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A Short History of Nearly Everything 1st Edition, Kindle Edition
In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail—well, most of it. In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand—and, if possible, answer—the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.
- ISBN-109780767916417
- ISBN-13978-0767908177
- Edition1st
- PublisherCrown
- Publication dateMay 6, 2003
- LanguageEnglish
- File size3937 KB
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Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Bryson has made a career writing hilarious travelogues, and in many ways his latest is more of the same, except that this time Bryson hikes through the world of science.”
—People
“Bryson is surprisingly precise, brilliantly eccentric and nicely eloquent . . . a gifted storyteller has dared to retell the world’s biggest story.”
—Seattle Times
“Hefty, highly researched and eminently readable.”
—Simon Winchester, The Globe and Mail
“All non-scientists (and probably many specialized scientists, too) can learn a great deal from his lucid and amiable explanations.”
—National Post
"Bryson is a terrific stylist. You can’ t help but enjoy his writing, for its cheer and buoyancy, and for the frequent demonstration of his peculiar, engaging turn of mind.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“Wonderfully readable. It is, in the best sense, learned.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
HOW TO BUILD A UNIVERSE
No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small.
A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years. So protons are exceedingly microscopic, to say the very least.
Now imagine if you can (and of course you can't) shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small that it would make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter. Excellent. You are ready to start a universe.
I'm assuming of course that you wish to build an inflationary universe. If you'd prefer instead to build a more old-fashioned, standard Big Bang universe, you'll need additional materials. In fact, you will need to gather up everything there is—every last mote and particle of matter between here and the edge of creation—and squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all. It is known as a singularity.
In either case, get ready for a really big bang. Naturally, you will wish to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because outside the singularity there is no where. When the universe begins to expand, it won't be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.
It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no "around" around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there—whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.
And so, from nothing, our universe begins.
In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements—principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.
When this moment happened is a matter of some debate. Cosmologists have long argued over whether the moment of creation was 10 billion years ago or twice that or something in between. The consensus seems to be heading for a figure of about 13.7 billion years, but these things are notoriously difficult to measure, as we shall see further on. All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.
There is of course a great deal we don't know, and much of what we think we know we haven't known, or thought we've known, for long. Even the notion of the Big Bang is quite a recent one. The idea had been kicking around since the 1920s, when Georges Lem tre, a Belgian priest-scholar, first tentatively proposed it, but it didn't really become an active notion in cosmology until the mid-1960s when two young radio astronomers made an extraordinary and inadvertent discovery.
Their names were Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. In 1965, they were trying to make use of a large communications antenna owned by Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, but they were troubled by a persistent background noise—a steady, steamy hiss that made any experimental work impossible. The noise was unrelenting and unfocused. It came from every point in the sky, day and night, through every season. For a year the young astronomers did everything they could think of to track down and eliminate the noise. They tested every electrical system. They rebuilt instruments, checked circuits, wiggled wires, dusted plugs. They climbed into the dish and placed duct tape over every seam and rivet. They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as "white dielectric material," or what is known more commonly as bird shit. Nothing they tried worked.
Unknown to them, just thirty miles away at Princeton University, a team of scientists led by Robert Dicke was working on how to find the very thing they were trying so diligently to get rid of. The Princeton researchers were pursuing an idea that had been suggested in the 1940s by the Russian-born astrophysicist George Gamow that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Gamow calculated that by the time it crossed the vastness of the cosmos, the radiation would reach Earth in the form of microwaves. In a more recent paper he had even suggested an instrument that might do the job: the Bell antenna at Holmdel. Unfortunately, neither Penzias and Wilson, nor any of the Princeton team, had read Gamow's paper.
The noise that Penzias and Wilson were hearing was, of course, the noise that Gamow had postulated. They had found the edge of the universe, or at least the visible part of it, 90 billion trillion miles away. They were "seeing" the first photons—the most ancient light in the universe—though time and distance had converted them to microwaves, just as Gamow had predicted. In his book The Inflationary Universe, Alan Guth provides an analogy that helps to put this finding in perspective. If you think of peering into the depths of the universe as like looking down from the hundredth floor of the Empire State Building (with the hundredth floor representing now and street level representing the moment of the Big Bang), at the time of Wilson and Penzias's discovery the most distant galaxies anyone had ever detected were on about the sixtieth floor, and the most distant things—quasars—were on about the twentieth. Penzias and Wilson's finding pushed our acquaintance with the visible universe to within half an inch of the sidewalk.
Still unaware of what caused the noise, Wilson and Penzias phoned Dicke at Princeton and described their problem to him in the hope that he might suggest a solution. Dicke realized at once what the two young men had found. "Well, boys, we've just been scooped," he told his colleagues as he hung up the phone.
Soon afterward the Astrophysical Journal published two articles: one by Penzias and Wilson describing their experience with the hiss, the other by Dicke's team explaining its nature. Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn't know what it was when they had found it, and hadn't described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times.
Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.
Although everyone calls it the Big Bang, many books caution us not to think of it as an explosion in the conventional sense. It was, rather, a vast, sudden expansion on a whopping scale. So what caused it?
Product details
- ASIN : B000FBFNII
- Publisher : Crown; 1st edition (May 6, 2003)
- Publication date : May 6, 2003
- Language : English
- File size : 3937 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 560 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #25,621 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #7 in Science & Scientists Humor
- #37 in Evolution (Books)
- #37 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. Settled in England for many years, he moved to America with his wife and four children for a few years ,but has since returned to live in the UK. His bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Notes From a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Down Under. His acclaimed work of popular science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize, and was the biggest selling non-fiction book of the decade in the UK.
Photography © Julian J
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book easy to read and engaging. They appreciate the well-researched and clear explanations of complex ideas. The humor and style keep the content entertaining. Readers appreciate the concise yet comprehensive history coverage. Overall, they describe the book as a must-read for anyone interested in learning more about science and history.
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Customers find the book easy to read and engaging. They appreciate the background details and anecdotes about famous scientists. The book is described as a fun and accessible read that makes science accessible to anyone.
"...He absolutely enraptures the reader and makes one wonder how we even figured anything out at all...." Read more
"...A thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating book which does not pretend to be scientific, but is more about scientists and how they have changed the way..." Read more
"...He meets with a wonderful cast of men and women to highlight the personalities behind the stories of discovery...." Read more
"Loved this book when I read it from the library, and now I have my own copy that I can highlight or mark up.... or not...." Read more
Customers find the book informative and well-researched. The author's unique prose breaks down complex ideas and explains discoveries in an understandable way for the average person. They appreciate the human side of science provided through characters, making science accessible to anyone. Readers also mention that the book provides thorough and extensive notations and bibliographies, making it a useful guide to get an abstract view of science.
"...also fortunate that his unique prose serves as a perfect tool for breaking down complex ideas and explaining discoveries and natural science from..." Read more
"...This book is chock-full of homages to famous scientists and many who were less lauded...." Read more
"...himself and ultimately delivered a lively, accessible, and mostly scientifically faithful, albeit cursory, proem to the history of the universe as..." Read more
"Full of information about how things come about, one thing leading to another. An important reminder that nothing happens in a void...." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's humor. They find it witty, informative, and easy to read. The author has a wry sense of humor that shines through, making the topics fun and accessible. The book is described as lively and engaging, conveying the joy and excitement of science.
"...narrative that he excels at, we are also fortunate that his unique prose serves as a perfect tool for breaking down complex ideas and explaining..." Read more
"...It is an entertaining romp through, well, just about everything, as the title suggests...." Read more
"...Bryson set an ambitious task for himself and ultimately delivered a lively, accessible, and mostly scientifically faithful, albeit cursory, proem to..." Read more
"...His wit shines through." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's history. They find it entertaining and informative, presenting an objective view of our origins with compelling human interest stories. The book provides a sweeping narrative that includes facts, details, and side stories that make each topic feel interesting.
"...everything that you think you know about the universe, broadens the scope of this thought, and increases the breadth and depth of detail by such a..." Read more
"...It is a potted history of science, mostly, which describes how we have studied this planet of ours and some of the astonishing conclusions that can..." Read more
"...Bryson marshals science, history, and philosophy to present a big-picture understanding of our universe from past to present...." Read more
"...did not rise out of a mist; we are on a link of a long and interesting chain of events, and the chain will continue to evolve." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's length. They find it well-documented with 38 pages of notes and 11 pages of bibliography. The book can be read through or broken up into chapter-sized chunks. It provides a brief and concise overview of various subjects. Some readers mention it's a good audio book for long drives, with humorous analogies that help understand their sheer scale.
"...His frequently humorous analogies help you understand their sheer scale and the havoc left in their wake...." Read more
"...chapters about the size of things in the universe, such as the vastness of space, down to the puzzling subatomic levels, was frequently mind..." Read more
"...It's a long read, but well worth the effort." Read more
"...the background details of the famous scientists, but it got a bit long in the tooth when discussing some of the origins of man and of the universe." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's vivid illustrations and classy presentation. They find the scope of the book breathtaking, with wonderful illustrations and a thoughtful style. The book is accessible and well-written, providing an insightful look into the lives of humans on this beautiful planet.
"...in a seamless, logical fashion, not always chronological but always illuminating...." Read more
"...The broad picture is certain, even if not all the brushstrokes have been made...." Read more
"...The over-all view is great. Not sure if he covered 'everything' but he sure did come close." Read more
"Bryson's narrative is clear, crisp, and humored as he delves into the major scientific disciplines and their current postulations and problems...." Read more
Customers find the book offers good value for money. They say it's worth the time and money, with a nice price for a social science book. The seller is happy with the book and transaction.
"...paleontology, planetary and cosmological sciences to an impressive degree for a single book...." Read more
"...It's a long read, but well worth the effort." Read more
"...is, to me, worth the price of the book all by itself...." Read more
"Pros Interesting read Teaches you a lot about science Fair price Fast shipping" Read more
Customers have different views on the book's boredom. Some find it engaging and make science seem lively. Others feel it gets tiresome after a while and gets bogged down in the last chapters.
"...Of course, the book is superficial but hey, it is, after all, a short history of EVERYTHING...." Read more
"...us to grasp, to the extent that seems possible, the interrelatedness of all physical phenomona...." Read more
"A frustrating book. It's a history of knowledge written as a gossip column...." Read more
"...find less interesting (chemistry, biology) rather tedious and even boring. The author writes in a style easily understandable to a lay person...." Read more
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A Sweep of the Cosmos
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2023I have spent my life wondering about the natural world around me. In fact, I've made a career from these interests. I know a bit about the cosmos, and I'll have conversations over a beer about elementary quantum mechanics. I'll rant passionately about successional stages of forests and the importance of wilderness conservation.
I understand time dilation and mycorrhizal relationships between plants, fungi, and animals and the indescribable and excruciating importance of the resiliency it produces on our planets.
I feel like I can understand the wonder of accretion disk theory in the creation of our early solar system from the nebulae of our own incarnate sun's previous corpse. Sometimes I even think I can understand in a rudimentary way how a runaway chemical reaction could lead to life. To us.
This book takes everything that you think you know about the universe, broadens the scope of this thought, and increases the breadth and depth of detail by such a factor as to be nearly overwhelming. I particularly enjoy the human aspect that Bill is able to infuse into his narrative. He absolutely enraptures the reader and makes one wonder how we even figured anything out at all.
Time and time again, as discoveries were made, we see through Bill's detailed research that we are lucky indeed that history played out the way it did. He also raises the thought of what we may have lost along the way. In addition to Bill's historical narrative that he excels at, we are also fortunate that his unique prose serves as a perfect tool for breaking down complex ideas and explaining discoveries and natural science from everything we know (and think we know) into a nearly easily digestible narrative that keeps you hooked, page after page.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2012This book, in common with just about everything Bill Bryson writes, is absolutely wonderful. It is an entertaining romp through, well, just about everything, as the title suggests. It is a potted history of science, mostly, which describes how we have studied this planet of ours and some of the astonishing conclusions that can be drawn from that study. Bryson's prose style is fluid and wickedly funny. To cite just a two examples:
"Smith's revelation regarding strata heightened the moral awkwardness concerning extinctions. To begin with, it confirmed that God had wiped out creatures not occasionally but repeatedly. This made Him seem not so much careless as peculiarly hostile....God, it appeared, hadn't wished to distract or alarm Moses with news of earlier, irrelevant extinctions."
"We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.)"
This book is chock-full of homages to famous scientists and many who were less lauded. There are some wild theories (and bad science) discussed, but always illustrated with surprising examples:
"When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy."
Placing the human species within the context of the history of our planet, Bryson does end on a sobering note:
"Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all....It is a curious fact that on Earth species death is, in the most literal sense, a way of life....99.99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us. `To a first approximation,' as David Raup of the University of Chicago likes to say, `all species are extinct.' For complex organisms, the average lifespan of a species is only about four million years - roughly about where we are now."
A thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating book which does not pretend to be scientific, but is more about scientists and how they have changed the way we look at, and live in, our world.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2014“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you.”
A Short History of Nearly Everything is not as impossibly far-reaching as the title would indicate. An attempt to cram everything and the kitchen sink into a work intended for the general reader is surely a recipe for failure—or so one might think. Bryson marshals science, history, and philosophy to present a big-picture understanding of our universe from past to present. Extraneous details are filtered out, and mysteries left unexamined, yet it somehow feels complete. Not unlike a film editor who can cut down 24 hours of production material into a feature-length film, he manages to pack a world of wonder and insight into an accessible and entertaining, though relatively lengthy (544-page) tome.
Bryson’s preoccupation is less with the rote repetition of facts (though there is that, too) than with conveying just how it is we know what we know. He takes us behind the curtain for a more intimate look at the process of discovery and the strokes of genius essential to that process.
Lengthy and mildly scatterbrained it might be, ASHONE is a pure literary delight. The author’s excitement and enthusiasm for the subject matter drip from every page. The sheer joy he receives from learning little gems he missed in high school or being reintroduced to information forgotten long ago is intoxicating. He meets with a wonderful cast of men and women to highlight the personalities behind the stories of discovery. Lone geniuses are a rarity in any field, and science is no exception. Bryson scratches below the surface to meet the individuals who played prominent roles yet went unrecognized.
In taking the long view, Bryson engages some of science’s toughest questions. Everything from the Big Bang to man’s (relatively terse) evolutionary past is presented here, with a nod to some of the more eminent and intriguing figures from each field. I particularly appreciated that after a concept was explained, he immediately followed up with the most obvious question in response. It really helps the lay reader navigate these complex topics.
Bryson spends a good amount of time on natural disasters, describing the many ways in which they shaped the history of our planet. His frequently humorous analogies help you understand their sheer scale and the havoc left in their wake. Ice ages, earthquakes, supervolcanoes, and pandemics are each showcased in breathtaking detail in some of the most harrowing events on planetary record. Given all the chaos that has besieged our planet, it becomes soberingly clear by the book’s end that we humans—or any life for that matter—are incredibly lucky to be here. In light of all that can go wrong and has gone wrong, it’s remarkable there is any life left to comment on the tragedy and storied disarray. I commend Bryson for demonstrating how truly diminutive our time here on Earth is relative to the universe’s imponderably vast history.
Bryson should also be applauded for pointing out places where our inquiry has hit a brick wall or those areas that remain imperfectly understood. The fact that we have accumulated such vast storehouses of knowledge over the last few centuries does not mean there are no mysteries left to explore. Indeed, dozens of questions both big and small remain unanswered, and new discoveries have a tendency to open up several more. We can both be proud about what we have uncovered to date and humble about the many uncharted possibilities that surely await us.
Fast and Loose with Science
There are a few caveats, however, with respect to some of the finer details. In one place he describes particles with “spin” as actually rotating about an axis (they are not). This erroneous conception of elementary particles dates back to the 1920s, when George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit interpreted the motion of electrons as self-rotation around their own axis. A few years later, Paul Dirac pointed out that electrons could not be spinning according to the rules of orbital angular momentum because the rate at which their surface would have to be spinning (to produce the magnitude of the magnetic moment) would have to exceed the speed of light, which would violate the special theory of relativity.
In another place Bryson says that quantum entanglement is a violation of relativity (it is not). Relativity tells us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and this applies even to things with zero mass, such as information or other electromagnetic radiation. Entanglement says that measuring a particle in one place can instantly affect a particle somewhere else. However, this effect is constrained by the cosmic speed limit. On p. 42 of his book What Is Relativity?, Jeffrey Bennett responds to this notion:
“However, while laboratory experiments suggest that this instantaneous effect can really happen, current understanding of physics tells us that it cannot be used to transmit any useful information from one place to the other; indeed, if you were at the location of the first particle and wanted to confirm that the second had been affected, you’d need to receive a signal from its location, and that signal could not travel faster than light.”
Bryson also claims that the production of black holes within particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider could destroy the world, when in fact, these microscopic black holes would disintegrate in nanoseconds thanks to Hawking radiation. On p. 154 of the same book, Bennett also debunks this largely media-driven fear:
“Some physicists have indeed proposed scenarios in which such micro black holes could be produced in the Large Hadron Collider, but even if they are right, there’s nothing to worry about. The reason is that while the LHC can generate particles from greater concentrations of energy than any other machine that humans have ever built, nature routinely makes such particles. Some of those particles must occasionally rain down on Earth, so if they were dangerous, we would have suffered the consequences long ago.
"In case you are wondering how a micro black hole could be “safe,” the most likely answer has to do with a process called Hawking radiation…Hawking showed that the laws of quantum physics imply that black holes can gradually “evaporate” in the sense of having their masses decrease, even while nothing ever escapes from within their event horizons. The rate of evaporation depends on a black hole’s mass, with lower-mass black holes evaporating much more rapidly. The result is that while the evaporation rate would be negligible for black holes with star-like masses or greater, micro black holes would evaporate in a fraction of a second, long before they could do any damage.”
He may have consulted with experts, but the manuscript could have benefited from additional fact-checking. That said, although the book was published in 2003, there is little that is out of date as of this writing—the confirmed interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denisovans being one notable discovery of late that adds greater texture to the stories recounted here. Additionally, I feel there could (and should) have been a greater emphasis on climate change; Bryson seemed to skirt over it whenever a related topic arose, and it's not clear whether this was intentional.
Closing Thoughts
The content in ASHONE is something I think everyone should know and be exposed to, and it's hard to imagine the material presented with greater alacrity than it is here. The passion and unbridled enthusiasm on display frequently approaches Sagan-esque proportions, in a style redolent of the signature series Cosmos, which is about the highest praise a work in this genre could hope to achieve. Though I found a few errors—and suspect the average grad student in one of a number of the subjects covered could spot a handful more—the book is nevertheless a praiseworthy stab at science writing for the layperson. Bryson set an ambitious task for himself and ultimately delivered a lively, accessible, and mostly scientifically faithful, albeit cursory, proem to the history of the universe as we know it today.
“Even now as a species, we are almost preposterously vulnerable in the wild. Nearly every large animal you can care to name is stronger, faster and toothier than us. Faced with attack, modern humans have only two advantages. We have a good brain, with which we can devise strategies, and we have hands with which we can fling or brandish hurtful objects. We are the only creature that can harm at a distance. We can thus afford to be physically vulnerable.” (p. 447)
4.0 out of 5 stars A Sweep of the Cosmos“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you.”
Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2014
A Short History of Nearly Everything is not as impossibly far-reaching as the title would indicate. An attempt to cram everything and the kitchen sink into a work intended for the general reader is surely a recipe for failure—or so one might think. Bryson marshals science, history, and philosophy to present a big-picture understanding of our universe from past to present. Extraneous details are filtered out, and mysteries left unexamined, yet it somehow feels complete. Not unlike a film editor who can cut down 24 hours of production material into a feature-length film, he manages to pack a world of wonder and insight into an accessible and entertaining, though relatively lengthy (544-page) tome.
Bryson’s preoccupation is less with the rote repetition of facts (though there is that, too) than with conveying just how it is we know what we know. He takes us behind the curtain for a more intimate look at the process of discovery and the strokes of genius essential to that process.
Lengthy and mildly scatterbrained it might be, ASHONE is a pure literary delight. The author’s excitement and enthusiasm for the subject matter drip from every page. The sheer joy he receives from learning little gems he missed in high school or being reintroduced to information forgotten long ago is intoxicating. He meets with a wonderful cast of men and women to highlight the personalities behind the stories of discovery. Lone geniuses are a rarity in any field, and science is no exception. Bryson scratches below the surface to meet the individuals who played prominent roles yet went unrecognized.
In taking the long view, Bryson engages some of science’s toughest questions. Everything from the Big Bang to man’s (relatively terse) evolutionary past is presented here, with a nod to some of the more eminent and intriguing figures from each field. I particularly appreciated that after a concept was explained, he immediately followed up with the most obvious question in response. It really helps the lay reader navigate these complex topics.
Bryson spends a good amount of time on natural disasters, describing the many ways in which they shaped the history of our planet. His frequently humorous analogies help you understand their sheer scale and the havoc left in their wake. Ice ages, earthquakes, supervolcanoes, and pandemics are each showcased in breathtaking detail in some of the most harrowing events on planetary record. Given all the chaos that has besieged our planet, it becomes soberingly clear by the book’s end that we humans—or any life for that matter—are incredibly lucky to be here. In light of all that can go wrong and has gone wrong, it’s remarkable there is any life left to comment on the tragedy and storied disarray. I commend Bryson for demonstrating how truly diminutive our time here on Earth is relative to the universe’s imponderably vast history.
Bryson should also be applauded for pointing out places where our inquiry has hit a brick wall or those areas that remain imperfectly understood. The fact that we have accumulated such vast storehouses of knowledge over the last few centuries does not mean there are no mysteries left to explore. Indeed, dozens of questions both big and small remain unanswered, and new discoveries have a tendency to open up several more. We can both be proud about what we have uncovered to date and humble about the many uncharted possibilities that surely await us.
Fast and Loose with Science
There are a few caveats, however, with respect to some of the finer details. In one place he describes particles with “spin” as actually rotating about an axis (they are not). This erroneous conception of elementary particles dates back to the 1920s, when George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit interpreted the motion of electrons as self-rotation around their own axis. A few years later, Paul Dirac pointed out that electrons could not be spinning according to the rules of orbital angular momentum because the rate at which their surface would have to be spinning (to produce the magnitude of the magnetic moment) would have to exceed the speed of light, which would violate the special theory of relativity.
In another place Bryson says that quantum entanglement is a violation of relativity (it is not). Relativity tells us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and this applies even to things with zero mass, such as information or other electromagnetic radiation. Entanglement says that measuring a particle in one place can instantly affect a particle somewhere else. However, this effect is constrained by the cosmic speed limit. On p. 42 of his book What Is Relativity?, Jeffrey Bennett responds to this notion:
“However, while laboratory experiments suggest that this instantaneous effect can really happen, current understanding of physics tells us that it cannot be used to transmit any useful information from one place to the other; indeed, if you were at the location of the first particle and wanted to confirm that the second had been affected, you’d need to receive a signal from its location, and that signal could not travel faster than light.”
Bryson also claims that the production of black holes within particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider could destroy the world, when in fact, these microscopic black holes would disintegrate in nanoseconds thanks to Hawking radiation. On p. 154 of the same book, Bennett also debunks this largely media-driven fear:
“Some physicists have indeed proposed scenarios in which such micro black holes could be produced in the Large Hadron Collider, but even if they are right, there’s nothing to worry about. The reason is that while the LHC can generate particles from greater concentrations of energy than any other machine that humans have ever built, nature routinely makes such particles. Some of those particles must occasionally rain down on Earth, so if they were dangerous, we would have suffered the consequences long ago.
"In case you are wondering how a micro black hole could be “safe,” the most likely answer has to do with a process called Hawking radiation…Hawking showed that the laws of quantum physics imply that black holes can gradually “evaporate” in the sense of having their masses decrease, even while nothing ever escapes from within their event horizons. The rate of evaporation depends on a black hole’s mass, with lower-mass black holes evaporating much more rapidly. The result is that while the evaporation rate would be negligible for black holes with star-like masses or greater, micro black holes would evaporate in a fraction of a second, long before they could do any damage.”
He may have consulted with experts, but the manuscript could have benefited from additional fact-checking. That said, although the book was published in 2003, there is little that is out of date as of this writing—the confirmed interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denisovans being one notable discovery of late that adds greater texture to the stories recounted here. Additionally, I feel there could (and should) have been a greater emphasis on climate change; Bryson seemed to skirt over it whenever a related topic arose, and it's not clear whether this was intentional.
Closing Thoughts
The content in ASHONE is something I think everyone should know and be exposed to, and it's hard to imagine the material presented with greater alacrity than it is here. The passion and unbridled enthusiasm on display frequently approaches Sagan-esque proportions, in a style redolent of the signature series Cosmos, which is about the highest praise a work in this genre could hope to achieve. Though I found a few errors—and suspect the average grad student in one of a number of the subjects covered could spot a handful more—the book is nevertheless a praiseworthy stab at science writing for the layperson. Bryson set an ambitious task for himself and ultimately delivered a lively, accessible, and mostly scientifically faithful, albeit cursory, proem to the history of the universe as we know it today.
“Even now as a species, we are almost preposterously vulnerable in the wild. Nearly every large animal you can care to name is stronger, faster and toothier than us. Faced with attack, modern humans have only two advantages. We have a good brain, with which we can devise strategies, and we have hands with which we can fling or brandish hurtful objects. We are the only creature that can harm at a distance. We can thus afford to be physically vulnerable.” (p. 447)
Images in this review
Top reviews from other countries
- Kindle CustomerReviewed in Brazil on November 30, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing
Amazing book! If you like science or history you will love it.
It's inexplicable the facility that Bill have explaining complex constructions using simple analogies. Certainly he is my preferred author.
- Amazon CustomerReviewed in Canada on September 16, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth every hour of reading.
This was my second time reading this book which I first read several years ago, and it was still entirely engrossing and every minute revealed fascinating information told in such a clear and easy way to read. The amount of research that must have been done to put all this information together is astonishing, and this is a book you could read many times because not only is it so interesting, but it is probably impossible to retain all the information contained, making multiple readings fresh every time. Highly recommended for anyone that has any interest in anything.
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HildaReviewed in Mexico on July 11, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Muy interesante
Vale la pena la lectura
- Good book for beginners, in science and reading.Reviewed in India on January 15, 2025
5.0 out of 5 stars Easy to read, beginner friendly with depth in understanding.
Haven't read the entire book yet, but judging by the introduction part and a quick overlook, and way of writing and explanation.
It's good for beginners, because I'm a beginner in reading and it's drawing my attention and interesting good. And I'm a bit confused about everything going on around me and find out, this book can help me process everything with a single vision. So I bought this book, judging by the introduction part it seems promising, now let's see what it delivers.
Good book for beginners, in science and reading.
Reviewed in India on January 15, 2025
It's good for beginners, because I'm a beginner in reading and it's drawing my attention and interesting good. And I'm a bit confused about everything going on around me and find out, this book can help me process everything with a single vision. So I bought this book, judging by the introduction part it seems promising, now let's see what it delivers.
Images in this review - JemmaReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 12, 2025
5.0 out of 5 stars Great, in-depth book
This is one of Bill Bryson's best works. I really enjoyed how thoroughly he covered the different topics and he is a very knowledgeable author. Even though this a serious, non-fiction book, Bryson brings a great sense of humour and lightheartedness to his writing. This book is written in a timeline style and it's easy to follow.
I would recommend this book for anyone who is interested in learning about the history of the world, from the beginning of time until modern day.