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A Short History of Nearly Everything
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A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) (edit title/settings)

by Bill Bryson (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

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. In A Walk in the Woods , Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail --- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country , he... read more

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

  • - The history of the universe and science from the Big Bang, told with Bryson's subtle wit. Best as an audiobook!
  • - A tedious revisionist exercise of a few things
  • - This book is about the Earth, life on Earth and the attempts of science to explain it all.
  • - From bacteria to the cosmos...very fun.
  • - Tough going to read but surprisingly interesting to listen to on tape.

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “if you want to see the atom in a drop of water, with naked eyes, you would have to make the drop 24 kilometres across.”
  • “In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.”
  • “Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes.This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.”
  • “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.”
    Bill Bryson
  • “Despite her two Nobel Prizes, she (Marie Curie) was never elected to the Academy of Sciences, in large part because after the death of Pierre she conducted an affair with a married physicist that was sufficiently indiscreet to scandalize even the French—or at least the old men who ran the academy, which is perhaps another matter.”
  • “But the landmark event—the dawn of a new age—came in 1905, when there appeared in the German physics journal Annalen der Physik a series of papers by a young Swiss bureaucrat who had no university affiliation, no access to a laboratory, and the regular use ofno library greater than that of the national patent office in Bern, where he was employed as a technical examiner third class. (An application to be promoted to technical examiner second class had recently been rejected.)His name was Albert Einstein, and in that one eventful year he submitted to Annalen der Physik five papers, of which three, according to C. P. Snow, “were among the greatest in the history of physics”—one examining the photoelectric effect by means of Planck’s new quantum theory, one on the behavior of small particles in suspension (what is known as Brownian motion), and one outlining a special theory of relativity.”
  • “In 1684 Dr Halley came to visit at Cambridge <and> after they had some time together the Dr asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the Planets supposing the force of attraction toward the Sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it.Sr Isaac replied immediately that it would be an <ellipse>. The Doctor, struck with joy & amazement, asked him how he knew it. ‘Why,’ saith he, ‘I have calculated it,’ whereupon Dr Halley asked him for his calculation without farther delay, SrIsaac looked among his papers but could not find it.This was astounding—like someone saying he had found a cure for cancer but couldn’t remember where he had put the formula. Pressed by Halley, Newton agreed to redo the calculations and produce a paper. He did as promised, but then did much more. He ... at length produced his masterwork: the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, better known as the Principia .”
  • “You might not slumber quite so contentedly if you were aware that your mattress is home to perhaps two million microscopic mites, which come out in the wee hours to sup on your sebaceous oils and feast on all those lovely, crunchy flakes of skin that you shed as you doze and toss. Your pillow alone may be home to forty thousand of them....these mites have been with us since time immemorial, but they weren't discovered until 1965.”
  • “On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feet away.”
  • “By the time we reach Pluto, we have come so far that the Sun—our dear, warm, skin-tanning, life-giving Sun—has shrunk to the size of a pinhead. It is little more than a bright star. In such a lonely void you can begin to understand how even the most significant objects—Pluto’s moon, for example—have escaped attention. In this respect, Pluto has hardly been alone. Until the Voyager expeditions, Neptune was thought to have two moons; Voyager found six more. When I was a boy, the solar system was thought to contain thirty moons. The total now is “at least ninety,” about a third of which have been found in just the last ten years.”
  • “The point to remember, of course, is that when considering the universe at large we don’t actually know what is in our own solar system.”
  • “Pluto may be the last object marked on schoolroom charts, but the system doesn’t end there. In fact, it isn’t even close to ending there. We won’t get to the solar system’s edge until we have passed through the Oort cloud, a vast celestial realm of drifting comets, and we won’t reach the Oort cloud for another—I’m so sorry about this—ten thousand years. Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way.”
  • “We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas. Even the most substantial ocean creatures are often remarkably little known to us—including the most mighty of them all, the great blue whale, a creature of such leviathan proportions that (to quote David Attenborough) its “tongue weighs as much as an elephant, its heart is the size of a car and some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them.” It is the most gargantuan beast that Earth has yet produced, bigger even than the most cumbrous dinosaurs.”
  • “IT STARTS WITH a single cell. The first cell splits to become two and the two become four and so on. After just forty-seven doublings, you have ten thousand trillion (10,000,000,000,000,000) cells in your body and are ready to spring forth as a human being.1 And every one of those cells knows exactly what to do to preserve and nurture you from the moment of conception to your last breath.”
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First Sentence edit see section history

NO MATTER HOW hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I: Lost in the Cosmos
1. How to Build a Universe
2. Welcome to the Solar System
3. The Reverend Evans's Universe

II: The Size of the Earth
4. The Measure of Things
5. The Stone-Breakers
6. Science Red in Tooth and Claw
7. Elemental Matters

III. A New Age Dawns
8. Einstein's Universe
9. The Mighty Atom
10. Getting the Lead Out
11. Muster Mark's Quarks
12. The Earth Moves

IV: Dangerous Planet
13. Bang!
14. The Fire Below
15. Dangerous Beauty

V: Life Itself
16. Lonely Planet
17. Into the Troposphere
18. The Bounding Main
19. The Rise of Life
20. Small World
21. Life Goes On
22. Goodbye to All That
23. The Richness of Being
24. Cells
25. Darwin's Singular Notion
26. The Stuff of Life

VI: The Roads to Us
27. Ice Time
28. The Mysterious Biped
29. The Restless Ape
30. Goodbye

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 50 of 145 in Whitcoulls Top 100 (2011). (authoritative list)
This is book 51 of 121 in Whitcoulls Top 100 (2012). (authoritative list)
This is book 95 of 100 in Top 100 Books That Defined The Noughties (Telegraph). (authoritative list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Bill Bryson (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Black Swan; Broadway Books
Country: United Kingdom; United States
Publication Date: 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 544

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Reading Level: Young Adults

Anyone with basic knowledge of physics and biology can read and enjoy this book.

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
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