On November 04, 2009, Piet van der Poel (pipoel@yahoo.com) said:

Dear Bill (I assume that I can call you this. In return you can call me Sir, or Piet, whichever you prefer).

This may be a bit long (6 pages comments)but it hs been stuck in my computer for 3 years and I thought I should put it somewhere.

I suppose that plenty of people write that ‘The short history of nearly everything’ is a great book, blah, blah, blah. I agree, but I will try to be a bit more critical, something that does not appear to be taught much at universities in the USA, but was stressed by my geomorphology professor at the University of Amsterdam (Dr. Pim Jungerius, who just like me was the son of a tulip farmer). These days I am usually trying to prevent water from flattening the earth any faster than it is already doing, while occasionally dabbling into other fields ranging from rural sociology and farming systems research to eco-tourism and lepidoptery. Some of the remarks may just be me not understanding the concepts or your “twisted mind”/humor and can simply be ignored. For the rest it’s up to you.

- I would have appreciated if the book had had more drawings to illustrate some of the points being made, such as the drawing in the first chapter. The saying goes ‘A picture paints a thousand words’, which seems to indicate that the whole book could be replaced by about 180 pictures, saving quite a few trees. But the reading is a pleasure and the illustrations should mainly be used to clarify rather than to replace text. For example a picture/drawing of the world’s tectonic plates or of the triangulation process would be nice.

- Your use of miles here and kilometres there in the text must be confusing to at least some of the metrically or imperially illiterate. Not only the dumbests of our species have a problem with a unit system they did not grow up with. I remember that it took me a few weeks to convince Dr. G.O. Schwab that the metric horsepower equation (for turbines or whatever?) in his soil and water conservation engineering book suffered from a fatal conversion error. It took me a lot longer to figure out why it was wrong after finding that the metric and imperial solutions to a problem did not match.

It appears that you also got confused. On page 317 you write that air cools 1.6 C per 1000 meter. I suppose you meant per 1000 ft, which would be about 0.5 C per 100m. The so-called adiabatic cooling per 100 m apparently varies from about 0.3 C for moist air to 1 C (actually 0.978 C) for dry and/or cold air. 0.6C per 100m seems to be the commonly used figure.

Another example seems to be on page 291, where it states that it was assumed that no organism could survive at temperatures above 50C, and a bit further that extremophiles survived “in waters nearly twice that hot”. Still further it claims that the even hardier hyperthermophiles “demand temperatures of 80 degrees Celsius or more.” I consider somewhere between 50 and 80, let’s say 65C, not nearly twice as hot as 50C. However, if you use F, 50C become 32F, 65C becomes 60F (nearly twice as hot) and 80C becomes 86F., and it makes sense.

Maybe the book should be published in metric and imperial versions. For translations into other languages this would also be easier as translators would not have to try to convert unknown units into whatever unit system happens to be used in the countries where the other language is spoken.

- I suppose one problem with books like this is that they will always be outdated, as new discoveries take place or decisions are taken, such as demoting Pluto from a planet to a big iceball or a dwarf, the Christmas earthquake/tsunami of 2004 being more destructive than the Lisbon earthquake and other new stuff such as birdflu. Walks in the woods don’t suffer from these problems.

- As unavoidable in books like this, there are related topics that get little or no attention, but are probably considered interesting by many people, e.g. black holes.

- I have often wondered which of our presently generally accepted theories and beliefs will be considered totally laughable/ridiculous in 25 years time. But I am too much of a generalist to be able to make any such judgements.

Additional remarks are given by page, just to make life easier for you. Some of the remarks just indicate that some things are not clear to me. These may not be clear to other readers and maybe in some case a bit more explanation may help.

P 18. “For a very long time there wasn’t”. No universe that is. But I wonder if before the Big Bang there was time at all.

P 21. The drawing does not appear to be to scale. Not even close, as lower mantle and outer core are much thicker. Being to scale would be impossible for the crust. A little inset showing the variation in the thickness of the crust below the ocean, flat land and mountains would be possible.
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P33. I have some problem with having a universe of a 100 billion light years across and probably infinite having been formed in a fraction of a second or a single cracking instant. Assuming that the forces of gravity, etc. did not exist in the first fraction (1.0E-43) of a second , speed of light may not have existed or been a limiting factor either. For an instant the universe may have been expanding at some unimaginable rate, but infinite or 100 billion light years? It appears that the universe doubling in size every 10-34 second if starting with something you can hold in your hand (e.g. a few mm in diameter) would soon be increasing in size at speeds exceeding the speed of light, and not just by a little bit, if this doubling continued for up to 10-30 second which is 10,000 times. I somehow seem to think that the universe should have been expanding at the speed of light at the most, at least after the first fraction of a second when gravity did not exist.

P 37. I tried to ask myself if a million million million million miles makes more sense to me than a trillion trillion miles. Both are rather unimaginable. I suppose that one uses a million rather than a thousand thousand, so shouldn’t it be a trillion rather than a million million? Some consistency may be good. But when you mention that the human body has 10 quadrillion cells (p 369), it does not mean much to me and 10 million trillion seems more understandable. When we get to zillions and whatever else, I am at an almost total loss and 1018 seems even slightly more fathomable.

P48. Just reaching the centre of our own galaxy …? I thought somewhere you mentioned that there is not really a centre, that the centre is everywhere, or was it that the origin of the universe, the singularity, was everywhere?

P 68. For triangulation between two points within eyesight of each other there is a clear straight line between the two points. However, between Paris and Moscow it would not be straight due to the curvature of the earth. The explanation seems to ignore this.

P 69. I suppose Halley also predicted when the comet would return.

P 75. I have a vague memory reading somewhere that the first effort by humans to measure the circumference of the earth was undertaken by some Egyptian who measured the angle to the sun in a place somewhere north of Alexandria and the distance between the two places at midday in mid summer. At that day and time only, the sun would shine down a deep well in Alexandria and thus be straight above it (assuming the well went vertically down). Of course after that we went back to believing that the earth was flat.

P100. “De la Beche is a dirty dog”. I am supposed to be able to make sense of this? I checked and found that he was a British geologist (No surprise), but nothing about him being a dirty dog.

P 142-144. If Medeleyev put the elements in groups of seven, how come I do not see any of this in the periodic table, which at least for the more common elements seem to come in groups of eight (as Newland suggested). And these groups of 8 do not appear to include the common metals (Fe, Mn, Cu, Ni, etc.)? It is not clear to me why the table does not follow the order of the atomic numbers but jumps from 56 to 72 and puts 57-71 somewhere below. One nice addition would be to shade all elements known to Mendeleyev grey in the periodic table, while leaving the then unknown elements white.

P149. “Dating rocks”. Must be extremely boring. But it may have advantages over dating men or women.

P157. Saying that “for half the year the earth is travelling towards the sun and for half the year it is travelling away from it” gives me the impression that the earth is a yo-yo at the end of a string pulled and released by the sun. Yes, the earth’s velocity has half the time a component towards the sun and the other half a component away from it, but the main direction is perpendicular to a line connecting the sun and the earth.
As the earth’s path around the sun is an ellipse, I suppose that the not-perpendicular component of the earth’s velocity changes each quarter of a year. Measuring the velocity of light in opposite seasons appears to be a waste of time as the component of the earth’s velocity that is not perpendicular to the sun-earth line will be about the same magnitude and in the same direction (away or towards the sun).
If you have all the information and are good at mathematics you can calculate when this component is largest towards and when largest away from the sun. Since the path of the earth is nearly circular (only 2% difference between max and minimum distance?), I wonder if measuring at sunrise (your location on earth rotates toward the sun) and at sunset (away from it) would not be easier. I don’t know if the rotational velocity of the earth (1675 km/hr acc to p321) or rather its component towards or away from the sun is bigger than the non-perpendicular velocity component of the earth.

P176. “Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars ...” I am a bit confused as I assume that only subatomic particles such as photons and neutrinos travel between stars and planets or get lost into space. How did these atoms get from one star to another and eventually to me?

P190. When you write: “When you determine the spin of a particle …” do you mean “when you make a subatomic particle spin”?, and having as effect that its partner or sibling (or is it really a sister rather than a brother) particle will immediately start spinning in the opposite direction.

P218. Hubble’s formula seems to suggest that the earth is the centre of the universe as all objects appear to be moving away from it at a speed equal to the distance divided by Ho. I assume that maybe every point of the universe is its center and the multidimensional characteristics of it make this possible? But I cannot really figure out how this works.

P 254. I have used plenty of bicycle pumps and yes they do get hot when you pump up a tyre/tube. But just compressing the air is not creating any heat, or at least not in my bicycle pump. Mine seems to get hot when the air gets decompressed.

P 266. Lightning may not be so random. First of all some places in the world have a lot more lightning storms than others. I have lived in the place that had/has the record with 322 lightning storms per year: Bogor in Indonesia. Secondly, the strikes have preference for certain areas/objects/persons, even not considering objects with lightning conductors. The top of mountains such as El Capitan, tall trees and golf players are examples. Although the latter play conductor and thus have themselves to blame.

P 268. Is the distribution of kimberlite pipes really random? It appears kimberlite pipes are only found in very old rocks and there is none of those in my back garden. So if this supersonic magma cannonball shoots up there what does the solidified rock turn into?

P271. I thought the mantle volume being 82% of that of the earth seemed a bit high and tried to check it using the figures of the footnote on page 269. I ended with a figure of 79.0% and 80.5% if I consider half the thickness of the D-layer as part of the mantle. So, actually not as different from the indicated 82%, but why the difference? Probably my calculation was wrong.

P 281. I do not quite see the comparison of the earth heating the crust which is now under Wyoming and a blow torch on a ceiling as the ceiling would normally not be moving. It’s more like a hand moving over a burning candle.

P 315. “You don’t have to rise too many hundreds of meters from sea level before your body begins to protest.” “Not too many” to me means maybe 4 or 5 times 100m, but altitude sickness (AMS, HACE and HAPE) occurs only above about 2500m. The impression given seems that fitness is a factor in altitude sickness. It is not, as stated on page 316. Or maybe it is in the sense that if you exhaust yourself you are more likely to get altitude sick and if you are less fit you exhaust yourself more easily.

Frostbite and hypothermia are not symptoms of altitude sickness. AMS manifests itself by a headache accompanied by one, more or all of the following: loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, dizziness and insomnia. When it becomes a splitting headache with loss of coordination (stumbling, etc.), disorientation, confusion and lethargy you have probably moved on to HACE. By the next stage all your suffering will be over as you will be in a coma and soon dead. I have progressed to severe AMS near the border of HACE and it was not pleasant. Hypothermia and frostbite could come in when due to exhaustion and lethargy one does not generate enough heat anymore to stay warm, but one can happily die of HACE or HAPE in a warm bed in a heated hut. Hypothermia also appears to increase the severity of HAPE. Migraine also does not appear to be a sign of AMS.

Extreme shortness of breath during rest is a sign of HAPE, unless you are always extremely short of breath. A persistent dry cough or coughing up frothy and/or pink fluid, severe fatigue, loss of balance and “gurgling” breathing are other signs of HAPE.

P317. Moving a few hundred meters closer to the sun, assuming that a few equals 2, is equivalent to moving approximately 8,000 x 200/(93 x 106 x 1.609) (to get it all in the metric system and I have estimated Australia and Ohio to be about 8000 km from each other) = 1.6/(149.6) = 0.011m = about 1 cm closer to a bushfire in Australia. My steps are about 75 to 80 cm long. It would take a long time to hike the Appalachian trail with your 1 cm steps. Or, climbing Mount Everest from sea level would get you so little closer to the sun that it would be like getting 47 cm or 2 small steps closer to a bushfire in Australia when in Ohio.

P318. While talking about lightning it may be worthwhile to elaborate a bit on thunder, how the expansion and subsequent collapse of the heated air causes the sound and how the difference in the speed of lightning and sound can be used to tell how far away the last lightning strike approximately was, which does not mean that even if it was far away that the next one could not hit you on the head. Or maybe that is not science anymore? Or why do some people get more often struck by lightning than the rest of use, of course not counting the stupid ones that wave sticks into the air to attract lightning or in case that does not happen strike a little white ball.

P331. I vaguely remember being taught the quadrille almost 40 years ago. I wonder if it means anything to any of the younger people.

P348. Never heard of crab-eating seals before, but if you mention human as being more numerous, maybe cattle, sheep, goats, horses, buffaloes and asses should also be mentioned, while camels may not quite make it. Or just lump them together as livestock.

P 357. “It happened just once.” For life to begin. But maybe it happened before but failed, e.g. got fried in a vent. Or isn’t it mentioned somewhere else in the book that life may have started elsewhere in the universe.

P 360. I may be on a slippery slope here, but not knowing the word “adduced” I looked it up: to cite as an example or a means of proof in an argument. It does not appear to make sense “deduced” maybe? Or is that deducted? On p 538 “no persuasive reason has been adduced …” does make sense.

P 363. The new oxygen-using organisms”? There appears to be a leap of logic here as only oxygen producing cyanobacteria were introduced in the text.

P390. “… it’s no good keeling over on a future site of granite”. It just depends on how future your granite site is. If it is now a nice muddy shallow sea, it may be perfect and if it turns into a pleasant mudstone or shale. You could be very well preserved as a fossil until the rock and you eventually erode or is discovered before the site becomes the granite that you were talking about. If I wanted to become a fossil I suppose I would try not to keel over in a rain forest, while your chances of making it while getting buried in desert sands would probably also be minimal. Waiting for a volcanic eruption would not be a good alternative either because most of these are not very predictable and you may well have been devoured and/or decomposed before you get packed in a fossilizing layer of volcanic ash.

P396. Walcott does not seem to get much credit. I got the impression that he screwed up while the short sentence that in the end he was right (p 404) appears to do too little to restore him. Gould may have been wrong all along but appears at first to have the bright new ideas that the established scientific community as usual attacks. It may just be because on most other occasions when someone with a new idea is introduced in the book he meets a lot of opposition, but here it is the other way around.

P416. “… at least 95% of the animals known from the fossil record checked out”. I suppose the fossil specialist have their methods, but it appears to me that the fact that 95% of the animals known from the fossil record are not known from the next period does not mean that they checked out. May be they just have not yet been found.

P453. Losing 500 brain cells per hour may seem a lot, but in reality over a long life of about 90 years it would only amount to losing 0.4 % of your brain cells. Clearly this cannot be the reason why great insights are mostly produced by young scientists. It is more likely that due to damage to the nerves transporting messages to and from the brain cells, the brain is no longer used to its full capacity by us old farts.

P497. I am not sure if skating races on the Dutch canals is such a good example. They also took place when I was a kid, and the famous 200km 11-city race in Friesland was not organised in any year between 1963 and 1986, but several times since. Not only climate is to blame here, but also pollution and larger and stronger boats including icebreakers that keep the canals open. However, a new icemaking technique “ice transplantation” (plates of ice are sawn out of existing ice and pushed into the last open water stretches of the race route that do not want to freeze over.

P 517. The Wisconsin glacial period is called the Würm in Europe if I remember well.

P 542. “The Java dates could be wrong altogether”. Am I wrong to have assumed that the earlier reported age was not based on reliable scientific test, ignoring the inherent and large inaccuracies of whatever methodology was used?

P. 544. I assume that the first attempt at tool making was what I would have done. Take a big rock and use it to hit a chert rock and see if there are any usable pieces, an then surely someone (most probably a woman) would have come along to tell me that I could do it so much better if I used a more gentle force rather than a brute one.

Piet van der Poel
2006

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