There are two sentences in Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Everything" that absolutely amazed me when I read them the first time: "Even at the speed of light

There are two sentences in Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Everything" that absolutely amazed me when I read them the first time: "Even at the speed of light (300,000 kilometres per second) it would take seven hours to get to Pluto. ... On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant..."