Bryson Chapter 3

Quote:

"Evans’s is a talent so exceptional that Oliver Sacks, in An Anthropologist on Mars, devotes a passage to him in a chapter on autistic savants—quickly adding that “there is no suggestion that he is autistic.” Evans, who has not met Sacks, laughs at the suggestion that he might be either autistic or a savant, but he is powerless to explain quite where his talent comes from.

“I just seem to have a knack for memorizing star fields,” he told me, with a frankly apologetic look, when I visited him and his wife, Elaine, in their picture-book bungalow on a tranquil edge of the village of Hazelbrook, out where Sydney finally ends and the boundless Australian bush begins. “I’m not particularly good at other things,” he added. “I don’t remember names well.”

“Or where he’s put things,” called Elaine from the kitchen."

Comment:

I read this part and it managed to make me laugh (something that hasn't happened so far in this book) so that made it rather memorable.

Connection:

I feel like I can relate to Evans in a lot of ways. Although I have not been tested, I have been told by multiple parents of kids who have autism that I myself might have autism. I also am terrible at memorizing names and lose where I place my things all the time. Perhaps it is a bit of a stretch to compare myself to Evans, but I feel a connection to him nonetheless.

Question:

Is there a connection between being innovated, talented, or smart in certain subjects and misplacing things or forgetting names easily?

Bryson reading chapter 2 QQC

Quote: "A few astronomers continue to think there may be a Planet X out there—a real whopper, perhaps as much as ten times the size of Jupiter, but so far out as to be invisible to us. (It would receive so little sunlight that it would have almost none to reflect.) The idea is that it wouldn’t be a conventional planet like Jupiter  or Saturn—it’s much too far away for that; we’re talking perhaps 4.5 trillion miles—but more like a sun that never quite made it. Most star systems in the cosmos are binary (double-starred), which makes our solitary sun a slight oddity."

Comment: I think the idea of a vary large planet is interesting and very possible, but until proof is found, I remain skeptical towards the matter. I do find it interesting that most star systems consist of pairs of stars (i.e. two suns) while ours is unary consisting of individual stars (i.e. one sun).

Question: How do the binary star systems affect the solar system in comparison to unary star systems? Do they affect things like shape, gravity, orbit, and other aspects? How are these aspects affected?

Bryson reading intro and chapter 1 QQC

Quote: 

"One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier collapsing universe―that we're just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine."

Comment:

I think this is a very interesting and cool idea―the thought that as an individual, we are just one of the many chapters in the story of life, as life, we are just one of the many chapters in the story of the universe, and as the universe, we are just one of the many chapters that are created from each expansion of the universe. This one concept seems like enough to base a setting for a movie (I would totally go watch this movie).

Question:

As I was taught it many years ago, the Big Bang theory was an origin theory of sorts in that it explained how the universe began, but now it seems as though an origin story would go deeper than our universe. It would go deeper than all the universes that expanded and condensed before us. What would be the reason that a universe would re-compact itself after expanding? Every time a universe re-expands, is there always going to be at least one planet that can and will support life before the universe re-compacts itself? Based on this theory, do we have an estimate as to when the universe will re-compact to the spec that it was before? Based on this theory, can we really say that the universe is infinitely large?