The Canon (55 page)
Authors: Natalie Angier
trumpeter swans,
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truth, proximate nature of,
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â
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tunicate (sea squirt),
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uncertainty,
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â
[>]
,
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â
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,
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universe
entropy and,
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uracil,
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Urey, Harold,
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valence,
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van der Waals force,
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â
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,
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,
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Varmus, Harold,
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vinegar,
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Volta, Count Alessandro,
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â
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Wake, David,
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â
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,
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,
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,
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Wallace, Alfred,
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Washington, George,
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water.
See also
ocean
atmosphere and,
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chemical links in,
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comets and,
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life and,
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Watson, James,
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Watt, James,
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Wegener, Alfred,
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Weinberg, Steven,
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,
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,
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â
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whale,
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whip scorpion,
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White, Tim,
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white blood cells, in invertebrates,
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â
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Whitman, Walt,
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Wigler, Michael,
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Wigner, Eugene,
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Wildlife Conservation Society (Bronx, New York),
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â
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Wilson, Edward O.,
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Women's Health Initiative,
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X-rays,
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yeast
cell division and,
[>]
metabolism and,
[>]
yoctosecond,
[>]
zeptosecond,
[>]
* Tom Stoppard's pleasurably unsettling comedy
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
opens with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the road to Elsinore, repeatedly flipping coins and getting heads every time.
***
â This multiplication rule only applies to calculating probabilities when each event in the sequence is independent of the other, as it is when you're tossing a coin. It could not be applied in cases where one event is likely to influence the other. For example, you can't calculate the likelihood of a man having a beard and mustache by multiplying the individual probabilities together, because, Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding, men with beards generally opt for mustaches as well.
***
* This additive rule requires that the two events be mutually exclusive, and again coin tossing fits the bill: with only a single penny on hand, you can't flip four heads and four tails simultaneously.
***
* I must emphasize that the "95 percent accuracy figure" bandied above is strictly hypothetical, and that the true accuracy rate for today's HIV tests is much better, greater than 99.9 percent. Nevertheless, the use of medical assays and "routine screens" is rising sharply, and many of them suffer from distressingly high and decidedly nonhypothetical rates of false positives.
Caveat patiens.
***
* Following the lead of my nation's educational system, I will alternate between metric and the old British units throughout the book.
***
* In the mid-twentieth century, Murray Gell-Mann, a theoretical physicist and puckish promoter of
Finnegans Wake,
famously named the fundamental building blocks of matter "quarks," after a line from James Joyce's least readable novel: "Three quarks for Muster Mark! / Sure he hasn't got much of a bark / And sure any he has it's all beside the mark." Despite Joyce's presum0ed intent that "quark" be pronounced to rhyme with
Mark
and
bark,
the subatomic particle generally is articulated
kwôrk
(as in
pork),
which also happens to be the preferred pronunciation for the creamy, acid-cured cheese product popular in Germany.
***
* Argon, krypton, xenon, and radon.
***
* The late Stephen Jay Gould favored the latter scenario, which he called punctuated equilibrium: evolutionary stability as the norm, punctuated every now and then by mass extinctions and evolutionary overhauls; and because Gould, as a scientist, essayist, and best-selling author, did more than anybody else to introduce Darwinism to a popular audience, his take on the subject accordingly has been widely aired.
***
* Because the set of possible three-part combinations of DNA (64) exceeds that of amino acids in need of encoding (20 standard ones), most amino acids are specified by several different triplets of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs. The amino acids arginine, leucine, and serine all claim the uppermost number of six descriptors apiece, while poor tryptophan and methionine are accorded just one monogram each. Not surprisingly, tryptophan ends up being a relatively rare subunit in the protein community, though nevertheless essential to human health and happiness. From tryptophan the body makes serotonin, the familiar brain chemical that drugs like Prozac seek to enhance.
***
* This is not true of the DNA in bacteria and other prokaryotes, which divide early and often and thus cannot afford to carry around the genetic equivalent of likes and ums and twiddling thumbs. Bacterial genomes are much cleaner and terser than our own.