables of climate; weight of air in front; wind. See also ice ages

Wegener, Alfred

Weinberg, Samantha

Weinberg, Steven,

Weitz, Charles

whales; ambergris

Whewell, William

White Cliffs of Dover

White, Nathaniel

Whittaker, R. H.

Whittington, Harry

Wickramasinghe, Chandra

Wilberforce, Samuel

Wilford, John

Wilkins, Maurice

Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe

Williams, Stanley

Wilson, Allan

Wilson, Edward O.

Wilson, Robert

Winchester, Simon

wind

Windows into the Earth (Smith amp; Siegel)

Wisdom of Bones, The (Walker)

Wistar, Caspar

wisteria

Witzke, Brian

Woese, Carl

Woit, Peter

Wonderful Life (Gould)

Wren, Christopher

X

X-ray crystallography

X rays

Y

Yakima, Washington

Yellowstone Park; earthquakes,; Emerald Pool; geysers; Hebgen Lake quake; hydrothermal explosions; rockfall, Gardiner Canyon

Yellowstone Volcanic Observatory

Z

Zwicky, Fritz

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bill Bryson is the author of numerous works of travel literature. In addition to his bestselling books for Broadway, including A Walk in the Woods, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, and Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words, he is the author of Mother Tongue, The Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island, and Neither Here Nor There. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, with his wife, Cynthia, and their children.

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A word on scientific notation: Since very large numbers are cumbersome to write and nearly impossible to read, scientists use a shorthand involving powers (or multiples) of ten in which, for instance, 10,000,000,000 is written 1010 and 6,500,000 becomes 6.5 x 106. The principle is based very simply on multiples of ten 10 x 10 (or 100) becomes 102: 10 x 10 x 10 (or 1,000) is 103; and so on, obviously and indefinitely. The little superscript number signifies the number of zeroes following the larger principal number. Negative notations provide essentially a mirror image, with the superscript number indicating the number of spaces to the right of the decimal point (so 10-4 means 0.0001). Though I salute the principle, it remains an amazement to me that anyone seeing “1.4 x 109 km3” would see at once that that signifies 1.4 billion cubic kilometers, and no less a wonder that they would choose the former over the latter in print (especially in a book designed for the general reader, where the example was found). On the assumption that many general readers are as unmathematical as I am, I will use them sparingly, though they are occasionally unavoidable, not least in a chapter dealing with things on a cosmic scale.

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