Bill Bryson

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)

I am delighted that you could make it

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson

the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase,

where the universe went from a form we can’t understand to one we almost can.

Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang.

fifty-nine elements are needed to construct a human being. Six of these—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus—account for 99.1 percent of what makes us, but much of the rest is a bit unexpected. Who would have thought that

The biggest component in any human, filling 61 percent of available space, is oxygen. It may seem a touch counterintuitive that we are almost two-thirds composed of an odorless gas.

The reason we are not light and bouncy like a balloon is that the oxygen is mostly bound up with hydrogen (which accounts for another 10 percent of you) to make water—and water, as you will know if you have ever tried to move a wading pool or just walked around in really wet clothes, is surprisingly heavy.

You are the product of three billion years of evolutionary tweaks