0767908171

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
1 How to Build a Universe	?	?	On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway).	If the Earth were the size of a pea - 7.5mm - then Pluto would be 1.3mm, perfectly visible and 1,000 times the size of a typical bacterium.
1 How to Build a Universe	?	?	Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years.	One year = 31,536,000 seconds. 500,000,000,000 thus equals to roundabout 16000 years only! Don't know if the number 500,000,000,000 is even correct for the size of a proton.
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]
4	?	?	Says that the last noble gas was discovered 1962.	Radon, the last noble gas to be discovered, was discovered as "emanations" from radium by Curie and from thorium by Rutherford in 1899, which was confirmed by Dorn in 1900. Emanations from actinium was observed in 1903. In 1904 Ramsay suspected that the radioactive gas was a noble gas and he isolated the radium emanation in 1908 together with Gray, determined that it was 111 times heavier than hydrogen (H2) and gave it the name niton (Nt) which was accepted in 1912. In 1923 the isotopes were named radon (Rn), actinon (An) and thoron (Tn) - i.e. emanation from radium, actinium and thorium respectively (note that although that Soddy proposed the existence of different isotopes of an element in 1912, isotopes were not fully understood until much later [i.e. after the discovery of the neutron in 1932]). There was still confusion about the name up into the 1960s, but that was only a question of naming, not of discovery. [12]
5 The Stone-Breakers	?	?	Description of Great Devonian Controversy	The dispute was primarily between Henry T. De la Beche and Roderick I. Murchison. De la Beche claimed that petrified plants found in coals in Devon Greywacke date it to Carboniferous period, while Murchison dated it to the Silurian period. After some investigation the issue was resolved in the early 1840s by inserting a new period, Devonian, between Carboniferous and Silurian ones.
8 Einstein's Universe	?	?	It occurred to Michelson that for half of the year the Earth is travelling towards the Sun and for half of the year it is travelling away from it,	Michelson was interested in the motion of the Earth relative to the ether, particularly the orbital velocity of the Earth in its orbit around the sun, and not the relatively minor motion towards or away from the sun (i.e. arising from the ellipticity of the Earth's orbit). The point is that in opposite seasons the Earth is travelling in opposite directions relative to the stars, and not that it is travelling towards or away from the sun.
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	270	?	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] The reason glass in old windows is sometimes thicker at the bottom than at the top is because of the way the glass was made. Usually using the Crown Glass process. This resulted in an uneven pane of glass; when it came to fitting the glass in the lead frame the person doing it chose to put the thickest part at the bottom (for obvious reasons, it would stand up better) Sometimes however they would put the glass in the wrong way up and there are examples of panes being thicker at the top or at the side. [10] Also, Roman, Chinese and Egyptian glass artifacts that predate medieval stained glass by centuries show no evidence of deformation due to any type of 'flow' effect
16 Lonely Planet	?	?	It is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.	There is probably as much as 20-30g (an ounce) in the earth's crust alone. [11]
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	?	?	[10000 trillion cells after 47 divisions]	Two rised to 47 gives only 140 trillion.
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]
26 The stuff of life	?	?	[Guanine -> Guano]	Guano has given name to Guanine, not the other way round. [9]
28	?	?	[The chimp and man share 99.99999% of their history]	This means that have only been separated for 1/10000000 of their time as organisms. As life has existed for some three billion years, this would mean only 300 years. The correct figure should be something like 99.8%.

References
[1] (2010-10-18) Planetary Voyage
[2] Why use the Hipparcos/Tycho data?
[3] staff of Jupiter Scientific (2004) A book review of A short history of nearly everything.
[4] Gibbs, Philip. (2007-05/06) Glass Worldwide, pp 14-18
[5] Is it true that a substance known as ambergris comes from whales?
[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] Mascart, Jean (1913) “L’étude de la haute atmosphère et les travaux de Léon Teisserenc de Bort“, La Nature, pp. 296-300.
[9] guano, Dictionary.com
[10] Kruszelnicki, Karl S. "Glass flows"
[11] Orozco, Luis A. (2003) "Francium"
[12] Radon, Elementymology & elements multidict