Simon Singh

"… did you know that 60% of measurements and statistics start with a 1, 2 or 3? Distance to the sun, 150,000,000km, starts with a 1. Height of Everest, 29,000ft, starts with a 2. Density of barium, 3.59g/cm3, starts with a 3. You might think that I am (2008 Italian cherry production, 134,407 tonnes, starts with a 1), but if you scan the financial pages of this newspaper then you will see that most numbers do indeed start with a 1, 2 or 3. This eccentricity of the digits is dubbed , because it was made famous by , a physicist at the in New York. He, like the rest of us, had both previously assumed that the starting digit of numbers would be evenly spread among all the numbers from 1 to 9, so he was shocked by his own discovery."

"We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe; that's a good estimate with well-defined error bars and with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you."

"Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste."

"What seems certain is that Pythagoras developed the idea of mathematical logic... He realized that numbers exist independently of the tangible world and therefore their study was untainted by inaccuracies of perception. This meant he could discover truths which were independent of opinion of prejudice and which were more absolute then any previous knowledge."