Science Reference for Everyone
Review on A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Successful travel writer, Bill Bryson, has taken an extended journey through the world of science with his eyes wide open. From the inner core of the earth to the furthest parts of the universe readers can share his sense of delight at the beautiful and the bizarre, the beguiling and the bogus. Wonder, with him, at the sheer magnitude of knowledge, and share his fears of how little is actually known of things that are possibly of earth shattering importance. When will Yellowstone Park explode? When will the next ice age start, and why? Has it started already?
It is something of a relief to be told that many of the estimates in science are little more than informed guesses.
Like all good travel writers the author doesn’t just point out the landmarks of discovery, he gets behind the scenes showing them from fresh, often unexpected, angles.
What Scientists Know
Scientists know, or think they know, that life on earth has been marked by a series of extinctions. It is estimated that 99.9% of all creatures that have ever lived on the planet are no longer with us. A sobering thought, especially when we consider that the average life span of a species of complex organisms is 4,000,000 years, “roughly about where we are now.”
Despite, often terrifying, observations like the above the book is shot through with humor and wit of an outstanding quality. Extremely complex theoretical conclusions become more explicable, or at least easier for the lay person to digest, when compared with everyday occurrences.
Statistics in Perspective
The author has a deceptively easy manner of putting statistics into perspective. For example scientists disagree on the known number of plants in the world, putting the figure at between 248,000 and 265,000. This doesn’t seem so huge until the difference is explained as being 20 times more than the total number of flowering plants in the whole of North America; known ones that is.
Mr. Bryson usually writes sympathetically about the characters that populate the world of science although many of them were exceedingly difficult personalities, and some of the infighting has been astonishing. As the pursuit of science often requires a singleness of purpose it is not altogether surprising that some practitioners were, to put it mildly, slightly unhinged. A test tube short of a laboratory, perhaps?
In all fairness he does point out that many men and women displayed remarkable courage (or extreme foolhardiness depending on the point of view) when working with unknown forces and worked incredibly hard, often in the face of scepticism from their peers.
Can You Explain That Again?
Anyone with any curiosity about the world will be grateful to Bill Bryson for his dedication in producing this volume. As he explains in the acknowledgements section of the book he endlessly repeated the question, “I’m sorry, but can you explain that again?” Somebody had to, and he has certainly made things easier for the armchair traveller.
A Short history of Nearly Everything, Black Swan, 2004, 0 552 99704 8, sounds like a book packed with trivia, but contains nothing inconsequential from start to finish. An essential requirement on any shelf of reference books ranging from the diverse (and often messy) sub-atomic theories, through the complexities of DNA to the mind numbing distances of the cosmos.
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