A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
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Book Reviews of A Short History of Nearly Everything
Book Review: An entertaining read, cautiously recommended
Summary: 3 Stars
Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" has a lot of good points. It is above all a very entertaining and engaging read. Bryson writes in an informal, chatty style that at times reminded me of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. His subject is, essentially, life, the universe and (nearly) everything. Bryson aims to explore the history of science in general, summarizing not only what we know, but also how we know it - he sets himself the wonderful goal of trying to explain "how scientists work things out". It's a big task, and had Bryson accomplished it, this would have been an incredible book. As it is, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is still a worthwhile read, despite its flaws, which I will soon discuss.
The organization of the book is partly chronological, partly thematic. It is divided into six parts and thirty relatively short chapters. The earlier parts focus on the physical sciences, including astronomy, cosmology, geology, physics and physical chemistry. The latter half of the book deals primarily with the life sciences - biology, ecology, botany, zoology, oceanography, organic chemistry and so on. It's a considerable challenge to organize such a large amount of material dealing with so many distantly-related subjects, and Bryson pulls it off quite well. I can make no criticism of his large-scale organization.
However, the devil is in the details, and many of the details Bryson chooses to include in his "Short History" have little if anything to do with what he's supposedly writing about. He has a persistent tendency to head off on irrelevant tangents and lose himself in anecdotes about some of the curious characters that have walked the halls of science. Bryson wastes far too much ink relating bizarre factoids picked up in the course of his research, from William Buckland's dining habits to Gideon Mantell's twisted spine. He especially loves recounting the details of feuds and squabbles between scientists - the more intense, underhanded, unreasonable and destructive, the better. In all of this, the material we picked up the book to explore can get somewhat lost. Chapter 10, for instance, is "an important and salutary tale of avarice, deceit, bad science, several needless deaths, and the final determination of the age of the Earth" - in that order of importance.
Reading "A Short History of Nearly Everything", I did greatly appreciate Bryson's ability to make clear how much scientists don't know and are still working to figure out. However, I was disappointed that despite his promise to explore "how scientists work things out", Bryson often just quotes results and conclusions without further explanation. Sometimes he doesn't even do that - modern physics is largely dismissed as wacky and incomprehensible.
Even worse, Bryson makes several glaring errors in his discussion of physics (and perhaps also in other areas that I'm not so familiar with), far worse than any I've seen in other popular science books I've read. For example, he suggests particles with "spin" are actually spinning about an axis (which they are not) and presents entanglement as a violation of relativity (which it is not). Bryson also incorrectly claims that the production of black holes within future particle accelerators would destroy the world. In fact, these microscopic black holes would evaporate in a fraction of a nanosecond - something that would have been very nice to learn in "A Short History of Nearly Everything".
I enjoy reading popular science, and much of what I've read I've found better than Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". I would especially recommend Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Alan Guth and Martin Rees for physics, astronomy and cosmology, and Richard Dawkins and Stephen J. Gould for biology. However, I know of no other work that attempts to cover nearly as many fields as Bryson's "Short History". Even though Bryson's book wasn't able to live up to its initial promise, it was a decent read - one I recommend, though with some reservations.
Book Review: experts will quibble, but still worthwhile
Summary: 4 Stars
I first read Bill Bryson when a friend recommended that I obtain his book A Walk In the Woods in order to prepare me to hike the 200-mile John Muir Trail. In his Walk Bryson recounts how he and an old friend, both grotesquely out of shape at middle age, hiked the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. I am a rookie hiker and my friend advised that Bryson would be an affable if introductory guide. Similarly, you could put my knowledge of science in a thimble (I do remember the bunsen burner from high school), so reading Bryson's popular-level history of science was a perfect fit for me. And for others, too, judging from its success. A Short History spent six months on the bestseller list of the New York Times, which predicted that it is "destined to become a modern classic of science writing."
Bryson disarms readers from the get-go when he explains why he wrote his book. On a long flight across the Pacific ocean he realized "with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on. I had no idea, for example, why the oceans were salty but the Great Lakes weren't. Didn't have the faintest idea...And ocean salinity of course represented only the merest sliver of my ignorance." After three years of research, reading, interviews, and asking specialists "a lot of outstandingly dumb questions," he wrote this gem.
Bryson is simply a fantastic writer. His prose sparkles page after page, even if the book is a little long. Peppered throughout his history are salient quotes from the experts. A virus, notes the Nobel laureate Peter Medawar, is simply "a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news." To appreciate the hubris of physics consider the scorn of Ernest Rutherford: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." Bryson has also mastered the analogy to give us at least a faint idea of the spectacular boundaries of scientific inquiry. "If someone struck a match on the moon," he observes, astronomers could "spot the flare." Humor is always a page or so away, as when the famous German Alexander von Humboldt wrly observed the three stages of scientific discovery: "first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally, they credit the wrong person."
From our cosmological origins in just 1 of 140 billion galaxies, to the subatomic spectacle of quarks and gluons, to life on earth and in the sea, in millennia past and in the present, including air and sea, glaciers and cells, Bryson describes the mystery of our world as scientifically understood. What is the weight, diameter, age, or circumference of the earth, and how do we know? What, really, is at the core of the earth? The deepest point in the ocean? Who invented the periodic table that hung on the wall of my tenth grade chemistry class? What was Einstein's "appalling piece of science" that the great physicist admitted was "the biggest blunder of my life?" What is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and why is it so important? Who discovered plate tectonics? Read Bryson and you will learn what scientists know and how they know it.
You will also learn what scientists do not know, and that turns out to be quite a lot. Conjecture, speculation, extrapolation and outright guesswork play a role. Bryson clearly loves and appreciates science, but he does us the service of not divinizing it. His book includes brilliant insights by science, but also grandiose mistakes, enlightened scholars and eccentric mavericks, plodding experiments and accidental breakthroughs, princely human beings and petty egomaniacs, noble quests and infantile squabbles. The outrageously quixotic is never far from view, either, as with the German chemist Hennig Brand who in the seventeenth century thought he could distill gold from urine. All of which is to say that Bryson humanizes the scientific enterprise, and as a consequence makes it so very easy for us to love its labors.
Book Review: Schizophrenic Science
Summary: 3 Stars
Reading Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is akin to watching a schizophrenic displaying a multiple personality disorder. Engrossing, fascinating, and enlightening in the sense of "Thank goodness I don't think like that".
That all the glowing reviews of Bryson's book come from other journalists, rather than scientists, should set off a screaming alarm in the head of anyone wanting to actually know more about science. His description of the book (see http://www.meettheauthor.com/bookbites/197.html) starts with "The idea is that I never understood science very well when it was being taught to me in school..."
Uh-oh.
Granted, the task of describing the history and developments of science over the past few centuries is a near impossible task and, in many ways, Bryson has done a good job of making this history interesting; unfortunately his understanding of the science and its importance is too often second hand, with the result that when it gets too hard for him he tends to dismiss it with a funny story. This attitude is not what science is about. He didn't understand science when he was in school, and he does not understand it now.
The "climax" of this approach occurs in Chapter 11 when, having characterised all physics since the 1940's in the preceding pages as an unintelligible and endless waste of money he says "Almost certainly this is an area that will see further developments of thought, and almost certainly these thoughts will again be beyond most of us."
Great. We might as well give up now.
Imagine for a moment Bryson writing this book back in the 1870's...
A Scottish scientist by the name of James Clerk Maxwell has used a new branch of mathematics replete with concepts such as partial differential equations, to describe the properties of electric and magnetic fields. There are perhaps a few dozens of people in Europe who have the ability or interest to decipher what he has written.
Bryson would dismiss Maxwell's work as the speculations of a bizarre rambling Scotsman (which he was), since Maxwell's work is far too difficult for Bryson, or any other sane person to bother understanding. We might as well give up now. As proof of this thought, Maxwell - in my opinion the third greatest physicist of the modern age behind only Newton and Einstein - gets a mention in Bryson's book only as the editor of Cavendish's papers! His work on electromagnetism is not even mentioned in Bryson's book!! (I suspect the reason is that no-one has written a popular book on Maxwell yet - much of Bryson's material seems to have been borrowed from other popular books he and I have read over the past decade...)
The implications of Maxwell's work on electromagnetism is of course the basis of all modern technology and science, including the development of Einstein's relativity and modern atomic theory. Maxwell's mathematics is now standard fare for third year physics and electrical engineering students. Too bad Bryson can't understand it any more than he can understand modern physics:
For example, if the Higgs boson turns out to be real then we may be only a few technical hops away from science fictional ideas such as faster than light travel, since controlling the Higgs field might allow control over the mass of an object... in much the same way that controlling Maxwell's electromagnetic field allows us to use cell phones... but all this is lost on Bryson because he is way out of his depth and has discovered he cannot swim in the ocean of science.
The book is both fundamentally interesting and fundamentally flawed. I think I was able to get through it because I understood the relevance of each topic without having to rely on Bryson's dismissive explanations. I doubt that most readers would be able to do the same.
Book Review: Neither Short, nor a History, nor.........
Summary: 3 Stars
Voltaire once said of the Holy Roman Empire that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. I feel the same way about this book. It is not particularly short (weighing in at just under 600 pages), nor a history in the sense that most historians, including historians of science, would use the term.
As for "of everything", or even "of nearly everything", that can only be obvious hyperbole. I suspect that the phrase was included as a sly dig at some recent authors in the field of popular science whose works could be subtitled "A Short (or Long) History of a Remarkably Narrow and Specialised Area of Human Knowledge". Bill Bryson clearly has wider ambitions than that. He first made his name as a writer of travel books, and this is a travel book of a sort, a Cook's tour of science, taking in cosmology, astronomy, geology, chemistry, physics, oceanography, biology, and palaeontology. He combines information about the current state of knowledge in these different sciences with a brief overview of the historical development of each. He does not have a scientific background himself but has obviously learnt a lot in the writing of this book; each chapter has been reviewed by an expert in the relevant field.
A feature of the book is that the author loves to regale his audiences with tales of the foibles and eccentricities of the great and the good of science. Thus we learn about the nineteenth-century anatomist-clergyman the Revd. William Buckland and his ambition to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom; guests at his home were likely to be served baked guinea pig or battered mice. Isaac Newton once poked a needle into his own eye socket (motivated by scientific curiosity rather than masochism). The chemist Carl Scheele was in the habit of tasting a sample of every substance he was investigating, regardless of its toxicity, a habit which probably led to his early death. Linnaeus amused himself by giving plant genera sexually suggestive Latin names such as "Clitoria".
The motivation for telling these stories is presumably not just a love of idle gossip; they seem to have been designed to reassure the reader that scientists are not some alien race of super-intelligent boffins but human beings like any other. The book is designed to be both entertaining and informative, to combine characteristic Bryson humour with serious scientific information. Some of the author's own preoccupations come through clearly. The fact that the final chapter deals with extinctions, for example, seems to point to his "green" environmentalist beliefs. He clearly has no time for the Creationist fundamentalists who believe that the Book of Genesis is the only scientific or historical textbook anyone will ever need. (I note that he has taken some predictable flak from them on this board).
In my opinion the author succeeds better in entertaining his readers than in informing them. His style is a delight to read, being both witty and friendly. As far as information goes, however, I felt that the book was perhaps a little too ambitious in scope. It might not be a "history of nearly everything", but trying to cope with so many scientific disciplines between the covers of one book is a huge undertaking in itself. Although the result was certainly entertaining, I felt that at times it seemed a bit shallow, leaving me knowing everything about the personal habits of the great scientists but wanting to know much more about their contributions to science.
Book Review: Thought Provoking
Summary: 5 Stars
Thank goodness Bill Bryson has an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Here I thought he just walked all over the world and then wrote about it --- fortunately not. I've read about half a dozen of his books: A WALK IN THE WOODS, NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND, NOTES FROM A BIG COUNTRY, NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, even a dictionary he wrote. Not one of them failed to elicit embarrassing giggles, often at highly inconvenient, and public, times. So I jumped at the chance to read A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING. I mean, just look at the title! By the time I'd finished the Prologue, I was running to my husband exclaiming how incredible this book was going to be. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the content, but written the way it is, it undeniably makes learning fun. While his travelogue humor is much more likely to elicit wild bouts of guffaws, Bryson speckles A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING with amusingly constructed sentences and an occasional observation on the absurdity of what he has singled out to share with us.
Bryson cements the facts with quirky personalities and places. Lord Kelvin, for instance, father of the temperature scale that bears his name, virtually leaps alive on the pages, as do Richter, Pasteur and a host of others. Biographical trivia personalizes these gods of science and history. Did you know that Albert Einstein failed his college entrance tests the first try? That little factoid should make you feel better the next time your boss scoffs derisively at your presentation.
One of the chapters includes a fascinating look at the life and work of Charles Darwin, distilled down to the intriguing parts and expanded upon with charmingly obscure odd morsels. Here's a good one: after reading Darwin's ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, an editor of the British Quarterly Review politely suggested he write on a subject that might be of more interest to a large audience, say a book about pigeons.
Aside from an abundance of famous names, you'll encounter some key minds wrapped in lesser-known countenances. For example, have you ever heard of the Reverend William Buckland? Likely not, but he made some exciting discoveries among the fossils of yore. How about his friend, Gideon Algernon Mantell, a country doctor and amateur paleontologist? You can find out about this man's tragic life in the shadows of a great discovery he made.
When Bryson isn't treating his readers to an intimate look inside some eccentric scientists' lives, he's wowing us with some truly staggering figures --- the number of atoms it takes to build a pinhead; the distance, in terms we can almost grasp, of Pluto from where you sit at your computer right now; the depth of the Earth's crust, or simply its age. (I can tell you without giving the plot away that it is very old.)
A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING starts with the birth of the universe and the creation of the Earth, and then carries through evolution, the discovery of elements, the counting of comets, the makeup of chromosomes and DNA, the mysteries of the seas, the composition of the air, and potential --- and historic --- natural disasters, to name but a few of the subjects covered.
I can't imagine what Mr. Bryson will tackle next. It seems he has covered literally everything in just this one volume. But I look forward to his future undertaking with unabashed eagerness.