A Short History of Nearly Everything

There's no reason this book should be as enjoyable as it is. It's a slightly hodge-podgey account of various discoveries of (mostly) Western science; looking at the list of chapters, you'll probably think there's nothing new you could read on any of these topics. But you'll be wrong. Bryson manages to find interesting details and insights on nearly every subject, and he writes with a dry, likable wit that should draw you in from the first page.

I picked this book up at the airport, thinking at first that it was a book about human history. I confess I did not know at the time who Bill Bryson is and was blissfully unaware of his widely acclaimed writing record. Obviously, the book turned out to be completely different from what I had expected. Bryson wrote a book about "how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since." In short, a story about the natural history of the world and much more.

Bryson's accomplishment inspires awe and envy. Here is a person with no scientific background who, driven by an insatiable desire to learn, has mastered biology, astronomy, show more paleontology, geology, chemistry and much much more, and then translated this knowledge into a readable account of "nearly everything". The New York Times Book Review wrote that A Short History of Nearly Everything "is destined to become a modern classic of science writing" and I fully agree. Bryson succeeds to explain where we came from and how our world works in terms that every person can understand, while at the same time peppering his tale with humouristic anecdotes about the greatest scientists in history: their lives, their mistakes and their feuds.

This book is a journey in space and time. It takes the reader from the core of the Earth to the infinite reaches of outer space, and from the beginning of time to the future outlook for our planet. In this journey, Bryson brings home two messages, over and over again. First, how insignificant our lives are in comparison with the age of the world and the forces of nature, especially when we take into account the improbable odds of our very existence. Second, how little we know and understand about how we came about, how our planet works or indeed who and what inhabits it besides us. The book is full of facts which leave the reader open-mouthed; several times I had to re-read a sentence just to make sure I understood the full implication of the facts presented in it.

The first thing I did today after finishing the book was to log on to amazon.com to search for other Bryson books and order them. I am looking forward to getting more acquainted with this wonderful writer in the very near future. show less

When I first started reading A Short History of Nearly Everything I wanted to document every "history" Bryson exposed and explained. I thought it would be fun except for the fact I quickly lost track. Short History starts out simple enough: the history of the atom and an explanation of the inflation theory. In other words, the history of you and the universe respectively. Then there's a deeper dive into the question of space, the galaxy and our place in the solar system. Somehow we moved onto inverse square law and the weight (literally) of the world. We explore volcanoes and earthquakes and the (un)predictability of natural disasters. Then there are the disasters that are not so quite natural which man insists on taking part like free show more diving. Then there are the bugs and so on and so forth.
Probably one of the best sections was about the struggle to make Pluto a planet. We determined we had four rocky inner planets, four gassy outer planets...and one teeny, tiny lone ball of ice.
The obvious drawback to reading something out of date is the predictions for the future are now obsolete.
what I have learned from reading Short History is not the what Bryson explains but how it's explained. The telling is everything. show less

Space, Dinosaurs, Biology, Medicine, Plants, Microbiology, Geology. This book is quite literally a short history of nearly everything related to science.

I had been hearing about this book for a very long time but was always hesitant because I thought it was another book about space that I wouldn't understand. While the book does start off with the history and science of space and the big bang, Bill Bryson does a freaking amazing job about going into the history of nearly everything: almost every scientific field, the people involved in discoveries, the scandals surrounding them, and their personalities, what they actually did vs what people think they did. All of this is done in a very witty and entertaining language that breaks down show more educational concepts you can understand without feeling like an idiot. show less

I loved this. My interest level was engaged throughout; Bryson delivers a mountain of information in a lively manner, with a good dose of humour, and providing 'personality' and background information almost irrestibly. Whilst I'm sure purists would criticise aspects of this book, it opens the world of science, nature and the universe to those of us who have not continued in these studies but remain interested generally. I highly recommend this book. This would be the ideal audiobook for a long car journey, engaging all ages and maybe encouraging into this line of work future Nobel prize winners :)

This will definitely be a reread for me. There is so much information, I have no hope of retaining any decent percentage.

Audiobook: narrated show more excellently by William Roberts. 5 stars. show less

“Sometimes the world just isn't ready for a good idea.” — Bill Bryson, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”

Reading Bill Bryson's “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” his 2003 history of science for readers who don't know beans about science, one gets the idea that the world isn't ready for a good idea not sometimes but rather most of the time. The science establishment was reluctant to accept the big bang theory, continental drift, evolution, the theory of relativity and just about every other major discovery in science you might think of. Scientists, like just about everyone else in the world, are slow to welcome change.

Those who propose new scientific theories often don't live long enough to see their theories show more accepted, and even then somebody else often gets the credit for them. Bryson does much to right some of these wrongs.

Much of his book is dated now. More than 15 years after its first publication, scientists have explored much deeper into the oceans and much farther into space than they had in 2003, to cite just two examples. But history books should be read more for what they say about the past than what they say about the present, and here the author excels even now.

The book covers just about every field of science you might think of, from astronomy to zoology, and does so with easy transitions from one to another. A background in any of these fields proves unnecessary to grasp what Bryson writes or to enjoy his narrative. As readers of his other books know well, he has gift for explaining things in a way that makes reading seem more like entertainment than work.

Again and again Bryson returns to what has been called the Goldilocks effect. That is, everything has been just right for life on Earth and for human existence. Not too close to the sun nor too far away. The right kind of orbit, the right kind of atmosphere, the right circumstances at just the right time. We are overdue for another ice age, he writes, and overdue for another catastrophic explosion of the Yellowstone volcano. You name it, we have been very fortunate, even blessed. Yet even in 2003 Bryson warned of negative human influences on the planet's climate and the survival of species. Such warnings have not been dated by the passage of time.

Reading “A Short History of Nearly Everything” proved to be a very good idea, even if it did take me a decade and a half to get around to it. show less

A Short History of Nearly Everything is an incredible literary and popular achievement introducing ordinary readers to all the major wonders of science. Such topics are usually rather daunting and difficult to understand, but author Bill Bryson explains them all with an easy eloquence, a warmth of humour and a keen eye for the right anecdote or analogy. Bryson also has an inexhaustible supply of infectious enthusiasm. This is not a cringeworthy hey kids, let's make learning fun!" sort of book, but rather just one man sharing his astonishment at the variety, scale and wonder of our universe.

And without meaning to diminish the kudos that are due to Bryson's writing, it should come as no surprise that these topics capture the reader's show more imagination. They are simply incredible. Covering everything from the origins of the universe and the formation of planets right down to biological life at the cellular level on this little blue planet of ours, many – no, scratch that, all – of the topics and facts that Bryson shares are just mind-boggling. The scale and complexity of our existence is staggering in itself, but Bryson's genius is in presenting such often-difficult concepts in an accessible and universally agreeable way. Early on, the writer tells us that his remit is "to see if it isn't possible to understand and appreciate – marvel at, enjoy even – the wonder and accomplishments of science at a level that isn't too technical or demanding, but isn't entirely superficial either." (pg. 24). I would wager that you won't find a single reviewer that would dispute that Bryson has achieved his goal. You certainly won't find such dissent in this review.

It is one of those few books for which the cliché is genuinely and indisputably warranted: this is a book that everyone should read. It reminds us that our own place in the universe is ridiculously insignificant, yet at the same time it is incredibly life-affirming by reminding us just how miraculous our own existence actually is. When you consider that the odds are massively stacked against anything happening, the fact that we have a species have not only come into existence but have also reached a stage where we can begin to understand things on a far more grand and impossible stage than ourselves should fill one with a real sense of pride, even those of us who haven't personally contributed to this advancement.

Another key achievement of Bryson's book is that he doesn't just tell us the facts, or even just tell us them in an approachable way. He also tells us how scientists came to work this sort of thing out, something which he admits early on that he had always been curious about (pg. 23). Some of these methods are ingenious (one relatively minor incident which nevertheless stood out for me was how scientists confirmed that the Earth's magnetic poles have switched ends throughout the ages. They did so by measuring the iron content in rocks of different ages: the iron in the loose sediment would have shifted to one end or the other before solidifying).

The book also impresses on the reader that however much we know, there is still so, so much that we don't (yet?) know. Every discovery brings new questions or, as Bryson phrases it, "every time we manage to unlock a box, we find that there is another locked box inside" (pg. 210). I was surprised how (relatively) recent many of our fundamental scientific discoveries actually are. For example, the confirmation that dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite belongs to the twentieth-century. The 20th century also gave us the 'Modern Synthesis', the theory that unified the celebrated work of Charles Darwin and the less-celebrated but no less important work on genetics by Gregor Mendel into the theory of evolution that we know and love (well, some of us) today. This is in itself a thought-provoking notion throwing into relief the pace of our species' achievements. As Bryson says: "It is fairly remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and Nobel committees awarding prizes for longer than we have known that the Earth has a core." (pg. 261).

Perhaps some of the questions raised by science can never be answered; it certainly does seem like there are some insurmountable hurdles ahead. Even a genius like Einstein failed to make real headway on fitting his celebrated relativity theory into a grander unified theory, the so-called 'theory of everything' that would knit everything together. Even so, the fact that Bryson's book – written over a decade ago – writes non-committedly on such things as the Higgs boson, which has since been confirmed by the much-publicised work done by the Large Hadron Collider, shows us that science is still advancing full speed ahead into the questions of the future. And some of the puzzles which science has already solved would, no doubt, have seemed impossible to previous generations. Who knows what achievements the future may bring? Speaking as a relatively young man, it is entirely possible that, given the pace of scientific discovery, there will be at least one more high-profile discovery in my lifetime that will have important implications for our understanding of the universe and leave me shaking my head in wonder. (In fact, on the very day I wrote this review NASA announced they had discovered water on Mars, which may support alien life. This came less than twelve hours after I watched a once-in-a-generation supermoon lunar eclipse, or 'blood-moon', from my front garden. The universe is amazing.) We are living in an unprecedentedly exciting age, scientifically-speaking, and Bryson has invoked the wonder of this in an unprecedentedly accessible and engrossing science book." show less