As Merlin would say...

All my life I have been a lover of the arts. I am at my happiest looking at art, listening to all kinds of music, watching a ballet or other forms of dance, attending the opera, or a good play. And of course I'm a writer and a librarian, a lover of language, books.

But I have long been fascinated by science as well. I often have a hard time understanding scientific concepts, but I still find them fascinating. For example, in my college physics class I could not wrap my mind around the idea that "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." My physics teacher used the example of a brick wall -- you lean against a brick wall, bringing the pressure of your weight against it, and at the same time it is pressing back, to the same degree. "Come on," I said, "It's not doing anything! It's just standing there!"

What all this has to do with is the book I am currently reading and enjoying enormously: Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. As with most books I finally get around to reading, most other people have long since read it (this one was published in 2003). Nonetheless, if you haven't read it I can recommend it if you're in the mood to refresh your knowledge about this or that aspect of the physical universe, from the cosmically large, to the infinitesimally small, as well as to learn one or two (or 15 or 20) completely new things, all while being entertained by Bryson's cheerfully wry way of writing.

While I've been amazed many times over by what I've been learning, or reminded of, I think the most mind-boggling has to do with the world of the teeny tiny, of particle physics. It's on a par with the concept of "deep time" that I found so challenging when reading a book on dinosaurs not long ago (See Note of Nov. 20, 2010). And by the way, Bryson also touches on those incomprehensibly long stretches of time, in his sections on fossils and evolution.

Of course we all learned about atoms in grade school: the teeny tiny particles that make up all matter, and consist of a positively-charged nucleus surrounded by swirling, negatively-charged electrons. (Apparently that image, created in 1904 by a Japanese physicist who was more or less guessing, is "completely wrong, but durable just the same.")* We learned it, but did we really grasp the significance? I can't see the individual atoms that go to make up this penny I'm looking at, but since it's very old (pre-1984) it is made up of about 28,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000 atoms of copper. Clinging to each other, to form a thing. And all of those atoms have smaller parts. The nucleus of an atom, for example, is "only one millionth of a billionth of the full volume of the atom."* How do I think about that?

Or about the idea of "all but massless neutrinos" that zoom out from the sun and bombard the earth constantly (about 10,000 trillion trillion of them a second!), most of them passing right through you, me, and the planet itself? There are these things passing through me constantly, that have some mass, even if they are "all but massless?" This is like the approximately one trillion bacteria grazing on my skin, "about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin,"* feasting on my dry skin cells, as well as the oils my body exudes. You have to assume at some point someone has looked at a square centimeter of skin and seen -- with what kind of amazing instrument? -- all those thousands of bacteria doing their thing.

Which takes me to such statements as: "'Given an adequate supply of nutrients, a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day,' says biochemist Christian de Duve."* In the same period, a human cell is doing good to divide once. My goodness, can anyone doubt that bacteria will inherit the earth? Especially since they can live anywhere, in virtually any kind of environment, while we delicate-flower humans are confined to a tiny area that supplies what we need for survival.

So fascinating, learning this stuff. It brings to mind a quote from one of my all-time favorite books: The Once and Future King, by T.H. White:

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting." You bet.

*Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.