0767908171 A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. Broadway books, ?location 2003-05, hardcover, 560 pages.
| Chapter | Page | Line | Errata and corrigenda | Correction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 Welcome to the Solar System | ? | ? | [the two Voyager spacecraft used] a ‘gravity assist’ technique in which the craft were successively flung from one gassy giant to the next in a kind of cosmic version of ‘crack the whip.’ Even so, it took them nine years to reach Uranus and a dozen to cross the orbit of Pluto. | true only for Voyager 2, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter and Saturn only, after which its trajectory took it out of the plane of the ecliptic. It therefore never reached Uranus, nor did it cross the orbit of Pluto. [1] |
| 3 The Reverend Evan's Universe | ? | ? | [the red giant star Betelgeuse is] fifty thousand light years away | 430 +/- 130 light-years. [2] |
| 9 The Mighty Atom | ? | ? | [atoms] are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare. | "the nuclei of every atom you possess has most likely passed through several stars" "Jupiter Scientific has done an analysis of this problem and the figure in Bryon's book is probably low: It is likely that each of us has about 200 billion atoms that were once in Shakespeare's body." [3] |
| 13 Bang! | ? | ? | Radiating outward [from the huge asteroid striking Earth]] at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. […] Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet | both the shock wave and the cloud would be travelling much slower [3] |
| 14 Dangerous planet | ? | ? | rocks are viscous, but only in the same way that glass is. It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downward under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top | The flow is not visible to the naked eye after such a short period. [4] |
| 17 Into the Troposhere | ? | ? | It is suggested that Leon-Philippe Teisserenc de Bort in 1902 personally ascended in a balloon to high altitudes to discover the tropopauze. | Bort actually used unmanned balloons, which is an area of science he pioneered in. [7],[8] |
| 17 Into the Troposhere | ? | ? | The temperature drops about 1.6 degrees Celsius with every 1,000 metres you climb. | May be confusion with air temperature and dewpoint here. Air temperature actually drops 9.8 degrees C for each 1,000 metres of altitude. Dewpoint drops about 1.8 degrees C for each 1,000 metres of altitude. |
| 18 The Bounding Main | ? | ? | [ambergris is derived from the giant squid]] | is produced by the sperm whale, possibly as an aid in digestion of hard items such as squid beaks. [5] |
| 24 Cells | ? | ? | [ten-thousand trillion cells in the human body] | about 50 trillion [3] |
| 26 The stuff of life | ? | ? | Thiamine [sic] [(Vitamin B1) one of the four DNA bases] | Thymine one of the four DNA bases and not Vitamin B1 (Thiamine) [6] |
References
[1] Planetary Voyage. 2004-03-23. Retrieved on 2008-07-09. JPL, NASA.
[2] Why use the Hipparcos/Tycho data? Retrieved on 2008-07-09. Project Pluto.
[3] staff of Jupiter Scientific. A book review of A short history of nearly everything. 2004. Retrieved on 2008-07-09.
[4] Gibbs, Philip. Glass Worldwide, 2007-05/06, pp 14-18.
[5] Questions? Ask the researchers Retrieved on 2008-07-09. Whales on line.
[6] Ophardt, Charles C. The virtual Chembook: Organic and biochemistry: DNA and RNA introduction. 2003. Retrieved on 2008-07-09. "A major difference between DNA and RNA is that DNA contains thymine, but not uracil, while RNA contains uracil but not thymine. The other three heterocyclic amines, adenine, guanine, and cytosine are found in both DNA and RNA."
[7] “Sur les caractères de la température dans l’atmosphère libre au-dessus de 10 kilomètres“, 1904,
Conférence météorologique de Saint-Pétersbourg.
[8] Jean Mascart: “L’étude de la haute atmosphère et
les travaux de Léon Teisserenc de Bort“, La Nature, 1913, pp. 296-300.
