Bill Bryson's Life, the Universe and Everything (A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson)

Member Name: xalala

Product:	A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Date:	06/07/04 (220 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to understand science, Not too technical, Lots of anecdotes

Disadvantages: Still managed to bamboozle me in places!

I've recently read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything as part of an online bookclub I sometimes take part in. The book had been on my reading list for ages, and since it's recently out in paperback (on 1 June 2004), it seemed the ideal opportunity to give it a go.

I'm familar with Bill Bryson's writing through having read many of the other books he's written, not only the well-known travelogues (Notes from a Small Island, Walk in the Woods etc) but also from his book on the English language, Mother Tongue. So I was aware that he's much more than just a travel writer, but was curious to find out just how he'd manage to deal with scientific theory in a way that remained accessible to "the masses" (ie, me!). Given that the book has just won the Aventis science book prize, I was somewhat dubious, but took heart from the fact that it's been described as the best "Rough Guide" to science ever printed.

The book itself is split into various segments, each dealing with a different scientific discipline, and travelling (more or less) along the path of developing theories and scientific discovery. In just 29 chapters he covers cosmology, biology, geology, anthropology, paleantology (that's what Ross from Friends did), vulcanology, various other ologies as well as physics, chemistry and a smidgen of maths.

The style of writing is, as you might expect from a best-selling author, pretty accessible throughout, and Bryson uses bags of analogies to get the point across, too. For example, when describing the creation of a universe, he writes:

"NO MATTER HOW hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small.


A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years. So protons are exceedingly microscopic, to say the very least.

Now imagine if you can (and of course you can't) shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small that it would make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter. Excellent. You are ready to start a universe."

This is not, however, our universe - they are even more complicated than that!

Some of the comparisons Bryson uses are a tad stretched, but still work. It's not as easy reading as his travel books, or Mother Tongue, but manages to crack along at a fair old pace.

I had to work harder than I might have liked to get to grips with some of the physics bits, especially quantum/particle physics, but then I was expecting to be bamboozled by that! Otherwise, the information remained very accessible to someone with very little scientific background. Part of the reason for that are the tons of anecdotes about the individuals responsible for scientific development, and Bryson's commentary on them. For example:

"Buoyed by the success of leaded gasoline (which he had invented), Midgley now turned to another technological problem of the age. Refrigerators in the 1920s were often appallingly risky because they used dangerous gases that sometimes leaked. One leak from a refrigerator in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929 killed more than a hundred people. Midgley set out to create a gas that was stable, nonflammable, noncorrosive, and safe to breathe. With an instin
ct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny, he invented chloroflurocarbons, or CFCs.

Seldom has an industrial product been more swiftly or unfortunately embraced. CFCs went into production in the early 1930s and found a thousand applications in everything from car air conditioners to deodorant sprays before it was noticed, half a century later, that they were devouring the ozone in the atmosphere. As you will be aware, this was not a good thing...

Midgley never knew this because he died long before anyone realized how destructive CFCs were. His death was itself memorably unusual. After becoming crippled with polio, Midgley invented a contraption involving a series of motorized pulleys that automatically raised or turned him in bed. In 1933, he became entangled in the cords as the machine went into action and was strangled."

I'd be interested to know just how factual some of the facts that he's included are - it's quickly becoming apparent that science keeps changing its mind about, well, everything! Also, Bryson is afterall a journalist at heart, and there's certainly some sensationalist stuff included here. We are, it appears, massively overdue for a huge volcanic eruption, an extinction level meteor strike, a disease that gets the better of us, killing off human life as we know it, and many other catastrophes. Hang on - is that a meteor I see heading towards me? Should I bother saving up for my retirement, or just blow the lot on living it up while I still can?!

For me, some of the most interesting bits were around the people behind the science. Amusing pen portraits of the weird and wonderful individuals who inhabited the scientific world through the past centuries abound, and most of them appear to be British... What also amazed me is how often the same people pop up, time and again, in v
astly differing branches of science. It seems that people took pride in concentrating their efforts in something entirely pointless, then tossing off a seminal work on the side and completely failing to see its importance. (For example, Darwin kept his work on the origin of species in a drawer for a couple of decades or so before bothering to get it published. And once it had been published, one editor suggested he write something about pigeons instead, as it would be more interesting to people.)

It's a long book, weighing in with over 550 pages in total in the paperback format, but is a book designed for picking up and putting down. I think that unless you are especially keen on science, or already working in the field, say, that it would be impossible to read this through in a couple of days. The level of information included is just too intense to suceed. And if you were working in the field and read this, you'd probably just get annoyed by the dumbing down/popularising of your field of expertise.

The chapters within each section are fairly short, however, and of a perfect essay length, giving an overview of each topic before leading neatly into the next. This lead in does make it more difficult to read just one or two at a time, but not overly so.

Towards the end of the book I was a little uncomfortable with what I thought felt too much like moralising (possibly unintentionally). Writing about species becoming extinct, Bryson reports with seeming incredulity that one species, considered extinct for decades, was miraculously rediscovered by two people only a couple of days apart:

"Perhaps nothing speaks more vividly for the strangeness of the times than the fate of the lovely little Bachman's warbler. A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually thrilling song, but its population numbers, never ro
bust, gradually dwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether and went unseen for many years. Then in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds, and that was the last that was ever seen of Bachman's warblers."

There's a concentration on just how dangerous we (homo sapiens) are to the animal and plant kingdoms, with estimates of between 100 and 600 species a week becoming extinct due to our actions. This is fine, and a valuable piece of information, especially for a veggie tree hugger in potentia like me, however I thought that on the whole the point was laboured, and didn't fit comfortably with the rest of the book. A minor niggle though, at the end of a very good read.

I didn't actually realise when I'd got to the end of the book either. There are stacks of pages of notes at the back, useful for getting more information, but I didn't notice anything actually annotated during the course of the book, so it's difficult to tell if there's a note relating to it or not. Perhaps I should have expected them, but the notes came as a complete surprise to me! Just goes to show how long it's been since I read a similar type of book (which was probably The Science of Discworld, for what it's worth).

I would recommend this book for non-science types who are interested in finding out a bit more about our planet and solar system, along with how (we think currently) we came to be here. Bryson's touch is light enough to give his subject matter a wide appeal, and of sufficient depth to do a decent job of explaining, well, life, the universe and everything.

Thanks for reading!

Further details:

A Short History of Nearly Everything, published by
Black Swan in paperback on 1 June 2004.

ISBN: 0552997048

Available on amazon at the time of writing for £6.29 + p&p.

Summary: