A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
This is going to be a ’short’ post of nearly everything.
When I first started reading the book, I found it hard to ‘get into’. Requires at least an hour of serious reading to get into the whole ‘thing’. But it’s quite a marvellous work! Don’t know how much time Bryson took to research everything! It gives in great detail how we progress through the ages… from the creation of the universe to the intricacies of archaelogy and all the way to the realm of quantum physics… and more… I’m astonished at the huge amoun t of information in this book, it is more of an encyclopaedia than a novel!
I noticed that a recurrent theme in his work is an awareness of how vast the universe is… and how small we all are. Despite the seemingly insignificance of one person in this vast vast long history of the universe, and how relentless the tide of time seems, this book is extremely encouraging because it tells us how one person is able to change so much in this world. To bring more understanding of everything around us, and to lead to the thousand and one inventions us descendants now enjoy. Rutherford, Darwin, Planck, Bohr… I wonder whether I’d someday be able to do something so great that some people will remember me for it. Heh heh heh.
In order to allow non-scientific persons to understand just how vast the universe was and how rare a supernova is, Bryson asked us to imagine…
“a standard dining-room table covered in a black tablecloth and throwing a handful of salt across it. The scattered grains can be though of as a galaxy. Now imagine fifteen hundred more tables like the first one - enough to make a single line two miles long - each with a random array of salt across it. Now add one grain of salt to any table and let Bob Evans walk among them. At a glance he will spot it. That grain of salt is the supernova.”
And another one, which i personally liked best - on Avogadro’s number
“Chemistry students have long amused themselves by computing just how large a number it is, so I can report that it is equivalent to the number of popcorn kernels needed to cover the United States to a depth of nine miles, or cupfuls of water in the Pacific Ocean, or soft-drink cans that would, evenly stacked, cover the Earth to a depth of two hundred miles. An equivalent number of American pennies would be enough to make every person on Earth a dollar trillionaire. It is a big number.”
I like his theory of how atoms are being recycled and perhaps, we just might be made up of an atom of some famous person in the past!
Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant nymber of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.)
Here, I’d also like to highlight the humurous and unique way Bryson has for making analogies. :) And it’s too bad I don’t contain a couple of Dalí’s atoms. Heh.
History is studded with amazing accounts of great men who’ve risked their lives in their pursuit for knowledge. To have subjected themselves to oxygen toxicity and radiation exposure, in order that mankind may benefit from their findings. Many literally sacrificed themselves in the name of science. I salute all these great men (and women)!!!
Ooh and then I found out that Homo sapiens means ‘man the thinker’. So apt! Interesting… A theory that really got me thinking was how man seems to place himself at the centre of the universe. We think that we are the top of the food chain, with the best brains, and we’re the culmination of something great. In actual fact, we’re just bystanders in this entire humongous, overwhelming process. We’re just an ‘accident’. As Stephen Jay Gould mentioned, ‘if you replayed the tape of life - even if you ran it back only a relatively short way to the dawn of hominids - the chances are quite ‘unlikely’ that modern humans or anything like them would be here now.’
The novel ends on a sad-reflective note, highlighting the destructive nature of human beings… which might herald the next worldwide extinction, where everything would be wiped out and history would re-write itself. On the other hand, it emphasises how lucky we all are to be here, all the organisms on this planet. This one planet that we know supports life… and Bryson ends off expressing his hope that we will sustain this miracle of living for as long as possible.
