”…I didn’t know what a proton was, or a protein, didn’t know a quark from a quasar, didn’t know how an atom was put together and couldn’t imagine by what means anyone deduced such a thing. Suddenly I had a powerful, uncharacteristic urge to know something about these matters and to understand how people figured them out.” – Bill Bryson, from the back cover of *A Short History of Nearly Everything
I, like Bill Bryson, have a natural curiosity about things. Call it a quest for knowledge or an insatiable knack for trivia, but I am always thirsting for knowledge. Bryson, however, has used his previous experience from classics like A Walk in the Woods and Neither Here Nor There to create a magnificent guide to the “History of Nearly Everything”.
In it, he does indeed cover quarks (sub-atomic particles) and quasars (dying stars which emit rhythmic electromagnetic pulses), Australopithecus (an early hominid) and volcanic ash layers. Bryson’s natural curiosity is evident, and his good humor often makes a quick visit to material many would not consider funny.
*A Short History of Nearly Everything covers the flow of history as we know it. Starting with the origins of the universe, he not only examines the facts (at least as we know them at this point) but how we got to them – the men and the process that led to our current theories and knowledge. And he manages to do it in a manner that, while educated, does not come across as too complex.
In addition to the cosmos, he tackles such diverse topics as:
-- The formation of the Earth
-- Dinosaur Extinctions
-- Cellular Development
-- Scientific Discovery
-- Geology & Meteorology
The book begins with explanations of the basics as to how the universe was formed. He flawlessly describes the way that the universe expanded from a single pinpoint of matter into the massive expanse of space we know today. Although he uses a lot of technical jargon, he also manages to give simple explanations for it.
After we learn about the formation of the universe, we look inward to toward the solar system and then back out to the place of our solar system in the cosmos – a small system among a billion trillion others throughout our galaxy alone. We learn about how the knowledge of our little planet and its environs was ‘discovered’, and how science slowly developed from it. Hundreds of names are given, most of which we’ll forget by the end of the book – but the names add to the historical reference he gives. In fact, many times it is these scientists that ARE the story as they try to answer the questions which produced us.
Bryson quickly moves on to the Age of Scientific Discovery – chiefly how science developed through the last half-millennium. Of particular interest to many ‘scientists’ were the topics such as the weight and age of the Earth. Not the seemingly exciting topics you may hope for, but Bryson’s method of curious documentary works well to describe the minds and methods of the era:
”Newton was a decidedly odd figure – brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. He built his own laboratory, the first at Cambridge, but then engaged in the most bizarre experiments. Once he inserted a bodkin – a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather – into his eye socket and rubbed it around ‘betwixt my eye and the bone as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could’ just to see what would happen. What happened – miraculously, was nothing – at least nothing lasting.” (page 46).
So, we learn that Newton was a bit of a crack-pot in addition to a brilliant scientist. He speaks of the pre-eminent names of scientific history – Newton, Halley and Lyell – and makes them come alive as characters in his story. He also does a brilliant job of explaining how commonplace fields of science, such as geology, came about often on the backs of simple men who did it as a hobby. And we get to see the seemly side of science – these men didn’t always play very nice, and Bryson shows the warts as well as the prizes. This continues through the chapters on life and elements as well.
Part 3 of the book tackles modern science, beginning with “Einstein’s Universe”. We get to know a man whose mind was as eclectic as his hair – “When the poet Paul Valery once asked Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. ‘Oh, that’s not necessary,’ he replied. ‘It’s so seldom that I have one.’” (page 123). But his brilliance was unquestionable as we discover in this easy-to-understand biography of Einstein and his theories that changed physics forever. The atom is the next logical choice for material, followed by a bit of an odd chapter, “Getting the Lead Out”, which details how science can sometimes be a bad thing, as is the case with lead and corporate greed.
The last two chapters of this portion of the book jump back into sub-atomic particles and then to plate tectonics - I’m not sure of the sequencing, but somehow it works. Plate tectonics leads to our wonderfully dangerous planet. Bryson really starts to hit his stride here, glorifying in the things he can understand at a ‘reach-out-and-touch-it level (understandably, quarks and muouns are tough to really get a handle on). In Chapter 13, “Bang”, we examine interstellar visitors in the form of BIG ROCKS and their effect on the planet, while the next two chapters take on the Earth’s interior and the havoc it can create – specifically earthquakes and volcanoes. Particularly interesting are his observations on the biggest volcano in North America – no, not Mt. St. Helens - Yellowstone National Park. He seems to have a lot of fun with this section of the book, leaving the theoretical and difficult to comprehend and returning to the knowable portions of science. Yellowstone provided exceptional material, the very least of which is the potential it could have as a destructive force.
Part 5 is Bryson’s mega-chapter. Once again, he’s got a better sense of humor about the origins and diversity of life. He covered the chemical origins earlier, and now we get a biology lesson. From the first organisms to the eventual supremacy of dinosaurs takes a span of 60 pages. We see how fossils are formed (and discovered), hypothesize on their extinctions, and study the sheer magnificence of how life has developed into nearly countless forms. While we start at a unicellular level, we soon get to discover cells, how they become you and how you are who you are because of DNA. Oh, and how amazing is it that DNA was discovered at all.
When he reaches the macroverse of life – namely things we can readily see – his passion comes through with the subjects he in more intimately familiar with – especially us humans. In Part 6, he starts touching on where ‘we’ came from. It begins with the Ice Ages and how unlikely it was that we were able to expand our range at all in the face of ice a mile and a half thick. He talks of Darwin, but his discussion of evolution doesn’t address the scientific basis for the theory as much as it discusses the people and the thinking behind the development of the theory – including those who opposed it. He then spends 2 chapters discussing the fossil evidence of humanity’s probably ancestors, including the confusion of how exactly our line came about. He does a fantastic job of showing the evidence and the difficultly in proving anything because of the fragmented record.
The final chapter, “Good-Bye”, is perhaps the saddest story in our known history, and his frustration and anger actually show through his words as his objectivity wavers. 99.99% of all of the species to ever exist on Earth are gone through no fault of humans. But the rapidity of the assault on the last 0.01% we have waged is amazing. By both deliberate and inadvertent methods, humanity has accounted for perhaps 50% of all extinctions since we became smart enough to climb out of the trees. Even now, scientists estimate we are causing extinctions at a rate 120,000 times the natural level.
Through it all, be it cells or volcanoes, Australopithecus or extinction level cometary impacts, Bryson’s genuine love for learning is evident. He’s a brilliant writer, and this talent makes subjects as diverse as the discoverer of magnesium (Humphry Davy) to the name of the oldest living bacteria (Bacillus permians - 250 million years young) exciting and compelling to read. This book was about more than the next one on his contract – it was a passion for knowledge and answers, and it shows in every passage.
He can be irreverent at times, but that is Bill Bryson – sometimes science can use some humor to liven it up, and he is a good source. He is also skilled as a storyteller, and it is THAT skill which makes it easy to read this book. This is far from being a text book – it is a campfire story, an urban legend and a generational fable told with the skill on a skilled mystic orator. But it IS still science, and some will just not find the material compelling. You may not care that Avogadro’s number is 6.022x10E23 molecules (which, by the way, is a VERY big number) or that Charles Doolittle Walcott made one of the most significant fossil discoveries in North America. That’s fine. But if you have wondered how we know how hot it is on the sun, or just have a desire to find out how we know what we do, “*A Short History of Nearly Everything” provides a witty, hard-to-put-down story of Life, the Universe … and Everything.
10 FACTS YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T KNOW
FACT 1 The human body contains 7,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of potential energy – about the same as 30 Hydrogen bombs.
FACT 2 If the solar system were drawn to scale, with the Earth the size of a pea, Jupiter would be 1,000 feet away, but Pluto would be about 1.5 MILES away (and the size of a bacterium).
FACT 3 The first dinosaur skeleton discovered was in Haddonfield, NJ in 1787
FACT 4 The Chesapeake Bay was formed by a cometary impact.
FACT 5 The largest recorded earthquake was off of the coast of Chile in 1960, and was measured at 9.5 on the Richter scale.
FACT 6 Yellowstone National Park is actually the site of a supervolcano. All told, virtually 2.2 million acres form an active caldera (volcanic pit).
FACT 7 A typical cell will contain over 20,000 different proteins.
FACT 8 The dodo was already extinct due to man before the first descriptions of it ever reached scientists.
FACT 9 Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2 was not in his famous paper describing the Theory of Relativity. It was actually published later in a supplement to the original paper.
FACT 10 If you took back your ancestry 30 generations, you could count 1,073,741,824 people as your great-to-the-umpth-degree-grandparents. However, because of inbreeding and cross-breeding, that number is significantly less.
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