This from the book I’m currently reading called Everday Survival by Laurence Gonzales -
Exactly how does the big bang, some 10 or 20 million years ago, go about producing Fruity Cheerios?
I can only assume that the word ‘million’ in a book by someone who appears to have a reasonable grasp of science was either a typo or substituted for billion by an ignorant copy editor.
But that apart, what a great line!
There’s a similar line at the beginning of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything in which he describes the epoch of cosmic inflation which took, to paraphrase Bryson, ‘about as long as it might take you to make a sandwich’.