History of Everything

I wrote this last fall but forgot to send it to my extended family. Recently recommending some books to my cousin made me check to see if it was still in my drafts folder. And voila! I present to you my first book report since school.


For the past two weeks I've been carrying around a 5-pound book, reading it on the El, at lunch, in the elevator. Some of you may have heard of it or its author:

A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
(a famous American travel writer living in England, wrote A Walk In The Woods)

Judging from the title, I assumed it was a history book. Wrong -- it's a history of science book. I much prefer liberal arts to sciences (hellooo, Classical Civilization/Linguistics degree). In fact, I've taken all of five science classes in my life, studying biology and chemistry over 10 years ago. Why does someone who knows nothing about science, and hasn't made it a point to learn anything about it, become so enthusiastic about a book singularly devoted to it?

For starters, I checked out the new illustrated version. Being able to see what Bill Bryson describes was invaluable, even though at times I felt as if I were reading a textbook for fun--nerdy, I know. (Although since a cute guy on the El wanted to talk to me about it, I shouldn't be complaining.) Secondly, and most importantly, Bryson writes in a tongue-and-cheek manner that is entirely captivating. Explaining everything from nuclear power to meteorites in terms any layperson can understand, he injects every chapter with an inimitable sense of humor. Here are two examples:

from the chapter 'A New Age Dawns: Einstein's Universe':

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 x 10(18) joules of potential energy--enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

quoting a scientist in the chapter 'Life Itself: The Rise of Life':

"Well, one school of thought says it was actually cool [in the Archaean Period] because the sun was much weaker." (I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as "the Chinese restaurant problem"--because we had a dim sun.)

See why I found it so fun to read? I now understand how bizarre the laws of physics get at a small level; I know why Vermeer's paintings might have been influenced by a guy who made microscopes; and I can even explain why Marie Curie's cookbooks are locked up (they're radioactive). For the first time, I find science interesting. In fact, I wonder what would have happened had I read this in high school. Perhaps I wouldn't have stopped with anatomy class, and would be writing to you from the dinosaur fields in Montana or a stargazing site in Australia.

Not often does one run into a book one thinks may have changed their life. So go -- go now, and devour it. And remember (this from chapter 'A New Age Dawns: Muster Mark's Quarks'):

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.