Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything

some comments by Markus Ehrenfried

"The part that I sometimes found hard was sitting with a scientist as they explained their work to me. I had one scientist who was extremely patient at explaining particle physics to me, and I simply couldn't grasp it at all. It seemed like the sort of thing that someone on LSD would be telling you."

-- Bill Bryson in an interview
with New Scientist

photo (c) Jerry Bauer by courtesy of Random House Bertelsmann, New York

Bill Bryson's official website

On randomhouse.com you can read an excerpt from 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'.

Some interviews with Bill Bryson can be found at New Scientist, powells.com, January Magazine, Stanfords, salon.com, Random House and Book Page.

A review of 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' appeared in the Cern Courier.

A page about Bill Bryson in the Guardian Books section. You can also find a review of 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' there.

Another review appeared in the New York Times.

about.physics also reviewed this book.

There are reviews on popMatters, BookBrowse, BookReporter and many other websites, but not all of them are worth reading... -- better read the book itself instead! ;-)

The Natural History Museum in London; there you can also find some pages about the history of the museum.

 

A biography of Richard Owen, the first director of the Natural History Museum, can be found on berkeley.edu; he was the man who named the Dinosauria in 1842.

Have a look at strangescience.net, there is also a short biography of Owen.

Brooklyn College, New York, has a list of biographies of people who contributed in the field of 'dino research', including one of Owen.

The Victorian Web is an extremely interesting website which contains a lot of information about science, literature, politics, etc. in this time. (Of course there is also information about Richard Owen). Have a look at their physics section and the pages about Victorian technology, too.

Christian de Duve, 1974 Nobel laureate in Physiology and Medicine, wrote an excellent book about cell biology entiteled A Guided Tour of the Living Cell (two volumes, Scientific American Library, 1984), which unfortunately seems to be out of print. More information about de Duve's ideas can be found here. In American Scientist appeared his interesting article about The Beginnings of Life on Earth.

Well, I guess I cannot comment on the statement above... I am a particle physicist but I have no experience with LSD so far.

I'm going to recommend this book to you anyway; in fact, it is one of the best books I've ever read. It's one of those books I think everyone should read once in his life. Seriously. I cannot see how anyone could find this book boring or could not become interested in science while reading it. (On the other hand: there are many people who cannot understand how somebody can find 'Lord of the Rings' boring and my former German teacher at school never could understand why I hated Thomas Mann's novel 'Der Zauberberg'.)

Bryson's book -- extremely aptedly entitled 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' -- tells the story of the creation of the universe, the earth, life and most of the rest. He also describes in his humourous and ironic way how our understanding of nature developed. What I like most is his gift to bring things into proportions. Reading this book really helps to get an understanding of the size of things from galaxies to microbes and a feeling of the incredible time it took to form our planet. It also makes one aware that we know almost nothing about the oceans and the life forms inside it, don't know most of the plants and bacteria and fungi on earth and don't seem to care.

Bill Bryson is no trained scientist. Actually, I think a trained scientist couldn't write a book like this. He is also not a journalist, at least not one of those who read ten popular science books ("that is: non science books", as one of my former professors in theoretical physics used to remark ;-) and produce an eleventh book. Bryson has done a great deal of reading as the bibliography in his book shows. I was amused and delighted to see that I've read about 50% of the books Bryson lists in his bibliography and his quotations from many of these books reminded me of them. As far as I can assess the literature he used, I would say that he read 'the right books'. From this point of view Bryson's book is a good starting point to go on and read more specialized books on the subjects he covers.

His book is not free of mistakes. When I read his chapters about cosmology, atomic and particle physics I spotted several inaccuracies. (Actually, I don't want to call it 'mistakes' as I know very well how difficult it is to speak about something that complex in a abbreviated way. In fact only some minor things are 'wrong', and considering that he covers everything from biochemistry to particle physics, from geology to oceanography, from meteorology to medicine he has done an absolutely outstanding job!) I guess scientists from other fields will spot similar inaccuracies in chapters which cover their special subjects but over all this is probably the best single book you can find which gives the reader an overview over so many subjects, stays correct most of the time and is highly entertaining in addition!

Bryson's book reminded me of many books I read over the last 15 to 20 years and which I should look at once again, sometime. Most of them I read when I was still at school or during my first semesters at university: books by Isaac Asimov, Paul Atkins, David Attenborough, Hans Christian von Baeyer, David Bodanis, Francis Crick, Paul Davis, Richard Dawkins, Will Durant, Freeman Dyson, Timothy Ferris, Richard Feynman, George Gamow, Steven Jay Gould, John Gribbin, Alan Guth, Steven Hawking, Richard Leakey, Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan, Martin Rees, Carl Sagan, C.P. Snow, Ian Stewart, Kip S. Thorne, James Trefil, James Watson, and Steven Weinberg. One book I definitely should read again is 'A Guided Tour of the Living Cell' by Nobel laureate Christian de Duve (-- this book made me decide that I would like to study biochemistry, even though I finally ended up in particle physics).

Bryson's bibliography is almost a reading list for someone who wants to get an excellent overview about science, therefore in my opinion "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is a very good starting point.

Among many other things Bill Bryson also describes the History of one of my favourite science museums, the Natural History Museum in London. You think the history of a museum couldn't be funny? Then read Bryson's book! The man who made the museum in the 1880s open for everyone (not only to scientists with letters of recommendation) was Richard Owen, the first director of the Natural History Museum. Bryson characterises him as follows: "Owen was not an attractive person, in appearance or in temperament. A photograph from his late middle years shows him as gaunt and sinister, like the villain in a Victorian melodrama, with long, lank hair and bulging eyes - a face to frighten babies. In manner he was cold and imperious, and he was without scruple in the furtherance of his ambitions. He was the only person Charles Darwin was ever known to hate. Even Owen's son (who soon after killed himself) referred to his father's 'lamentable coldness of heart.'

To Owen's great displeasure it was proposed to erect a statue in memory of Charles Darwin and Owen tried everything to prevent this. "In this he failed", writes Bryson, "though he did achieve a certain belated, inadvertent triumph. Today his own statute commands a masterful view from the staircase of the main hall in the Natural History Museum" -- you can see it in the upper photo on the left side at the very end of the hall -- "while Darwin and T. H. Huxley are consigned somewhat obscurely to the museums coffee shop, where they stare gravely over people snacking on cups of tea and jam doughnuts."