According to Associated Press, the work is the closest scientists have come to a real-world quantum encryption system that uses light particles called photons to lock and unlock information instead of random-number "keys." Quantum cryptography depends on a defining discovery in physics: that
subatomic particles can exist in multiple states at once until something interacts with them.
Bestselling author of travelogues, Bryson has collected facts from hundreds of books, articles, and interviews to give his readers a short course in science, a subject he admits to disliking in school Bryson takes his readers on a whirlwind tour through the Universe,
subatomic particles, the origin of heavy elements, the Big Bang, Isaac Newton, the age and weight of the Earth, geology, paleontology, chemistry, Sir Humphrey Davy, the Curies, the atomic age, Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Niels Bohr, quantum mechanics, radiocarbon dating, holes in the ozone, astronomy, plate tectonics, Darwin's Origin of Species, supernovae, the oceans and how life started in them, binomial taxonomy, Leeuwenhoek, Gregor Mendel, Watson and Crick, and recent studies in mitochondrial DNA.