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4.21 AVERAGE
4.21 AVERAGE
- Can best be described as a broad history of scientific progress up to the year 2003 (I read the first edition)
- By page 10 I was bordering on a thinking-too-hard-about-space-induced panic attack, by page 100 I was considering getting into theism again
- I got about halfway in before my eyes started glazing over from just the sheer amount of info I was trying to absorb, so I DNFed. May try the 2025 edition audiobook later down the line
'A Short History of Nearly Everything' is a comprehensive, very readable and highly enjoyable book on - indeed - almost everything in natural sciences. Bryson is no scientist himself, and his explanations of all things in the cosmos and on earth remain thoroughly understandable throughout. Moreover, Bryson has an interest in how scientists discovered things like the size and the weight of the earth, and these stories add to the book's charm. Always in awe, but never taking his subject too seriously, Bryson keeps a light tone and allows the reader to join his amazement, wonder and sometimes ridicule.
Only at the end a pessimistic tone creeps in, and the author shows to be remarkably afraid of the future, most obviously because of the grand scale in which the earth itself and things from outer space can destroy us, but also because of a rather low opinion on mankind as a whole.
Nevertheless, the book is a great read and an outstanding introduction to physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, paleontology and biology.
Only at the end a pessimistic tone creeps in, and the author shows to be remarkably afraid of the future, most obviously because of the grand scale in which the earth itself and things from outer space can destroy us, but also because of a rather low opinion on mankind as a whole.
Nevertheless, the book is a great read and an outstanding introduction to physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, paleontology and biology.
this book was AMAZING! i felt like i was learning something every time i sat down with it (most times a lot of things). it is a big book, but you will not regret reading it.
bill bryson does a fantastic job of taking incomprehensible ideas (at least to us laymens!) and relating them to something easily understandable. example:
one of my favorite authors is [a:Mary Roach|7956|Mary Roach|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1463591979p2/7956.jpg] and someone suggested this book based on that. boy were they right! both authors make super complicated and above-my-head science into something that i can relate to and be excited about!
here are my favorite quotes:
If Earth were perfectly smooth, it would be covered everywhere with water to a depth of four kilometers. There might be life in that lonesome ocean, but there certainly wouldn’t be baseball.
Sea level, incidentally, is an almost entirely notional concept. Seas are not level at all. Tides, winds, the Coriolis force, and other effects alter water levels considerably from one ocean to another and within oceans as well. The Pacific is about a foot and a half higher along its western edge - a consequence of the centrifugal force created by the Earth’s spin. Just as when you pull on a tub of water the water tends to flow toward the other end, as if reluctant to come with you, so the eastward spin of Earth piles the water up against the ocean’s western margins.
At the risk of stating the obvious, there is a lot of salt in the sea - enough to bury every bit of land on the planet to a depth of about five hundred feet.
If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about a half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period.
Well, first it [the KT meteor strike] was positively enormous. It struck with the force of 100 million megatons. Such an outburst is not easily imagined, but as James Lawrence Powell has pointed out, if you exploded one Hiroshima-sized bomb for every person alive on Earth today you would still be about a billion bombs short of the size of the KT impact.
Once they got going, mammals expanded prodigiously - sometimes to an almost preposterous degree. For a time, there were guinea pigs the size of rhinos and rhinos the size of a two-story house.
DNA exists for just one reason - to create more DNA - and you have a lot of inside of you: about six feet of it squeezed into almost every cell. Each length of DNA comprises some 3.2 billion letters of coding, enough to provide 10 3,480,000,000 possible combinations, “guaranteed to be unique agains all conceivable odds,” in the words of Christian de Duve. That’s a lot of possibility - a one followed by more than three billion zeroes. “It would take more than five thousand average-sized books just to print that figure,” notes de Duve.
bill bryson does a fantastic job of taking incomprehensible ideas (at least to us laymens!) and relating them to something easily understandable. example:
The most striking thing about our atmosphere is that there isn’t very much of it. It extends upward for about 120 miles, which might seem reasonably bounteous when viewed from ground level, but if you shrank the Earth to the size of a standard desktop globe it would only be about the thickness of a couple of coats of varnish.
one of my favorite authors is [a:Mary Roach|7956|Mary Roach|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1463591979p2/7956.jpg] and someone suggested this book based on that. boy were they right! both authors make super complicated and above-my-head science into something that i can relate to and be excited about!
here are my favorite quotes:
Spoiler
Thanks to Global Positioning Systems we can see that Europe and North America are parting at about the speed a fingernail grows - roughly two yards in a human lifetime.If Earth were perfectly smooth, it would be covered everywhere with water to a depth of four kilometers. There might be life in that lonesome ocean, but there certainly wouldn’t be baseball.
Sea level, incidentally, is an almost entirely notional concept. Seas are not level at all. Tides, winds, the Coriolis force, and other effects alter water levels considerably from one ocean to another and within oceans as well. The Pacific is about a foot and a half higher along its western edge - a consequence of the centrifugal force created by the Earth’s spin. Just as when you pull on a tub of water the water tends to flow toward the other end, as if reluctant to come with you, so the eastward spin of Earth piles the water up against the ocean’s western margins.
At the risk of stating the obvious, there is a lot of salt in the sea - enough to bury every bit of land on the planet to a depth of about five hundred feet.
If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about a half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period.
Well, first it [the KT meteor strike] was positively enormous. It struck with the force of 100 million megatons. Such an outburst is not easily imagined, but as James Lawrence Powell has pointed out, if you exploded one Hiroshima-sized bomb for every person alive on Earth today you would still be about a billion bombs short of the size of the KT impact.
Once they got going, mammals expanded prodigiously - sometimes to an almost preposterous degree. For a time, there were guinea pigs the size of rhinos and rhinos the size of a two-story house.
DNA exists for just one reason - to create more DNA - and you have a lot of inside of you: about six feet of it squeezed into almost every cell. Each length of DNA comprises some 3.2 billion letters of coding, enough to provide 10 3,480,000,000 possible combinations, “guaranteed to be unique agains all conceivable odds,” in the words of Christian de Duve. That’s a lot of possibility - a one followed by more than three billion zeroes. “It would take more than five thousand average-sized books just to print that figure,” notes de Duve.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
slow-paced
Really good and super interesting; however, for my taste, he focuses way too much on the people rather than the matter.
adventurous
funny
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
funny
informative
medium-paced
Un livre de vulgarisation scientifique très intéressant et accessible, remplis de sarcasme et d'humour, même si je suppose que tout n'est pas d'actualité étant donné la date de publication.
Excellently fascinating book. My girlfriend gave me this for my 20th birthday. Best read and birthday present ever.