Its called "A short history of nearly everithing" by Bill Bryson.
I copy parts that I liked:
(About P. W. Atkins book on Thermodynamics) "There are four laws. The third of them, The Second Law, was recognized first; the first, The Zeroth Law, was formulated last; The First Law was second; The Third Law might not even be a law in the same sense as the others." (more on the same) ...the three principal laws are sometimes expressed jocularly as (1) you can win, (2) you can´t break even, and (3) you can´t get out of the game.
Page 77
(on quantum physics - cites Enrico Fermi) "if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist."
[Said particles being muons, pions, hyperons, mesons, K-mesons, Higgs-bosons, intermediate vector bosons, baryons, tachyons, gluons, of course photons, electrons, protons, neutrons and neutrinos, plus a number of quarks named up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom and further dividen into red, green and blue; not to forget an antiparticle for most particles]
Page 162 and around.
String theory has further spawned something called "M theory", which incorporates surfaces known as membranes - or simply "branes" to the hipper souls of the world of physics. I´m afraid this is the stop on the knowledge highway where most of us get off. Here is a sentence from the New York Time, explaining this as simple as possible to a general audience: "The epkyrotic process begins far in the indefinite past with a pair of flat empty branes sitting parallel to each other in a warped five-dimensional space... The two branes, which form the walls of the fifth dimension, could have popped out of nothingness as a quantum fluctuation in the even more distant past and then drifted apart." No arguing with that. No understanding it either.
Page 167
[If I live again, I would LOVE to be a theoretic physicist - if only I could handle the math. That is high magic, they totally live on another universe : ) ]
I don´t wish to interject a note of gloom just at this point, but the facts is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly. For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumble and die remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct.
Page 337
In fact, the more we have learned in recent years the more comlicated matters have tended to become. even thinking, it turns out, affect the way genes work. how fasta a man´s beard grows, for instance, is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge).
Page 413
[Reminds me of that part on the movie "What the bleep do you know?" when a man on the subway station tells the protagonist "If thoughts do that to water, imagine what our thoughts do to us."]
Now I want to write a book. I don´t really now why, but I´ve read so many good books, that now I would like to write one. I even thought up an idea of the argument. I suppose its another project that I won´t finish, since, the way I want it, it would require a lot of research (its a "cyberpunk" story, set here in baja, in a future with a collapsed ecology, no water, narco -wars everywhere else in mexico, big corporations fighting some minor corrupt alliance between narcos, government people, and some shady investors, in order to get control of all the water. They are more or less successful, until some big companies - say Slim and TVAzteca owner whose name I don´t remember right now - realize water is a very good business, and decide to step in and take it for their own. In the mean time, people living in lost cities have built they own destilators, and the big companies idea is somehow to make that illegal so they would be forced to buy water to the companies that are fighting to control it. It should include high tech, artificial intelligence, ecological collapse, global climate change, politics, narcos and drugs traffic, government corruption, tourism trends and development in this area, including the infamous sexual tourism like the one already going in cancún). In other words, just a very pessimistic extension of life in baja to some unpleasant future (that is what most cyberpunk is about). Some of this things I know about, some other (say, politics and big companies) I know nothing (considering what you must know to create believable situations on a novel).
Definitely not something to be done in a week. It would be a long effort, one I´m not sure its worth it (considering my other long efforts ended up being useless and fruitless - meaning I have a biology degree, a master and and almost finished PhD totally worthless, that in fact I must erase from my curriculum every time I go looking for a job).
Why is this post in english? Because if I do end up writing the book, it would be in english. In mexico people don´t read.
