A Blog About (Nearly) Everything
Book Review:
Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything", Black Swan, 2016.
"Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so." (p. 20)
I shall summarize how Bill Bryson takes us on a journey through space and time.
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The book is divided into six sections: Lost in the Cosmos, The Size of the Earth, A New Age Dawns, Dangerous Planet, Life Itself, and The Road to Us. In total there are 30 chapters (excluding the introduction). There are a number of illustrations by Neil Gower, including a timeline of geological periods ranging from the Precambrian to the Quaternary, a cutaway diagram of the Earth's interior, and a periodic table of elements.
Chapter 1 - Everything in our universe came from the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, and we can still detect remnants of it in the form of cosmic background radiation.
The idea of the Big Bang was proposed by Georges Lemaître in the 1920s. Cosmic background radiation was observed in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson -- but you can also pick up these microwaves using your television!Chapter 2 - You can't see Pluto clearly and crisply with a telescope, primarily because it is so far away -- in fact, it took the Voyager spacecrafts over a decade to reach Pluto.
We didn't even know Pluto had a moon until 1978, and the first photographs of it were faint and fuzzy. Our solar system is so big that it's nearly impossible to draw to scale: if the Earth were the size of a pea, for instance, then Pluto would be about 2.5 kilometers away.Chapter 3 - Reverend Robert Evans of Australia has a talent for spotting supernovae, which are explosions that occur when giant stars collapse and which synthesize the heavier elements needed for life.
The term "supernova" was coined by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s, who deduced the existence of neutron stars and cosmic rays long before they were observed. On top of that, he also hypothesized dark matter. The cosmologist Fred Hoyle developed the physics of nucleosynthesis: the formation of heavier elements (like carbon and iron) through the heat produced by supernovae.
Chapter 4 - In the 17th and 18th centuries, geniuses (often eccentric) like Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, and Henry Cavendish set out to understand the motions of planets and measure the size and mass of the Earth.
Newton's laws of motion and gravitation explained why the planets had elliptic orbits, why there were tides, and why the Earth was not a perfect sphere. However, determining the age of the Earth would prove to be a much harder task.Chapter 5 - In the 18th and 19th centuries there was great interest in geology, and people like James Hutton and Charles Lyell sought to understand how the Earth was shaped and which time periods rocks could be categorized into.
Hutton pioneered the science of geology with the insight that soil erosion had to be countered by the creation of new mountains, otherwise the Earth would have been quite smooth. This process of uplift, according to Hutton, came from the heat within Earth. About thirty-four years after Hutton's death, Charles Lyell introduced the units of geological history we still use today: the Pleistocene, Pliocene and Miocene epochs among others.Chapter 6 - The discovery of dinosaur bones raised further questions about the age of the Earth and the biblical implications of extinctions.
French paleontologist Georges Cuvier in 1795 identified a collection of bones from the U.S. as belonging to an extinct type of elephant he called the mastodon. Meanwhile, the Englishman William Smith surveyed the rock strata in Britain and noted a correlation between the age of rocks and the species of fossils found within them. The awkward moral implication, as Bill Bryson refers to it, was that God repeatedly wiped out the creatures he created. In any case, the term "dinosauria" was coined by Richard Owen in 1841, who helped create London's Natural History Museum, but unfortunately also took credit for others' discoveries.Chapter 7 - Chemistry shifted from alchemy to modern science thanks to Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Humphry Davy, Dmitri Mendeleyev and Marie Curie among others.
Lavoisier and his wife discovered the conservation of mass in the 1780s, but Antoine was executed in 1794 during the French Revolution (because he was part of the Ferme Générale, which collected taxes on behalf of the aristocracy). By the 1800s, new elements such as calcium and magnesium were discovered by the likes of Humphry Davy, using techniques like electrolysis. The periodic table of elements was organized by Mendeleev in 1869. Henri Becquerel and his student Marie Curie discovered radioactivity around the end of that century, which inspired Ernest Rutherford to use radiometric dating to determine the age of the Earth. (He still didn't arrive at the actual age.)
Chapter 8 - In the 20th century, our understanding of physics entered a new age as a result of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and Edwin Hubble's observations that there are many galaxies outside the Milky Way and that the universe is expanding.
Albert Michelson and Edward Morley conducted experiments with interferometers and concluded in 1887 that the speed of light is the same in all directions in all seasons, thereby refuting the idea of the "luminiferous ether". In 1900, Max Planck developed the idea of "quanta" (tiny individual packets) of light, laying the groundwork for modern quantum theory. Then in 1905, Einstein used Planck's theory to explain the photoelectric effect -- the same year that he also outlined special relativity. Einstein addressed the question of gravity in 1917 with general relativity. His theory treats time and space as being one (spacetime) and predicts that the universe must either expand or contract. By the early 1930s, Edwin Hubble confirmed that all the galaxies in the sky are moving away from us by measuring their spectra.Chapter 9 - Although John Dalton proposed in 1808 that everything was made of atoms, it took J.J. Thomson's discovery of the electron (1897), Einstein's paper on Brownian motion (1905) and Ernest Rutherford's detection of the atomic nucleus (1910) to prove their existence and that they were made of even smaller parts.
Atoms are unimaginably tiny -- on the scale of a ten-millionth of a millimeter. Yet, as Rutherford discovered, they are mostly empty space! We now know that atoms are made of protons and neutrons at the nucleus, with orbits of electrons. However, the subatomic world is full of strange behavior... physicists including Niels Bohr, Louis-Victor de Broglie, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli spent the 1920s and 30s grappling with the new discipline of quantum mechanics. In this new world, electrons seem to exist as "fuzzy clouds of probability" that can instantaneously influence each other faster than the speed of light.Chapter 10 - Lead is a toxic element, but was useful when Clair Patterson counted lead isotopes in rocks and meteorites to finally determine the age of the Earth -- a feat that was made difficult by the contamination of our atmosphere by lead from fuel.
The reason for adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline was to prevent engine knock. Even though its dangers were suspected early on, the inventor Thomas Midgley (who also invented chlorofluorocarbons, i.e. CFCs) tried to mask them in the interest of profit. Meanwhile, radiocarbon dating was invented in the 1940s by Willard Libby. The technique was used by Patterson to measure the age of the Earth at about 4.5 billion years old. Afterwards, Patterson became an activist against the Ethyl Corporation.Chapter 11 - Large amounts of money were spent on particle accelerators (often named "colliders" or "cyclotrons") to find new kinds of particles, including the quarks that make up protons and neutrons.
The atom-smashers helped physicists discover many new kinds of particles: muons, mesons, pions, hyperons, bosons, baryons and more. Neutrinos are particularly hard to find; scientists need to trap them in underground tanks of deuterium-heavy water. The elementary particles plus the nuclear and electromagnetic forces are brought together in the Standard Model. Some physicists have developed superstring theory or M-theory (to unify quantum laws and gravity), but others consider it borderline crackpot. As Bryson notes: "This, I'm afraid, is the stop on the knowledge highway where most of us must get off" (p. 213). There is still much we don't understand, including dark matter and dark energy.Chapter 12 - By the middle of the 20th century, the theory of plate tectonics and continental drift was developed by Arthur Holmes and Harry H. Hess, but it took until the 1960s for it to be accepted.
A German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener published a theory of Pangaea (the single landmass that all the continents used to be part of) in 1912, but it was met with resistance. Even in 1944 when Holmes came up with the theory of continental drift caused by convective currents inside the Earth, the idea was a radical one. Hess, who identified the process of seafloor spreading at the mid-Atlantic ridge in 1960, was also ignored. Only at a Royal Society symposium in 1964 did geologists start to come to terms with plate tectonics.
Chapter 13 - Meteor impacts leave craters like the ones at Manson, Iowa, and Chicxulub, Mexico -- evidence of destructive energy enough to cause the extinction of lifeforms such as the dinosaurs.
Of course, you can't see the Manson crater because it has been filled and flattened by millions of years of moving ice sheets. But asteroid impacts leave behind things like deformed rock and layers of clay. Walter Alvarez and his father Luis Alvarez determined in 1978 (using neutron activation analysis of iridium) that certain deposits had to be formed by sudden cataclysms like impacts. This helped overturn the belief that the dinosaurs gradually went extinct over millions of years. The discovery of the Chicxulub crater in 1990 provided a candidate for the impactor that killed the dinosaurs.Chapter 14 - Not just asteroids and comets but also volcanoes (for example Mount St. Helens) and earthquakes make the Earth a dangerous place, thanks mainly to the interior structure of our planet.
Earthquakes are very common and tend to occur at plate boundaries but can also occur anywhere. However, we actually know surprisingly little about the Earth's interior. We know that there are layers: the crust, upper and lower mantle, and outer and inner core. The liquid metals of the outer core are responsible for Earth's magnetic field. The inner core is probably as hot as the surface of the Sun. Little else is without controversy.Chapter 15 - Without warning, the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park may one day erupt, covering most of the U.S. in ash and creating a global "volcanic winter".
Not all volcanoes are mountains. For example, the caldera at Yellowstone is a magma chamber about 72 kilometers across which powers the hot springs and geysers at the park -- but isn't otherwise visible from ground-level. Yellowstone erupts once every 600,000 years on average, and the last one was 630,000 years ago. When it blows, you don't want to be within a thousand kilometers of it.
Chapter 16 - The Earth can support life due to being the right distance from the Sun, having an atmosphere and magnetic field, having a stabilizing moon, and simply being lucky in terms of timing -- yet even so, most of Earth's space is to us uninhabitable.
Almost all known life, ranging from the deepest trenches to the highest mountains, exists in a zone that is 20 km thick. Of course, most of this volume is still too extreme to be habitable by humans -- it is either too wet, too dry, too hot, too cold, too lofty or too steep. But compared to other planets in our solar system, the Earth is relatively hospitable. Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised by this, though. After all, we evolved to suit Earth's conditions.Chapter 17 - The troposphere is the 10-16 km thick bottom layer of the atmosphere that contains most of its oxygen, water and warmth.
The atmosphere can be divided into four layers: the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere and ionosphere. Together they extend upwards for 190 kilometers, but you need only ascend 5,000m before you start to get ill due to oxygen deprivation. The atmosphere is clearly important to us -- not only does it shield us from cosmic rays and keep us warm, it also produces weather. Nevertheless, meteorology is a relatively young science, and really got going after 1803 when Luke Howard classified various clouds (for example stratus, cumulus, cirrus, and nimbus).Chapter 18 - Even though water is so important to us, it wasn't until the 1870s that oceanography was born with the Challenger expedition, and not until 1960 did Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh discover life at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the world's deepest point.
The atmosphere and the oceans are often treated as a single system, and about 97% of the Earth's water is oceanic. Yet historically, deep-sea exploration has been conducted by amateurs like Charles William Beebe and Otis Barton, who teamed up in the 1930s to build a bathysphere (a type of submersible) which let them descend down to 900 meters below sea level. Piccard and Walsh made it to 10,918m in 1960, but since then no human has returned to the Mariana Trench. More modern vessels like Alvin have, however, helped oceanographers discover things like tube worms living around deep-sea sulfide vents.Chapter 19 - We don't know how life first arose, but cells containing DNA, proteins, sugars and fatty acids probably evolved gradually, starting about 3.85 billion years ago with the replication of genetic material, leading to cyanobacteria and eventually protists with mitochondria.
There are twenty amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins, and there are perhaps up to a million types of protein that form us. The chances that they would spontaneously self-assemble are mind-bogglingly tiny; yet miraculously it seems to be what happened. Or more likely, proteins evolved through a cumulative selection process. Snowflakes and sugar crystals are examples of how complexity constantly arises in nature. Life is amazing, but it is also a collection of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, calcium and iron. It is especially thanks to oxygen in the atmosphere that complex life (eukaryotes) was able to emerge about 1.8 billion years ago from the earlier anaerobic prokaryotes.Chapter 20 - Microbes -- including bacteria, archaea, and flagellates among others -- actually comprise most of the life on Earth, and we literally could not live without them.
Bacteria digest food in our guts, decompose dead creatures, fertilize the soil, purify water and even defend us from more dangerous microbes. Algae produce a lot of the oxygen we breathe. There are different ways to categorize organisms; for instance, R.H. Whittaker in 1969 grouped life into five "kingdoms", namely Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista and Monera, while Carl Woese in 1976 published a scheme that divided life into three domains, namely Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya. The Woese approach reflects the fact that most life is tiny. However, viruses are not included because they are not alive.Chapter 21 - Complex multicellular life probably arose around 640 million years ago, but it was mostly after the Cambrian explosion of 540 million years ago that organisms like trilobites became large enough to be preserved in the fossil record.
Most creatures do not become fossils when they die. This means that the fossil record is incredibly sparse. It was a great event in paleontology, then, when Charles D. Walcott discovered thousands of trilobite specimens among a shale outcrop on a mountain in British Columbia in 1909. In fact, there were different types of trilobite scattered around the world, suggesting that they all must have had a common ancestor that wasn't preserved in the fossil record.Chapter 22 - Animals first ventured onto land about 400 million years ago, but the KT impact event (which marked the end of the Cretaceous period about 65 million years ago) killed nearly 90% of land-based species, making way for small mammals to replace the dinosaurs.
To survive on land, life needed to develop new ways of moving and consuming oxygen. The fist land dwellers, besides plants, were probably similar to woodlice (which are actually crustaceans). During the Devonian and Carboniferous periods, the atmosphere had much higher levels of oxygen than today, which allowed for the rapid emergence of large creatures such as meter-long millipedes and dragonflies the size of ravens. Amphibians and reptiles were also dominant -- turtles, snakes and crocodiles are still with us today. Protomammals existed at the time of the dinosaurs, but modern mammals really flourished after the KT event.Chapter 23 - Carl Linnaeus (or Linné) gave us a simple and consistent system of taxonomy in the 1730s, which helps scientists classify the many millions of species of living things.
The Natural History Museum in London has a hidden collection of millions of animal and plant specimens -- and growing. It is the task of taxonomists to classify each new find, although there is frequent disagreement about the basics of the system, for instance how many phyla there are. Sometimes, species are named multiple times as they get independently rediscovered. The upshot is that we don't know how many species there are, or how many we have still to discover. According to some estimates, we know about 1.5 million species -- and including ones we don't yet know about there might be over fifty million. The reasons we know so little are that (i) most living things are tiny; (ii) we don't look in the right places, such as tropical rainforests; (iii) there aren't enough specialists to do the work; and (iv) the world is simply a big place.Chapter 24 - The cell was first described by Robert Hooke in 1665 and bacteria were first microscopically observed by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in 1683, but only in 1831 was the cell nucleus discovered by Robert Brown (who also observed Brownian motion).
Your cells do everything for you. The average human cell is about 20 microns wide (i.e. 1/50 mm) and is as bustling as a metropolis and as chemically active as a refinery. Your cells consist of a lipid outer membrane, a nucleus containing your genetic information, and a busy space in between called the cytoplasm. A typical cell has about twenty thousand types of protein. It is a wonder that cells can manage things so smoothly and reliably that an organism can survive for decades.Chapter 25 - Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, but we couldn't explain how species originated without Gregor Mendel's experiments on plant trait inheritance which provided a mechanism for how all living things could be connected via a common ancestor.
Why do living things have the impulse to continue to be? Darwin's "singular notion", as Bryson refers to it, was that species continually improve by competing for resources and having the successful pass their advantages down to their offspring. Although simple, this is one of the best ideas ever because it explains so much. Darwin sketched out his theory five years after returning to England from the Beagle voyage, but then locked it away for fifteen years. When Alfred Russel Wallace sent Darwin a letter in 1858 outlining a very similar theory of natural selection, Darwin finally unveiled his theory. In 1865, Mendel presented his findings on dominant and recessive "factors" (today known as genes). While Darwin and Mendel knew about each other, they never got in touch.Chapter 26 - Each person has a unique genome that is nevertheless nearly identical to those of other humans because if our DNA nucleotides were too different they would not be able to replicate -- in fact, we share 60% of our genes with fruit flies, because all life originates from a single plan.
Inside a cell nucleus are chromosomes which are made of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). In fact, there are nearly 2 meters of DNA in each nucleus. In turn, DNA is made of four basic nucleotides: guanine, cytosine, thymine and adenine. Back in 1869 when Johann Friedrich Miescher discovered DNA (he called it "nuclein"), people didn't think much of it. It took until 1944 for DNA to be viewed as the active agent in heredity, with thanks to an experiment by Oswald Avery involving bacteria. Then in 1953, the double helix structure of DNA was propounded by Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, and James Watson, based on a technique called X-ray crystallography.There is much we still don't understand. Most of our DNA does not seem to do anything. As Bryson explains:
"It starts to get a little unnerving, but it does really seem that the purpose of life is to perpetuate DNA. The 97 per cent of our DNA commonly called junk is largely made up of clumps of letters that, in Matt Ridley's words, 'exist for the pure and simple reason that they are good at getting themselves duplicated'. Most of your DNA, in other words, is devoted not to you but to itself: you are a machine for the benefit of it, not it for you." (pp. 495 - 496)This is similar to an argument in Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene, but that is a book which is still on my to-read list. In any case, we do know that the number of genes an organism has does not necessarily reflect its sophistication -- for example, humans have about forty thousand genes, the same as grass.
Chapter 27 - The Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz studied glaciers around 1840 and concluded that moving ice sheets during past ice ages were responsible for many features of Earth's landscapes.
In the nineteenth century, naturalists were perplexed by huge granite boulders atop limestone mountains and reindeer bones in the south of France. Agassiz's theory of glaciation (inspired by his friends Jean de Charpentier and Karl Schimper) was initially considered radical -- but by 1846 he found a following at Harvard. The ideas of James Croll (who suggested in 1864 that ice ages could be caused by variations in the Earth's orbit) and the computations of Milutin Milankovitch (who predicted climate cycles based on the Earth's tilt, pitch and wobble) helped flesh out the theory of glacial episodes. Essentially, when we receive less solar radiation (or more sunlight is reflected by snow) and produce less greenhouse gas, the Earth holds on to less heat. But the climate is complex: things like cloud cover (influenced by evaporation rates) and continental drift also have an effect.Chapter 28 - The search for ancient human bones ignited in the early 20th century with the discoveries of Neandertals, Homo erectus, Australopithecus, and Homo heidelbergensis followed by many others, although there is no consensus on how the species and genera are related due to scanty evidence.
Between 1887 and 1895, a Dutchman called Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois used a team of convicts to hunt for early human remains in Sumatra and Java. The team found a skullcap, thighbone, and tooth. Based on this, Dubois deduced that the "missing link" between apes and humans walked upright. He even produced a model skull of what he called Pithecanthropus erectus (today known as Homo erectus). Then in 1924 the Australian-born anatomist Raymond Dart identified the remains of a child from the Kalahari Desert as an even earlier creature called Australopithecus africanus. Neither Dubois nor Dart were well-received at first. Yet by the 1950s many more hominid bones had been found. Even in the 21st century, paleoanthropologists continue to find new specimens, such as Sahelanthropus tchadensis in 2002, thought to be about 7 million years old and possibly bipedal. While there is still much debate, it is generally believed that the genus Homo emerged about 2 million years before present and subsequently outcompeted the australopithecines.Chapter 29 - Hand-axes dating back about one and a half million years were the first forms of advanced technology crafted by early versions of Homo in what is modern-day Tanzania, from where we spread across the world.
How exactly we took over the world is a matter of contention. The so-called Movius line (drawn by Hallam Movius in the 1940s) suggested that the axes found in Europe, Africa and the Middle East (known as Acheulean tools) came from a second, more advanced wave of Homo sapiens, while the older and simpler Oldowan tools (often blunt stones) which can also be found in East Asia came from an earlier wave of Homo erectus. The first wave would have started around 2 million years ago, and led to Java Man and Peking Man in Asia, and Neandertals in Europe. The second wave took place about a hundred thousand years ago. However, there are alternative theories, like the multiregional hypothesis (promoted by Alan Thorne) which claims that there was only one species of humans that left Africa and then smoothly and continuously transitioned into us. Rather than one species displacing another, this theory maintains that there was a lot of travel and interbreeding. Unfortunately, a 1997 analysis of mitochondrial DNA from Neandertal bones showed that modern humans are not genetically connected to Neandertals. It is likely, after all, that modern humans came out of Africa within the last hundred thousand years from a small founding population. At the same time, there are numerous genetic anomalies (e.g. the Mungo people) that indicate migrations in different directions and genetic mixing. We still know surprisingly little about our own origins.Chapter 30 - Humans have caused the extinction of many plant and animal species, to the extent that we don't even know what we have done or are doing.
Famous examples of human-caused extinctions include the dodo of Mauritius, Steller's sea cow, the Carolina parakeet, and the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine). Early humans were probably also responsible for the disappearance of the mammoths. As Bill Bryson notes: "I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job" (p. 572). Yet we are the first real "master race" in the world, and for better or worse, we can make a difference.
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Where A Short History of Nearly Everything ends is coincidentally where Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens begins. Harari explains how early humans learned to cook, speak and tell stories, domesticate plants and animals, invent systems of writing and currency, and so on. He concludes, just like Bryson, that humans as the planet's dominant species are responsible for a deadly ecological disaster. However, it is notable how little attention A Short History of Nearly Everything gives to the history of human societies -- it mainly deals with the history of science, and even then it focuses on natural sciences. Perhaps this is understandable given the analogy Bryson uses in Chapter 22 of Earth's history as a day of 24 hours: on this clock, humans only emerge at 23:58:43. When you look at it from this perspective, prehuman history is indeed "nearly everything". But the purpose of the analogy is to illustrate why we are so recent. It is worth quoting from Chapter 22 at length:
"It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel like life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours -- arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But -- and here's an interesting point -- for the most part it doesn't want to be much. [...]But Bryson somewhat reassuringly points out that life goes on. The sentiment here is similar to the one in the quote that opens this blog post. The author writes:
I don't wish to interject a note of gloom just at this point, but the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly. For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumple and die remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct. Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isn't terribly ambitious." (pp. 408 - 410)
"We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life's dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to." (p. 424)Hence, we are lucky. Bryson reiterates this point in the final chapter, where he suggests that we humans have been "chosen" to look after the lonely cosmos (despite us being careless at looking after things), and that we are in a position of eminence:
"To attain any kind of life at all in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a trick we have only just begun to grasp." (p. 573)The book ends by stating that this is yet the beginning and that we will need more than luck to avoid finding the end.
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A Short History of Nearly Everything was a joy to read. Bill Bryson's writing style is lucid and humorous, and he often employs analogies, thought experiments and anecdotes to explain scientific ideas to his audience. He portrays scientific inquiry as an adventure with many twists and turns, false leads, mysterious anomalies, and occasional debates between ego-driven rivals. This certainly helps to make science seem less dull, and I wouldn't be surprised if the book inspired many teens in the 2000s to go into science. Bill Bryson, however, is also realistic in that he acknowledges science is not always fair: for example, the first person to discover something is not always the one who is credited, and sometimes scientists don't yet have the technology to make new discoveries. The scientific community itself is sometimes slow to accept new ideas (e.g. that we are descended from apes). Therefore an accurate portrayal of science must show it in all its colors, which Bryson manages to do. This book has received a lot of praise, and it seems to be merited.
I have little to criticize about this book; but as I already mentioned, it does not quite cover the history of everything (perhaps unsurprisingly, since "Nearly" is in the title). In particular, it leaves out most of philosophy, social science, computer science as well as neuroscience (which is a grievous omission, since our study of the brain could easily be discussed after the sections on genetics or paleoanthropology). To be fair, these topics would probably require a sequel entitled "A Short History of Nearly Everything Else". Perhaps it is a deliberate move against anthropocentrism. But even if we are content to look at the natural world, I felt like Bryson's book was tilted a little heavily toward Earth sciences (e.g. geology, oceanography, meteorology, volcanology and seismology). Besides this point, I have a few other quibbles: firstly, as a book about science, it spends virtually no time explaining the scientific method(s). Secondly, nearly all the scientists and naturalists it talks about are Westerners, which ignores the astronomers of ancient India, mathematicians of medieval Islam and engineers of Song Dynasty China (see Crash Course History of Science). Finally, the book was first published in 2003, and while I did read the 2016 edition, it seems plausible that some of the statements in the book are still outdated. After all, our understanding must have advanced in the past 15 years. Indeed, in Chapter 11 Bryson still refers to the Higgs boson as "postulated" and "notional", while it has been experimentally detected in 2013.
Nevertheless, A Short History of Nearly Everything remains relevant for the most part, and is certainly worth reading. I gave it 5/5 on Goodreads.
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