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In this book Bill Bryson explores the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer and attempts to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. To that end, Bill Bryson apprenticed himself to a host of the world's most profound scientific minds, living and dead. His challenge is to take subjects like geology, chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people, like himself, made bored (or scared) stiff of science by school. His interest is not simply to discover what we know but to find out how we know it. How do we know what is in the center of the earth, thousands of miles beneath the surface? How can we know the extent and the composition of the universe, or what a black hole is? How can we know where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through space and time, Bill Bryson encounters a splendid gallery of the most fascinating, eccentric, competitive, and foolish personalities ever to ask a hard question. In their company, he undertakes a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge.… (more)
themulhern: Both books stick to the science adventure, and go rather light on the actual science. "Chasing Venus" is about the decade long effort to calculate the value of the astronomical unit; Bryson's book is more shallow and broad.
erik_galicki: Weisskopf is more concise, more cohesive, and less anecdotal than Bryson. I consider Weisskopf a more enlightening but less entertaining alternate.
Noisy: If you find Bryson too lightweight, then the next step is to Gribbin. Gribbin goes all the way from the smallest scale (sub-atomic particles) to the largest (the universe).
All I have to say is I'm glad I finally finished this book. It took me forever.
It seems unfair to give it two stars because it is well researched and impressively put together - - but three stars would mean "I liked it", and I really can't say I did. I tolerated it. I appreciated the educational value of it. But liked it? Unfortunately no.
The good news though is that in the progression from physics to biology to anthropology, it became increasingly interesting to me, and you could tell that Bryson also had a better grasp on the subject matter. The anthropology section was interesting enough that it makes me want to read a book on that subject alone. I recall touching upon the development of man in school, but clearly the details were lacking. I had no idea there were so many competing theories.
All in all, for the right reader, I can see why this book is beloved. It delivers on the promise of its title. It just seemed to focus too much on the people involved for my taste and really didn't quite explain the science well enough for me to truly grasp it.
Really good overview of scientific discoveries across a variety of fields. I learned quite a bit and certainly enjoyed reading it. However, I can't quite recommend this to the younger set (ie, my kids) quite yet because Bryson does toss in macabre tidbits that describe a number of unfortunate (though often hilarious) deaths. And the chapter on earth getting hit by an asteroid kept me awake for several nights in a row. ( )
Besides the few chapters that were hard to get through (the ones on human history & geology), this book is highly informative and not plain or boring. There's a bit of humour here, a bit of fun facts there, a hint of sarcasm and just a pinch of no-way-that's-absurd bits of information. A splendid read, highly recommended for anyone who wishes to understand the history of nearly everything and not be lulled to sleep by a bland lecture. ( )
If you were bored by science in school yet still managed to retain your sense of awe and curiosity, Bill Bryson's book will explain everything you missed, and then some, in a rollicking narrative that covers not just how we came to know what we know, but all the hilarious stories behind the archeologists, anthropologists and mathematicians who brought us that knowledge. ( )
The more I read of ''A Short History of Nearly Everything,'' the more I was convinced that Bryson had achieved exactly what he'd set out to do, and, moreover, that he'd done it in stylish, efficient, colloquial and stunningly accurate prose.
"Una breve historia de casi todo" explica como ha evolucionado el mundo para acabar siendo lo que es hoy. Explica cualquier aspecto de nuestro universo, desde el más recóndito al más conocido.
The book's underlying strength lies in the fact that Bryson knows what it's like to find science dull or inscrutable. Unlike scientists who turn their hand to popular writing, he can claim to have spent the vast majority of his life to date knowing very little about how the universe works.
The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: 'I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.' ''Don't you think God knows the facts?" Bethe asked. 'Yes,' said Szilard. 'He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.' — Hans Christian von Baeyer, Taming the Atom
Dedication
To Meghan and Chris. Welcome.
First words
No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton.
Quotations
They're all in the same plane. They're all going around in the same direction. . . .It's perfect, you know. It's gorgeous. It's almost uncanny. - Astronomer Geoffrey Marcy describing the solar system
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; / God said, Let Newton be! and all was light. - Alexander Pope
A physicist is the atoms' way of thinking about atoms. - Anonymous
The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror. - British geologist Derek V. Ager
The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming. - Freeman Dyson
Descended from the apes! My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known. - Remark attributed to the wife of the Bishop of Worcester after Darwin's theory of evolution was explained to her
I had a dream, which was not all / a dream. / The bright sun was extinguish'd, / and the stars / Did wander . . . - Byron, "Darkness"
Because we can't see into the Earth, we have to use other interesting techniques, which mostly involve reading waves as they travel through the interior, to find out what is there. We know a little bit about the mantle from what are known as kimberlite pipes, where diamonds are formed. What happens is that deep in the Earth there is an explosion that fires, in effect, a cannonball of magma to the surface at supersonic speeds. It is a totally random event. A kimberlite pipe could explode in your back garden as you read this. Because they come up from such depths - up to 200 kilometres down - kimberlite pipes bring up all kinds of things not normally found on or near the surface: a rock called Peridotite, crystals of olivine and - just occasionally, in about one pipe in a hundred - diamonds. Lots of carbon comes up with kimberlite ejecta, but most is vaporized or turns to graphite. Only occasionally does a hunk of it shoot up at just the right speed and cool down with the necessary swiftness to become a diamond. It was such a pipe that made South Africa the most productive diamond-mining country in the world, but there may be others even bigger that we don't know about. Geologists know that somewhere in the vicinity of northeastern Indiana there is evidence of a pipe or group of pipes that may be truly colossal. Diamonds up to 20 carats or more have been found at scattered sites throughout the region. But no-one has ever found the source. As John McPhee notes, it may be buried under glacially deposited soil, like the Manson crater in Iowa, or under the Great Lakes. (page 271)
As James Surowiecki noted in a New Yorker article, given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks and antidepressants that people will take every day for ever, drug companies not suprisingly opt for the latter. Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn't given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s. (page 396)
Last words
And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.
In this book Bill Bryson explores the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer and attempts to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. To that end, Bill Bryson apprenticed himself to a host of the world's most profound scientific minds, living and dead. His challenge is to take subjects like geology, chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people, like himself, made bored (or scared) stiff of science by school. His interest is not simply to discover what we know but to find out how we know it. How do we know what is in the center of the earth, thousands of miles beneath the surface? How can we know the extent and the composition of the universe, or what a black hole is? How can we know where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through space and time, Bill Bryson encounters a splendid gallery of the most fascinating, eccentric, competitive, and foolish personalities ever to ask a hard question. In their company, he undertakes a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge.
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It seems unfair to give it two stars because it is well researched and impressively put together - - but three stars would mean "I liked it", and I really can't say I did. I tolerated it. I appreciated the educational value of it. But liked it? Unfortunately no.
The good news though is that in the progression from physics to biology to anthropology, it became increasingly interesting to me, and you could tell that Bryson also had a better grasp on the subject matter. The anthropology section was interesting enough that it makes me want to read a book on that subject alone. I recall touching upon the development of man in school, but clearly the details were lacking. I had no idea there were so many competing theories.
All in all, for the right reader, I can see why this book is beloved. It delivers on the promise of its title. It just seemed to focus too much on the people involved for my taste and really didn't quite explain the science well enough for me to truly grasp it.
I muscled through. (