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By the middle of the nineteenth century most learned people thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions of years old, but probably not more than that. So it came as a surprise when, in 1859 in On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald, an area of southern England stretching across Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, had taken, by his calculations, 306,662,400 years to complete. The assertion was remarkable partly for being so arrestingly specific but even more for flying in the face of accepted wisdom about the age of the Earth.*10 It proved so contentious that Darwin withdrew it from the third edition of the book. The problem at its heart remained, however. Darwin and his geological friends needed the Earth to be old, but no one could figure out a way to make it so.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
the likelihood of someone completing a STEM degree—all things being equal—rises by 2 percentage points for every 10-point decrease in the university’s average SAT score.4 The smarter your peers, the dumber you feel; the dumber you feel, the more likely you are to drop out of science. Since there is roughly a 150-point gap between the average SAT scores of students attending the University of Maryland and Brown, the “penalty” Sacks paid by choosing a great school over a good school is that she reduced her chances of graduating with a science degree by 30 percent. Thirty percent! At a time when students with liberal arts degrees struggle to find jobs, students with STEM degrees are almost assured of good careers. Jobs for people with science and engineering degrees are plentiful and highly paid. That’s a very large risk to take for the prestige of an Ivy League school.
David and Goliath
Malcolm Gladwell
Nevertheless, Halperin’s revelations to me of the president’s secretly ambitious aims and his reliance on threats of escalation to achieve them were enough to prompt my decision to copy the Top Secret Pentagon Papers. I was sure his threats would not succeed, and would instead prolong the ground war and enlarge the air war, with heavy further casualties on both sides. If I had known then about Nixon’s imminent nuclear threats and plans and had any documents on these, I would have revealed them immediately, instead of the history in the Pentagon Papers, which ended in 1968 before Nixon came to office. Later, when the papers were published in 1971, Henry Kissinger’s fear that I did know about Nixon’s nuclear threats and plans, and might have documents to back it up, was sufficient reason for him to regard me as “the most dangerous man in America,”260 who “must be stopped at all costs.” As I mentioned in the introduction, it was the unlikely exposure of White House crimes against me—actions precisely intended to avert my revealing documents from the Nixon administration, beyond the period of the Pentagon Papers—that led to Nixon’s resignation facing impeachment, making the war endable nine months later.
The Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg
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