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The Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
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What is The Short History of Nearly Everything about?
A Short History Of Nearly Everything (Majdnem minden rövid története) explains everything we’ve learned so far about our world and the universe, including how they were formed, how we learned to interpret time, space, and gravity, why it's such a miracle that we are alive, and how much of our planet remains a complete mystery to us.
Key ideas of The Short History of Nearly Everything
The Improbability of Existing
You are a temporary arrangement of borrowed atoms that have no awareness of you, and the fact that they hold together at all is the actual miracle.
Science Built by Unlikely People
Nearly every major discovery in physics, geology, and chemistry was made by eccentrics, amateurs, and overlooked outsiders working against institutional resistance.
Earth as a Barely Survived Story
Life on this planet has repeatedly been pushed to near-extinction by asteroids, supervolcanoes, and ice ages, and our presence is the result of accumulated lucky escapes.
Read an excerpt from the summary
Pick yourself apart with tweezers. Atom by atom. You'd end up with a small heap of dust, none of it ever alive, all of it once you. That image — bizarre, slightly nauseating, weirdly tender — is where Bill Bryson chooses to start. Not with a great man, not with a planet, not with a famous date. With you, atomized.
The premise that runs underneath the whole book is straightforward and slightly insulting. You are a temporary arrangement of borrowed parts. The arrangement has never existed before and will not exist again. The atoms cooperating to make you have no idea you are here. They will rearrange themselves into a beetle or a tomato or part of a sidewalk the moment you stop paying them. And yet for the roughly six hundred fifty thousand hours of an average life, they hold the formation. That, Bryson wants you to understand, is the actual miracle.
A Short History of Nearly Everything is his attempt to explain how we know any of this. It is not a textbook. It is a tour of how human beings, most of them eccentric and many of them mildly insane, figured out that the universe is thirteen point seven billion years old, that Earth is four and a half billion, that continents drift, that atoms exist, and that you and Shakespeare almost certainly share a billion atoms. Bryson started reading because he didn't know why oceans are salty but the Great Lakes are not. Three years later he had a book.
How to Build a Universe
Start with nothing. Not empty space — nothing. No location, no prior time, no around. Compress everything that will ever exist into a single point that has no size, and then, without warning, let it expand. In the first second the four fundamental forces appear. Within a minute the universe is a million billion miles across, ten billion degrees hot, and busy fusing hydrogen and helium. In three minutes, ninety-eight percent of all the matter there will ever be has been made. That, Bryson notes, is about the time it takes to put together a sandwich.
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who wants to understand science history without wading through a textbook.
- Anyone who is curious about how scientists actually figured out the age of the universe and the structure of the atom.
- Anyone who finds comfort in knowing that even the greatest discoveries were made by flawed, stubborn, and often ridiculous people.
- Anyone who wants a single book that connects physics, geology, chemistry, and biology into one readable whole.
About the author: Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson is an American author known for writing about science, travel, and language for general audiences. He spent several years researching this book after realizing he could not answer basic questions about the natural world, and the result became one of the bestselling popular science books of the early 2000s.
Bryson has written a wide range of books, from travel memoirs to a history of domestic life, but A Short History of Nearly Everything remains his most ambitious work in scope. It won the Aventis Prize for science writing in 2004.
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