A Short History of Nearly Everything

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Not to end on a negative note, Bryson is an enjoyable storyteller and the many short stories, along with the science lessons, nicely flow together. Bryson is not a scientist, but he did a fine job.

In his book, he accomplishes an important thing, one of the most important things - he presents the data while at the same time never letting go of the terribly exciting feeling of discovery, and presenting information about the discoverers themselves. It's obvious that he did a lot of research, but it's also obvious that these things fascinated him, and he grabs the reader's hand and runs headlong into the unexplored. And it is a world full of wonders. the only possible sequence o f hereditary combinations that could resulteventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you. In my opinion this book is a great read for all ages. You are never too young or too old to learn something new! It shows many great pictures, drawings, and diagrams which can help you understand better. Bill Bryson makes science exciting, interesting and understandable. It contains a mountainous number of facts.Okay, so here's my Bill Bryson story. I was in The Gladstone, a public house not too far from this very keyboard, with my friend Yvonne, who will remain nameless. We had been imbibing more than freely. A guy approached our table and asked me in a sly surreptitious manner if I was him. Him who? Was I Bill Bryson? Now it is true that I bear a very slight resemblance And discover our own incredible journey, from single cell to civilisation, including the brilliant (and sometimes very bizarre) scientists who helped us find out the how and why. cent"]/ and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene ("but a little recent"]. Lyell originally intended to employ "-synchronous" for his endings, giving us such crunchy designations as Meiosynchronous and Pleiosynchronous. The Reverend William Whewell, an influential man, objected on etymo­ logical grounds and suggested instead an "-eous" pattern, producing Meioneous, Pleioneous, and so on. The "-cene" terminations were thus something o f a compromise. Nowadays, and speaking veiy generally, geological time is divided first into four great chunks known as eras: Precambrian, Paleozoic (from the Greek meaning "old life"], Mesozoic ("middle life"], and Cenozoic ("recent life"]. These four eras are further divided into anywhere from a dozen to twenty subgroups, usually called periods though sometimes known as sys­ tems. Most o f these are also reasonably well known: Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Silurian, and so on* Then come Lyell's epochs-the Pleistocene, Miocene, and so on-which apply only to the most recent (but paleontologically busy] sixty-five mil­ lion years, and finally we have a mass o f finer subdivisions known as stages or ages. Most o f these are named, nearly always awkwardly, after places: Ulinoian, D esm oinesian, C roixian, Kim m eridgian, and so on in like vein. Al­ together, according to John McPhee, these number in the "tens o f dozens." Fortunately, unless you take up geology as a career, you are unlikely ever to hear any o f them again. Further confusing the matter is that the stages or ages in North Amer­ ica have different names from the stages in Europe and often only roughly intersect in time. Thus the North American Cincinnatian stage mostly cor­ responds with the Ashgillian stage in Europe, plus a tiny bit o f the slightly earlier Caradocian stage. Also, all this changes from textbook to textbook and from person to person, so that some authorities describe seven recent epochs, while oth­

If you burned this book now, its matter would be changed to ash and smoke, but the total amount of ‘stuff’ in the universe would be the same. we may soon begin to find other even larger icy spheres in the same por­ tion o f space. Then we w ill have problems. After Christy spotted Pluto’s moon, astronomers began to regard that section o f the cosmos more at­ tentively and as o f early December 2002 had found over six hundred ad­ ditional Trans-Neptunian Objects, or Plutinos as they are alternatively called. One, dubbed Varuna, is nearly as big as Pluto’s moon. Astronomers now think there may be billions of these objects. The difficulty is that many o f them are awfully dark. Typically they have an albedo, or reflec­ tiveness, o f just 4 percent, about the same as a lump o f charcoal-and o f course these lumps o f charcoal are about four billion miles away. The extraordinary Bill Bryson takes us from the Big Bang to the dawn of science in this book about basically everything.

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ond-but it changed the universe from something you could hold in your hand to something at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times big­ ger. Inflation theory explains the ripples and eddies that make our universe possible. Without it, there would be no clumps o f matter and thus no stars, just drifting gas and everlasting darkness. According to Guth’s theory, at one ten-millionth o f a trillionth o f a trillionth o f a trillionth o f a second, gravity emerged. After another ludi­ crously brief interval it was joined by electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces-the stuff o f physics. These were joined an instant later by swarms o f elementary particles-the stuff o f stuff. From nothing at It turns out, a lot of the ground that Bryson covers here wasn't completely new to me. Some of it was, of course, and even if some things were vaguely familiar, I've never fully understood them, so it was good to have a simple, concise introduction to them.