A Short History of Nearly Everything

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Summary: A Man Said to the Universe
Review: Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is beautifully written, very entertaining and highly informative. Bryson is not a scientist, but rather a curious and observant writer who, four or five years ago, realized that he couldn't tell a quark from a quasar, or a proton from a protein. Bryson set out to cure his ignorance of things scientific, and this book is the result.

For readers who are new to science and its history, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" contains one remarkable revelation after another. You'll be amazed at how enormous, complex and just plain weird the world is and at how small a part humanity plays in it all. It's a humbling experience, a little reminscent of Stephen Crane's blank verse: "A man said to the Universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 'However,' replied the Universe, 'the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'"

Just as engaging as the story of what we know is the parallel story of how we know it--from the first clever experiments to figure out things like how much the earth weighs to today's ongoing efforts to describe the origins of the universe itself, you come to appreciate that science is not an answer but a process, a way of learning about a world that always has one more trick up its sleeve.

Whatever else may be said about the universe, Bryson explains that learning about its mysteries is a very human endeavor. And so his book is peppered with tales of the odd turns, like Percival Lowell, the astronomer who saw canals on Mars when in fact there are none (and whose initials figured in the naming of Pluto, the ninth planet); the Askesian Society, a learned 19th century body devoted to the study of laughing gas; and the knock-down, drag-out personal battles between scientists whose genius was rivaled only by their lack of civility.

This is a superb book and a quick read despite weighing in at nearly 500 pages. If you enjoy "A Short History of Nearly Everything," I highly recommend for further reading Daniel Boorstin's "The Discoverers" and "The Creators" and Timothy Ferris' "Coming of Age in the Milky Way," all of which are elegant explorations of the history of science and how we have come to know what we think we know.

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Summary: Everything Explained
Review: From subatomic particles to tectonic plates to Pluto and then back again; Bryson covers it all. His goal is to help you and me understand (like the title says:) Nearly Everything. Every major science and the eccentric characters who built them are presented in a smooth and often hilarious tone. Bryson somehow makes reading about sediment a thrill. The first three-quarters of A Short History were highly entertaining, likely because Bryson dedicates as much time to the oddball scientists and their antics as to the science itself. In the latter chapters, the reading turns heavier, but that might be because there weren't so many colorful characters to focus on. That's not to say any part of the book was anything less than enlightening. A Short History shouldn't be missed.

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Summary: Great Layman's to Science - Past and Present
Review: As an engineer I've always been fascinated with science and turned off by bad science writing. Having a great writer like Bill Bryson write a history of scientific thought and discovery is just pure joy. Don't get me wrong - there are wonderful scientific writers out there but what Bill manages to do is bring a great number of different specialities under one roof and write about them consistently, interestingly and with great warmth.

The book is really a short history of scientific discovery since the time of Newton. Bryson moves us seemlessly from topic to topic, always finding some interconnection - reminiscent in some respects of the classic James Burke TV show, "Connections". Bill is interested not only in the science but in the people who discovered it. And some of these people are not household names, they have been overlooked; their ideas stolen or unrecognized. Often an amazing degree of stupidity is involved on the part of the discoverer - publishing in provincial magazines that have nothing to do with the subject!

There was one quote in the book that I found particularly appropro in this regard. I can't remember it exactly but it's something like, "First a scientific discovery is discredited; then it's significance is discredited; then the wrong person is credited".

For me this was one of the best aspects of the book. Pretty much every scientific discovery was one I already knew about but the history of the scientists was refreshing. For instance, I knew about leaded gas and CFCs (of course, who doesn't) but I never knew that the same guy was responsible for both! It was reading about people like that which made this book so enjoyable; your view might vary: Some of the negative reviews feel the book was spoilt by this.

This isn't always a comfortable book to read. For instance, the discussion about a massive volcano that sits hidden under Yellowstone National Park and is "past it's due date" and the discussion about being overdue for an asteroid attack gave me uncomfortable nights. To some extent we live in a bad age - we have discovered these things that could destroy us but we haven't yet figured out how to prevent them!

Whether you are already familiar with scientific thought and history or not I think you'll find this to be a wonderful book.

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Summary: Wonderful Science at its Best
Review: Any book by Bill Bryson is a delight to read. "A Short History of Nearly Everything" readily fits this bill.

Bryson shows a child like joy in uncovering any thing new. This book is full of interesting pieces which Bryson is only too happy to share with his readers. Bryson succeeds in making science readable. Popular science has rarely had a better communicator.

From another perspective, this is the sort of book that all believers in "creation science" should read. It keeps the scale of the earth and its occupants in true perspective to the universe. If there are 140 billion galaxies, how was all this made in seven days?

I recommend this book to all thoughtful and inquiring minds. Read and enjoy its many pleasures.

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Summary: This is simply Bryson at his best
Review: This is simply Bryson at his best - making complex subjects such as astronomy and the mysteries of cosmology intelligible to mere historians and people in the humanities like me. This is well worth the read - more so I think than some of his other books, since the jokes were beginning to pall. (What is wrong with Des Moines, after all...) Christopher Catherwood, author of CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS AND ISLAMIC RAGE (Zondervan, 2003)

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Summary: History of Scientific Discovery
Review: This is a serious work, but Bill Bryson still focuses on the ironies and foibles of the people who advanced scientific thought over the centuries, unearthing lots of interesting bits of trivia and history. An engaging book that would be a good companion piece for a survey course in the hard sciences.

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Summary: Everything you thought you knew, but didn't...
Review: This exceptionally well-written and entertaining history of the physical world, and all that surrounds it, should be mandatory reading for everybody. Bryson causes the reader to appreciate the wonder of physical science and those who discovered its mysteries.

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Summary: Top 5 List
Review: This book provides a fantastic overview of both the history of discovery and the information learned. It covers a multitude of scientific fields, from their origins to prevailing (and often disputed) beliefs. Contrary to most scientific text books, however, Bryson makes it all understandable amd mostly memorable. After reading, it is impossible to look at our physical surroundings the same way. Excellent read.

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Summary: Improbable!
Review: The number of times author Bill Bryson uses this adjective in 478 pages must approach Avogadro's Number. For how else to describe life on earth? It IS improbable! Bryson brilliantly brings out the sheer absurdity of our being here.

"If your two parents hadn't bonded just when they did -- possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond -- you wouldn't be here. And if their parents hadn't bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn't be here either....Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up.... If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived. Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that ..." (Well, I'll not disclose that here, but save it for your reading enjoyment.)

Also improbable are the countless scientific endeavors and inquiries over the last few hundred years, described in wonderfully colorful detail by our author. Kelvin, Count Rumford, Einstein, Mendeleyev, the Leakeys, Linnaeus, Darwin, Cavendish, Newton, Feynman...these are but a few of the famous scientific minds about which Bryson elaborates. We learn that Newton stuck a needle into his eye socket just to find out what would happen, that astronomer Edwin Hubble was a lifelong egotist and liar, that many would-be Nobel Prize winners had fame snatched out of their grasp by unlucky happenstance or pluckier rivals, and though Caspar Wistar devoted his life to the study of dinosaur bones, he is remembered chiefly for the flowering shrub wisteria named for him by his botantist friend, Thomas Nuttall.

The nineteenth century seemed replete with colorful characters sometimes masquerading as scientists, sometimes solving complex riddles. Among the many oddities and unique personalities portrayed by Bryson: The nitrous oxide inhaling devotees of the Askesian Society, the archeologist who preferred doing his fieldwork "au naturel", the astronomers who traveled for years only to miss the marvelous celestial happenstance due to a cloud, and the geologist who would slump to rest his head on chairseats while standing. Always, Bryson injects fascinating asides, strange coincidences, and the most arcane and useful detail. He does it all with the eye of a terribly interested observer, but not without a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek humor.

He closes one chapter that details just how much there is yet to learn about the earth's flora and fauna with a question posed to Richard Fortey at the Natural History Museum in London. " 'And I suppose that's why you value someone who spends forty-two years studying a single species of plant, even if it doesn't produce anything terribly new?' 'Precisely,' he said, 'precisely.' And he really seemed to mean it."

The fantastic narrative artfully weaves in and around the truly astounding facts of our universe, solar system, planet, life-forms, cells, and molecules. Bryson begins the book with an explanation that he has found school textbooks far too dry and their exponential numbering conventions incomprehensible. He avoids this by a longshot, bringing the numbers alive, always referencing how many 'thousand million,' or 'million billion' that comprise a large number. His descriptions of size, from the unapproachable vastness of our universe to the unseen smallnesses of cells, proteins and molecules, are nearly always accompanied by analogy. If the sun is as large as that depicted in most textbooks, then a true-to-scale solar system has Pluto, not on the foldout leaf, but as an unseeable microbe, several miles from the book. If you unraveled the DNA found packed into any one of the billions of molecules that comprise you, it would stretch out six feet. This is the stuff of which great cocktail party factoids are made!

This is the best book I have read since the hugely popular John Adams by McCullough came out several years ago. The level of research alone is astounding. Bryson seems to have culled everything that ever was chronicled. Although I am as far from being a scientist as we are to reaching the edge of the universe (discussed by Bryson, of course), I heartily recommend this book. Improbably.

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Summary: I wish my science teacher had taught this way
Review: This book is a treasure. Bryson is witty, literate, and knowledgeable, with an uncanny ability to personalize and make accessible the most arcane of scientific principles. My favorite is the description of the history of the world (4.5 billion years more or less) compressed into a single day.

Now I want to go find other books this smart fellow has written. Bravo!