a short history of nearly everything book

One of the world's most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey - into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.

But it's when Bryson dives into some of science's best and most embarrassing fights-Cope vs. Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as 'The Size of the Earth' and 'Life Itself.' Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Life and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming.

Though A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.įrom primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through time and space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. This book is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him.

A short history of nearly everything book