A Short History of Nearly Everything
A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's condensed history of science and how we know what we know about our species, planet and universe.
I learned two things from this book. First, most of the physical world is, in Bryson's words, "pretty well beyond imagining." Nonetheless, Bryson has an assload of strained analogies to help us. For example:
Atoms are tiny--very tiny indeed. Half a million of them lined up shoulder to shoulder could hide behind a human hair.
One atom is to the width of a millimeter line as the thickness of a sheet of paper is to the height of the Empire State Building.
It has been calculated that if you sunk a well to the center [of the Earth] and dropped a brick into it, it would take only forty-five minutes for it hit the bottom.
Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano... Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across... and about eight miles thick at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus cloud, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of.
I find none of these illuminating, but the book is filled with them and I understand that they're kind of necessary. Only by trying to imagine them can we understand how far they're beyond our ken.
The second thing I learned was that life itself is pretty durable and can exist in some extreme environments, but human life life is dismayingly fragile. We're only a meteor impact, volcanic eruption or ice age away from extinction, and the odds of those things happening are not nearly as remote as we like to think (and we have no way of predicting them).
But don't let that scare you away from ASHONE. It's a funny, quirky, fascinating book that's propelled by Bill Bryson's sense of wonder--wonder that we can know so much about atoms and galaxies and the history of the universe. And, towards the end, wonder that we are even here at all. (If you're a creationist/intelligent design-ist, you're bound to be frustrated by Bryson's secular world view.) I finished it both astonished and humbled by the billions of flukes, coincidences and near misses that let me be here to write this. Which is to say, it's good and I recommend it.
