A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson > Reviews > A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

Author's product rating:   

Degree of Information	Very high
How interesting was the book?	Captivating
How useful was it?	Pretty useful
Would you read it again?	Absolutely
Value for money	Excellent

Advantages:	Incredibly accessible introduction to science
Disadvantages:	None

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

What a good idea this book is. Take one of the most engaging writers around today and say "you know all this complicated science stuff out there; go and have a look and then come back and explain it to us." The result is a cracking book that fizzes along and manages to tell you more than you ever thought you needed to know.

The book is divided into sections, each roughly assigned to a particular discipline. These cover physics, particularly the study of the universe. Geology, including the history of the Earth as a physical entity, and then moving into chemistry. And finally a history of life on Earth and evolution. Each topic is given ample room to be discussed and Bryson moves at an agreeable pace throughout.

Bryson mixes history and exposition easily throughout, depending on the topic, and makes a pretty good fist of both. As suggested by the title, much of the book deals with the history of particular sciences and this is where the author is in his element. Much of these sections are made up of anecdotes and potted personal histories of some truly colourful characters, each of whom have made some contribution to human knowledge. Bryson comfortably brings his considerable gifts to this exercise and you are swept along a gently humorous journey where the emphasis is clearly on the light-hearted. We can pretty much get our heads round such things as the question of the age of the planet and the existence of fossils so they don't require a lot of scientific elaboration and we can enjoy learning about the characters and the conflicts that have been involved along the way. Where things begin to get a bit tricky is when he tries to explain some of the more recent discoveries in science. Unfortunately for us many sciences such as physics, biology and chemistry have reached such a level of advancement and sophistication that the theories and discoveries are way beyond the understanding of mere mortals.

Let's look at physics first. Everything was going swimmingly until that damn patent clerk came up with his theories of relativity. Despite now being a century old these are so complex and remote that the only people who genuinely understand tend to be of the Tefal-head variety. We learn that as well as measuring the universe in terms of space and time there is also space-time, and that space is curved. E=MC2, we all know that one. That's where E is energy, M is mass and C is the speed of light (the universal constant), what this tells us is that it is impossible to go faster than the speed of light as the energy required to move a mass at approaching that speed would be so immense as to be effectively infinite and therefore impossible. Also, if you should be in a ship travelling at close to light speed, time will pass slower for you than for someone stationary (which is why time is relative). As you probably know, it gets far more complicated than that and, really, no matter how well Bryson tries to explain it all you can do is nod and accept it as written without ever coming close to understanding why it's true. The same happens in chemistry, we can all picture an atom where you have a little nucleus being orbited by any number of moon-like electrons (this image is woefully inaccurate in reality but is so ingrained that it is still used) but things rapidly get complicated when the boffins start looking inside the nucleus or at the behaviour of the electrons. The problem is that the rules that apply at this micro level have no relation to physics at the tangible level. We learn that at this level everything is made up of particles divided into types, such as pions, antipions, muons and neutrinos. By this point the eyes are glazing over and you're grasping for words you might have heard on Star Trek. It happens in biology as well when working at the cellular level. We now know quite a lot about cells, Chromosomes and DNA. I say 'we' but really I mean those clever blokes at Cambridge or Harvard, the rest of us don't really know much at all. Bryson provides an excellent description of the goings-on within a cell but again it is so far removed from anything we can relate to that it is beyond what we can meaningfully understand. This isn't Bryson's fault, quite frankly if he can't explain it in terms we can understand I doubt there is any writer out there that could. All you can do is try to get as much intellectual ammunition out of it so that you are suitably prepped when next faced with the office know-it-all.

One of the things that Bryson does do well is convey scale. The opening chapter discusses space which, as Douglas Adams pointed out is big, very big. Quite how big we can't properly comprehend but Bryson comes as close to conveying this as is probably possible. For example, take the solar system; we can all picture the standard model of the Sun orbited by 9 equidistant planets. Unfortunately, this is hugely misleading in terms of scale. As he makes clear it is to all intents and purposes impossible to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you draw Earth the size of a pea Jupiter will be 300 metres away and Pluto two and half kilometres. And that's just the solar system; the nearest star is 4.6 light years away. 4.6 is a nice understandable number but the light years bit is truly daunting, even travelling at the speed of light (which, as we now know, is impossible) it would take that many years to get there and travelling at any kind of imaginable speed would take twenty odd thousand years, not that there's probably anything there worth seeing anyway. To get anywhere vaguely interesting would take considerably longer. It is all very frustrating for those of us who believe in such things but with there being something like 140 billion stars in our galaxy and an estimated further 140 billion equivalent galaxies in the universe in all probability there is plenty of life out there but the chances of us ever contacting them is effectively zero.
OK, so space is very big but another big number relates to the age of the Earth. 4.5 billion years old in fact (and you can add 4 years to that as well as the book was written in 2002) and that is very old. A billion years is easy to write down but impossible to imagine and Bryson supplies a couple of examples to illustrate this, and where we (as humans) sit on this time line. Imagine the history of the Earth as a single 24 hour day, life emerges quite early at about 4:00am with the first microbes. Nothing much changes for the next sixteen hours until 8:30pm when more complex organisms appear. By 10:00pm plants are growing on land soon followed by the first land animals. Dinosaurs arrive at 11:00pm and at 11:58pm the first recognisable humans finally appear. That's not to say our day is almost over but it does show that the planet was ticking along for one hell of long time before we got our hands on it.

Bill Bryson's greatest strength is as an everyman communicator, he makes writing look so easy. Just because he doesn't write serious works discussing the human condition should not take away from the fact that he is one of the best writers around today. This book is always accessible without ever dumbing down the subject matter and you will come away knowing a lot more than before you started. Like listening to David Attenborough, you learn so much without ever feeling like you're being taught. I can't recommend this book enough; anyone with even the slightest interest in the world around them will benefit from reading it, and if it encourages you to read further on any of the subjects covered, so much the better.