Product Description

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 is his quest to find out 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'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. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. 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. 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #307 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 686 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
What on earth is Bill Bryson doing writing a book of popular science--A Short History of Almost Everything? Largely, it appears, because this inquisitive, much-travelled writer realised, while flying over the Pacific, that he was entirely ignorant of the processes that created, populated and continue to maintain the vast body of water beneath him.

In fact, it dawned on him that "I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on". The questions multiplied: What is a quark? How can anybody know how much the Earth weighs? How can astrophysicists (or whoever) claim to describe what happened in the first gazillionth of a nanosecond after the Big Bang? Why can't earthquakes be predicted? What makes evolution more plausible than any other theory? In the end, all these boiled down to a single question--how do scientists do science? To this subject Bryson devoted three years of his life, reading books and journals and pestering the people who know (or at least argue about it); and we non-scientists should be pretty grateful to him for passing his findings on to us.

Broadly, his investigations deal with seven topics, all of enormous interest and significance: the origins of the universe; the gradual historical discovery of the size and age of the earth (and the beginnings of the awesome notion of deep time); relativity and quantum theory; the present and future threats to life and the planet; the origins and history of life (dinosaurs, mass extinctions and all); and the evolution of man. Within each of these, he looks at the history of the subject, its development into a modern discipline and the frameworks of theory that now support it. This is a pretty broad brief (life, the universe and everything, in fact), and it's a mark of Bryson's skill that he is able to carve a clear path through the thickets of theory and controversy that infest all these disciplines, all the while maintaining a cracking pace and a fairly judicious tone without obvious longueurs or signs of haste. Even readers fairly familiar with some or all of these areas o! f discourse are likely to learn from A Short History. If not, they will at least be amused--the tone throughout is agreeable, mingling genuine awe with a mild facetiousness that often rises to wit.

One compelling theme that appears again and again is the utter unpredictability of the universe, despite all that we think we know about it. Nervous page-turners may care to omit the sensational chapters on the possible ways in which it all might end in disaster--Bryson enumerates with cheerful relish the kind of event that makes you want to climb under the bedclothes: undetectable asteroid colliding with the earth; superheated magma chamber erupting in your back garden; ebola carrier getting off a plane in London or New York; the HIV virus mutating to prevent its destruction in the mosquito's digestive system. Indeed, the chief theme of this sprightly book is the miraculous unlikeliness, in a universe ruled by randomness, of stability and equilibrium--of which one result is ourselves and the complex, fragile planet we inhabit. --Robin Davidson

Review
The legions of fans who buy Bill Bryson's travel books and voted him a favourite author for World Book Day won't quite know what to make of the amiable traveller's latest offering. Transworld has dubbed it "for all those who couldn't understand A Brief History of Time" (and on that basis, if they all buy a copy it will be an instant bestseller). Bryson applies his naturally enquiring mind and his way with words which is both informative and entertaining, to "understand and appreciate, marvel at, enjoy even, the wonder and accomplishments of science at a level that isn't too technical or demanding, but isn't entirely superficial either". This is popular science in the true meaning of the phrase and repays diligent reading.

If you only know Bill Bryson as the author of amusing but essentially lightweight travelogues, prepare to be amazed. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his Sisyphean quest to understand everything that has ever happened, from the Big Bang via creation and evolution to the rise of human civilization. Bryson takes the kind of mind-boggling subjects that bore the pants off the average reader - geology, chemistry, particle physics, DNA - and miraculously renders them not only comprehensible but engaging, even (God forbid) fun. That he does so without ever seeming trite or simplistic says a great deal for Bryson's skill as a writer, and reveals hitherto unimagined depths of seriousness (remember, this is the man who single-handedly invented literary travel-lite). Of course, A Short History is still a travel book, of sorts. It merely replaces the coastal paths of Britain, the Appalachian Trial and the Australian Outback with the vast, awe-inspiring landscapes of time and space. It's not surprising, then, that Bryson took three years 'finding saintly, patient experts prepared to answer a lot of outstandingly dumb questions'. As with his other books, Bryson presents a splendid parade of characters, dead and alive, by turns obsessive, competitive, foolish and plain eccentric (like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish, who worked out how much the earth weighed but didn't bother to tell anyone). No doubt some spoilsports and naysayers will query whether there is really anything new in here - to which Bryson has the perfect answer. As the physicist Leo Szilard remarked, apropos his unpublished diary, 'I am going to record the facts for the information of God.... He knows the facts, but He doesn't know this version of the facts.' You would be well advised to familiarise yourself with Bryson's version of events. (Kirkus UK)

The Times - Peter Atkins
'This most enjoyable of books ... A travelogue of science, with a witty, engaging, and well-informed guide.'

Customer Reviews

A fascinating and exciting insight into our exsistence.
Well I love a good Bill Bryson book and this is surely the best. As a travel writer he has kept me interested and amused with many an exciting journey but this rates as the best journey he has ever written. A journey that takes the layman on a travel experience spanning billions of years including an insight into all the sciences and ologies one can imagine. If only I had been able to read science at school like this...I might well have found an interest.

Overrated
I am skeptical of journalists or writers who think they can write a book about anything. Yeah sure they've a great gift for writing but that doesn't mean they have a great gift for understanding! All too often they think they understand something when they simply don't.

I really can't fathom that in a long book which is supposed to be a "all you need to know" about the science, the scientific method itself isn't even explained. This means the mechanism which establishes science as most objective and reliable paradigm we have for establishing objective truth about the universe is omitted. Now, there's a countless amount of facts, dates, figures and 'imagine this' type stuff all there with the assumed intent of making a reader go wow. All very well, some of it will fuse the imagination, but let's not forget that the scientific method is what defines science and differentiates between science and pseudo-science. Without it, we have no way of differentiating the reliability between the big bang theory and crystal healers.

Too many times, instead of explaining principles and concepts, Bryson opts for facts about dates. It really doesn't matter if it was 1915, 1916, or 1917 when Einstein published his theory on general relativity what matters is what it is saying, the concepts that underpin it and why we can be confident it's correct. In this regard, Byrson comes up well short. Someone like Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, just about anyone with scientific training does a much better job.

He does make reasonable attempts at describing many of the Scientific theories, but there are times when his understanding is just way off.

For example, when he discusses the theory of evolution which is just as sound as the theory of gravity in terms of the scientific method. Both are testifiable, falsifiable, have huge amounts of evidence (one billion+ fossils and infinite amount of DNA evidence), been through the same peer reviewing processes etc. So, in scientific terms doubting evolution is like doubting gravity. It's just asinine. Perhaps Bryson should think about that the next time he gets on a plane.

His poor understanding insinutates that the lack of fossils found in human evolution may cast doubt on the theory. He sounds like a scientifically illiterate ignoramus who has just sifted their way through some intelligent design propaganda.

Why doesn't he point out the probability of fossilation is only about 1 / million and the probability of finding one about the same, which by simple mathematics make every fossil find of our ancestors species a miracle in statistical terms? Why doesn't he go through the simple mathematics in DNA which have confirmed evolution an infinite amount of times and provide even stronger evidence than fossils?

If you want a pop Science book so that you can understand science just skip this book. Science is a very area broad area now. Experts in Physics are not experts in Biology. Experts in Biology are not experts in Physics. A writer with no scientific expertise is certainly not an expert in anything scientific. If you really want to understand science, pick a branch of science and then pick the appropriate expert. Someone like Feymen for Physics, Dawkins for Biology or Hawking for the Universe.

Before you do any of that, make sure you understand the scientific method as described by Karl Popper. This is the framework that underpins all science and what makes science an exceptionally reliable paradigm. It's why planes fly and why we know the origins of all species on our planet.

If you couldn't give a monkeys about understanding and just want lots of scientific trivia; dates and names rather than any real understanding, yes sadly this book could be a runner.

Essential introduction to science!
This book is not only highy educational, but very entertaining, and Bryson's writting style makes it fun, and it keeps you craving for more.
If would be a good idea to make this read a compulsory High School one, to excite the curiosity and the thirst for knowledge of our students, considering the fact that the more we know, the more we love.
It is a nearly complete and thorough overview on the main principles of science. Wery well informed with plenty of historical anecdotes and curiosities. I have learned and laughed so much!!!
A genius's work.