A Short History of Nearly Everything
Ratings421
Average rating4.2
Couldn't be more fascinating - he really does cover nearly everything - starting right from pre-historic times. LOVE this book.
This book took me something like ten years to read. But to be fair I forgot about it and put it down in between for most of it. The book itself is not excellent, but it's fun to read and even more fun to ponder about. The best parts were when I put the book down to get lost in my thoughts, which is something it is very helpful for engendering. But it doesn't lend itself to reading quickly, nor to a good rating when not reading the book is more fun than reading it.
A great overview of the history of science and scientific thought. The great part is that it doesn't only go through different discoveries, but also includes and describes the social context of the era. From astrophysics through geology to genetics and environmental sciences the author tries to show you the world through a scientific eye and how many concepts, once unimaginable, were evolving and influencing our lives. I particularly like the fact, that the book has a message to it.
Très déçu par ce livre :
Le début est très intéressant, bien écrit et rempli de réflexions passionnantes.
Après quelques chapitres, le sujet change, on ne s'intéresse plus à la science, mais aux scientifiques eux-mêmes.
Certes, le livre est intéressant, mais ça donne une impression de hors-sujet.
Absolutely enjoyed reading this book. I had reservations before reading it since it came out 20 years ago, I'm afraid that the information would be outdated. But turns out, it's enough to cover the history of science (albeit a more condensed one). One thing that sparks my wonder is the book demystifying all the historical figures in science for me. In the end, they were all humans, wonderfully intelligent, but still flawed, even in their own field. They have dreams, desires, bad tempers and all the attributes of humanity. Reading the book makes me humble in the truest sense. I'm a singular organism on this pale blue dot, crafted after billions of years, to end up where I am now. I'm small in the scale of the universe, but also amazed at the complexity that makes me, and all the people I know and would never know, all the plants, animals, bacteria, cells, mountains, rocks, and all that exist. Stuffs that just exist. And life that just want to be.
This book is a fantastic review of all things scientific, basically covering what scientists know about our world and Universe for the non-scientist reader. Bryson goes into histories of what we know about geology, chemistry, physics, and biology just to name a few. As someone who hasn't really had the chance to take a science class in my adult life, I really appreciated this book and recommend it to everyone.
My final takeaway from the book (besides the many, many ways life as we know it can come to an end) is that there is still so much we still haven't discovered.. Nearly every chapter states something similar. We don't know much about the Universe yet. We don't know much about the atom. We don't know much about the depths of the ocean. We don't know why there were periods of mass extinction or exactly how homo sapiens evolved from other homo species. This is actually encouraging in a way. There is still much to be discovered. If you're young and considering becoming a scientist, by all means, do it!
A great expanded (or contracted, depending on your mileage) compilation of high school physics, chemistry and biology history and trivia.
I listened to this book on audible, narrated by Richard Matthews which was awesome. The narrator did a great job and was very enjoyable to listen to. The book itself took on a tall order, nearly everything is a lot of stuff. But I felt it was neatly organized and told a great story and managed to do it with some humor.
My take aways from the book were that we are far less certain about the things we know about the world than I was led to believe and that a surprising amount of things we've learned were learned really quite recently.
Bryson takes the reader through the history of the universe to this day, as far as we understand it (or understood it in 2003). On the way, he discusses topics as diverse as cosmology, astronomy, biochemistry, particle physics, paleoanthropology, archaeology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and meteorology in layman's terms.
I was especially struck by how little we know about so many things, not least about our own bodies and the abundant life around us.
Engaging, educational, lucid and entertaining.
I must say, never I have enjoyed a history book as this one. Bill Bryson explains the earth's history succinctly but at the same thoroughly. He has knack of storyteller and interweaves the stories of historian (which almost ends with historian dying unhappy life) that you feel like you are reading novel and not history (and in good sense). It covers everything from Big Bang, formation of environment, to evolution of life, the repeated cycle of evolution and extinction, purpose of life, from subjects ranging from (apart from history) geology, biology, palaeontology, to cosmology, anthropology and genetics etc.
BLUF: Pick this up.
Plot: A Short History of Nearly Everything is exactly as its' title suggests. This text takes us from the beginning of time to our current position – all in laymen terms.
Topics include: The solar system, geology, all things Earth, atoms, plants, dinosaurs, extinction of dinosaurs, Darwinism, quantum physics, global warming, and everything in between.
I almost DNF'd: I listened to the audiobook and quickly thought it would become a book that I would DNF. The Introduction was very difficult to process. It tried to make the book mysterious and appealing by describing what it took to make the reader, and continues on about atoms before it starts into why Bill Bryson decided to write this book.
Thankfully, I didn't: Believe me, I am thrilled that I made it past that first chapter. Bryson writes nonfiction in the form of stories. It's impressive. I have a hard time with nonfiction books because they tend to be dry and I tend to be unable (unwilling?) to retain the information, but Bryson is able to transitions from one topic to another in a seamless manner.
The iffy: I had a good time reading this book. It constantly made me stop and think about the information provided, as well as research the topics to understand a little more about what I was learning. (Don't get me wrong, the book gives enough information, but I have a need to verify and ponder.) Well... one of the things I researched, the idea that “all glass on Earth is flowing downward under the relentless drag of gravity”. Turns out, this isn't true. When one thing isn't true, it makes me wonder what else was written that was not true.
Oh, btw: The book talks about the Swine Flu. Specifically, how it reoccurs often without known reason. I thought this was awesome (erm.. timely) given that this ended up reoccurring soon after the book was published. I love seeing something I read prove relevant.
So... What are you waiting for? Buy it, rent it, read it, enjoy it, reread it! I know I will (preferably with more fact checking, for fun).
It's informative (YAY science) but also really well written. Just one of those books that changes your way of looking at the world. Magnificent in scope, perfect in execution. VERY highly recommended.
I think this will be the book that I will go back to again and again. There were so many interesting facts to learn, and I enjoyed reading about how various scientists discovered new information that often surprised them. I liked reading about William Herschel's discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781 and how he wanted to name it after King George III (Georgium Sidus). I also liked learning about prehistoric guinea pigs the size of cows.
Lots of great little nuggets of knowledge in this book - almost too much to take in and remember properly. If I'd been thinking of it at the beginning, I would've highlighted the interesting stuff as I went so that I could go back and easily remember/find it later.. but since I didn't I may have to read this again someday.
The first half I was able to keep going through the slower parts no problem because of the anticipation of more knowledge, but by the 2nd half the clever stories seemed to be less and less and it was more and more stats, data, etc and I found myself losing interest.
It could also have been due to a baby who didn't want to sleep and so I was reading it on little to no sleep. :)
This was a long read - he really does cover a little bit of all the major science disciplines. I found that there were sections I really enjoyed - geology and anthropology - and other sections, like chemistry and physics, that I had to skim through. It is an admirable undertaking, and Bill Bryson has the humor and writing skills to pull it off, and ultimately create a good book.
I hate science. There I've said it.
Science textbooks, science teachers,
science classes....For me, it was
all, as Bryson writes in the book's
introduction, “...as if (they) wanted
to keep the good stuff secret by making
all of it soberly unfathomable.”
For the science hater (and, I suspect,
for the science lover), this is a
singularly wonderful book. Bryson makes
Einstein and Darwin, Dalton and
Rutherford seem like cool dudes.
He talks about big subjects like the
expanding universe, plate tectonics,
the human genome, and Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle the way other
people talk about baseball.
Highly recommended.
Some of my favorite quotes from the book:
From the introduction:
“Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted
that you could make it. Getting here wasn't
easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a
little tougher than you realize. To begin
with, for you to be here now trillions of
drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in
an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner
to create you....For the next many years (we
hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly
engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative
efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you
experience the supremely agreeable but generally
underappreciated state known as existence. (1)”
“It isn't easy to become a fossil....When
your spark is gone, every molecule you own
will be nibbled off you or sluiced away to
be put to use in some other system. That's
just the way it is. (321)”
“Of course, it is possible that alien beings
travel billions of miles to amuse themselves
by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or
frightening the daylights out of some poor
guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in
Arizona (they must have teenagers, after
all), but it does seem unlikely. (27)”
“Every atom you possess has almost certainly
passed through several stars and been parts
of millions of organisms on its way to
becoming you. (134)”
“The good news, it appears, is that it takes
an awful lot to extinguish a species. The
bad news is that the good news can never be
counted on. (206).”
Bryson quotes Freeman Dyson: “The more I
examine the universe and study the details
of its architecture, the more evidence I
find that the universe in some sense must
have known we were coming.”
“You have no secrets from your cells. They
know far more about you than you do. Each
one carries a copy of the complete genetic
code-the instruction manual for your body-
so it knows not only how to do its job but
every other job in the body. (371)”
“We are...uncannily alike. Compare your genes
with any other human being's and on average
they will be about 99.9 percent the same.
(398)”
“It isn't being an organism. In the whole
universe, as far as we yet know, there is
only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of
the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain
you, and even it can be pretty grudging. (239)”
“...if you were designing an organism to look
after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor
where it is going and keep a record of where
it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings
for the job. But here's an extremely salient
point: we have been chosen....As far as we
can tell, we are the best there is. We may
be all there is. It's an unnerving thought
that we may be the living universe's supreme
achievement and its worst nightmare
simultaneously. (477)”
“The upshot of all this is that we live in a
universe whose age we can't quite compute,
surrounded by stars whose distances 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. (172)”