I came across Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything after drawn-out research into history books for this blog.  Reviews were high, and comments were positive.  Reviews are helpful, of course, but also best to approach with a grain-of-salt.  I've endured other books that were highly regarded, but left me with the maddening itch to commit seppuku. 

 

This is not one of those books.  Through the first half, I was surprised with the level of research, and intrigued by the obscure histories and stories of scientists I've never heard of.  By the second half, I was blown away by the detail, the depth, and the ideas.  A Short History of Nearly Everything is exceptional.  I'm impressed not only with Bryson's research into complex topics, but also with his ability to weave together the ideas into a understandable, engaging narrative.  This is a must-read for anyone interested in science or history.  I can't say enough - really.  

 

Bryson divides chapters under main sections that include:  Lost in the Cosmos - focusing on the cosmos; The Size of the Earth - the measurements of land; A New Age Dawns - the dawn of modern physics; Dangerous Planet - the geology of Earth; Life Itself - cells, evolution, climate, etc.; The Road to Us - the ice ages and the rise of humans.  Nearly 500 pages of content are packed within, so rather than ramble for days on every topic and idea, I present below some of the highlights from the book, that reminded me why the world is far more incredible than any of us imagine...

 

• Lost in the Cosmos - How to Build a Universe:  "Just as there is no place where you can find the edge of the universe, so there is no place where you can stand at the center and say: "This is where it all began.  This is the centermost point of it all."  We are all at the center of it all.  This is the idea of omnicentricity.  All roads lead to Rome - and you are Rome, no matter where you stand.

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• Lost in the Cosmos - Welcome to the Solar System:  "Under Drake's equation you divide the number of stars in a selected portion of the universe by the number of stars that are likely to have planetary systems; divide that by the number of planetary systems that could theoretically support life; divide that by the number on which life having arisen; advances to a state of intelligence; and so on.  At each such division the number shrinks colossally - yet even with the most conservative inputs the number of advanced civilizations just in the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions."  So, where are all these four-eyed freaks?  How about star KIC 8462852?  Strange light dimming has been seen periodically, confounding astronomers to the cause, as it can't be explained by known phenomena.  Is it a Dyson Sphere, an alien mega solar structure constructed to capture all solar energy from the host star, perhaps?  Probably not, but it certainly makes for a cool story.                 

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• Lost in the Cosmos - The Reverend Evan's Universe:  "Imagine a million really weighty cannonballs squeezed down to the size of a marble and - well, you're still not even close.  The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds."  A neutron star has been stripped of all electrons, so the tiny, weighty neutrons, pack together to a tight sphere.  We don't really have a frame of reference for this.  There is nothing on Earth even close to this kind of density.  What would happen if we could somehow hold a pin drop of pure neutrons and drop it on the ground?  Is this even possible?  Would it burrow to the center of the Earth?

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• A New Age Dawns - Einstein's Universe:  "You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 x 10^18 joules of potential energy - enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point...Even a uranium bomb - the most energetic thing we have produced yet - releases less than 1 percent of the energy it could release if only we were more cunning." 

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• A New Age Dawns - The Mighty Atom:  "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 number 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."  That's pretty amazing, I'd say.  However, don't forget.  That one guy with dysentery from old English history, what was his name?  Alden, I think.  He lived in East Anglia in 1049 as a lowly peasant - died in his twenties.  Last I remember, he got caught wanking it behind the swine stable.  Then, later the same day, took a hammer to the head from a larger brutish lad, for stealing barley.  He lived a short, deplorable, disease-ridden life.  Mm...yeah...he's part of us too - a billion or so atoms in each of us.      

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• Dangerous Planet - Bang!:  "One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth's surface, where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business.  The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases.  Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn't been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast.  Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it.
  
  "For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light - the brightest ever seen by human eyes - followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour.  Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound.  Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion."  With this kind of extraterrestrial impact, it won't matter if you're Buddha, Genghis Khan, Beethoven, or our beloved friend Alden.  A Yellowstone caldera eruption would look like Pop Rocks to something of this magnitude.  Make no mistake, this kind of impact has happened, and likely could happen again.  There is evidence of such an impact at the end of the Younger Dryas, which coincides, roughly, with the end of the last Ice Age.  Outspoken researchers like Randall Carlson, Graham Hancock, and Robert Schoch, insist the evidence for global cataclysm as recent as 14,000 years ago, is now overwhelming.  Countless peer-reviewed research papers add support to this theory.  *As a side note, Schoch believes mass coronal solar ejections, rather than celestial impacts, were the primary disaster trigger.*   
  
  What about the mythology of tribes and ancient cultures throughout the world?  They are consistent with the notion of a cataclysmic event coming from the heavens.  Immanuel Velikovsky elaborates on this theory in his book, Worlds in Collision, referring to numerous cultures that describe  a "serpent" in the sky that comes to Earth to cause death and destruction.  I doubt his theory on Venus beginning as a comet has any weight to it.  But the idea of ancient cultures viewing a comet as a serpent of death coming to reset the world, certainly does. 
  
  At the very least, we can't throw out the ideas presented forth in the theory of catastrophism.  In Chelybinsk, Russia, 2013, a meteor exploded about 20 miles above the city at a speed of over 40,000 mph.  About 1000 people were injured, with no fatalities.  If this meteor was a little larger, heavier, faster, or even came in at steeper angle, many people may have died.  In 1908, the Tunguska impact in Siberia flattened 770 square miles of forest, killing everything within the radius.  If this happened over a populated area, there would be massive casualties.  Earth's orbit takes us through the Taurid meteor shower twice per year.  This interstellar field of debris is a possible culprit for some of the impacts and close-calls our planet has endured.  Not to overstate the threat, but we certainly need to take this issue more seriously and develop some kind of defense program.  The extreme cost to develop an asteroid detection and deflection scheme would pay for itself many times over, after thwarting an object with global cataclysm potential.         

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• Dangerous Planet - Dangerous Beauty:  "The ash fall from the last Yellowstone eruption covered all or parts of nineteen western states (plus parts of Canada and Mexico) - nearly the whole of the United Sates west of Mississippi.  This, bear in mind, is the breadbasket of America, an area that produces roughly half the world's cereals.  And ash, it is worth remembering, is not like a big snowfall that will melt in the spring.  If you wanted to grow crops again, you have to find some place to put all the ash.  It took thousands of workers eight months to clear 1.8 billion tons of debris from the sixteen acres of the World Trade Center site in New York.  Imagine what it would take to clear Kansas. 
  
  "And that's not even to consider the climatic consequences.  The last supervolcano eruption on Earth was at Toba, in northern Sumatra, seventy-four thousand years ago.  No one knows quite how big it was other than that it was a whopper.  Greenland ice cores show that the Toba blast was followed by at least six years of "volcanic winter" and goodness knows how many poor growing seasons after that.  The event, it is thought, may have carried humans right to the brink of extinction, reducing the global population to no more than a few thousand individuals.  That means that all modern humans arose from a very small population base, which would explain our lack of genetic diversity."  This is all to say the threats from below aren't more forgiving than the threats from above.  We live in a relative time of plenty, but there is no guarantee this will always be so.

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• Life Itself - The Rise of Life:  "Anniversaries were few and far between in the Archaean world.  For two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life.  They lived, they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn't show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging level of existence.  At some point in the first billion years of life, cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, learned to tap into a freely available resource - the hydrogen that exists in spectacular abundance in water.  They absorbed water molecules, supped on the hydrogen, and released the oxygen as waster, and in so doing invented photosynthesis.  As Margulis and Sagan note, photosynthesis is "undoubtedly the most important single metabolic innovation in the history of life on the planet" - and it was invented not by plants but by bacteria."

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• Life Itself - The Rise of Life:  "We couldn't live for two minutes without them, yet even after a billion years mitochondria behave as if they think things might not work out between us.  They maintain their own DNA.  They reproduce at a different time from their host cell.  They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do.  In short, they keep their bags packed.  They don't even speak the same genetic language as the cell in which they live.  It is like having a stranger in your house, but one who has been there for a billion years."  

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• Life Itself - Good-bye to All That:  "Earth has seen five major extinction episodes in its time - The Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous, in that order - and many smaller ones.  The Ordovician (440 million years ago) and Devonian (365 million) each wiped out about 80 to 85 percent of species.  The Triassic (201 million years ago) and Cretaceous (65 million years) each wiped out 70 to 75 percent of species.  But the real whopper was the Permian extinction of about 245 million years ago, which raised the curtain on the long age of the dinosaurs.  In the Permian, at least 95 percent of animals known from the fossil record check out, never to return.  Even about a third of insect species went - the only occasion on which they were lost en masse.  It is as close as we have ever come to total obliteration."  No doubt, these extinction events were triggered by some cataclysmic event or a series of events.  In their wake come a rapid explosion of new species, in the geologic sense, that carve out their niches in the eternal game of reproduction and evolution.  To me, the Earth is a place of quantum evolution - more revolutionary, in effect.  Dramatic leaps in evolution and diversity follow catastrophes and the death of dominant species, followed by gradual micro changes to new species. 

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• Life Itself - The Stuff of Life:  "The genome, as Eric Lander of MIT has put it, is like a parts list for the human body:  it tells us what we are made of, but says nothing about how we work.  What's needed now is the operating manual - instructions for how to make it go.  We are not close to that point yet.  
  
  "So now the quest is to crack the human proteome - a concept so novel that the term proteome didn't even exist a decade ago.  The proteome is the library of information that creates protein.  "Unfortunately," observed Scientific American in the spring of 2002, "the proteome is much more complicated than the genome."  Will we see such a library in the next 20 years?  If I was to make a bet, I'd say yes.  We will see advanced quantum computers in the near future, in line with Moors Law.  A.I. systems in turn, will provide the medium to decipher complex patterns and iterate intricate biological interactions.

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• The Road to Us - Ice Time:  "As Earth moves through space, it is subject not just to variations in the length and shape of its orbit, but also rhythmic shifts in its angle of orientation to the Sun - its tilt and pitch and wobble - all affecting the length and intensity of sunlight falling on any patch of land.  In particular it is subject to three changes in position, known formally as its obliquity, precession, and eccentricity, over long periods of time.  Milankovitch wondered if there might be a relationship between these complex cycles and the comings and goings of ice ages.  The difficulty was that the cycles were of widely different lengths - of approximately 20,000, 40,000, and 100,000 years, but varying in each case by up to a few thousand years - which meant that determining their points of intersection over long spans of time involved a nearly endless amount of devoted computation.  Essentially, Milankovitch had to work out the angle and duration of incoming solar radiation at every latitude on Earth, in every season, for a million years, adjusted for three ever-changing variables."  Beyond these, are there other influences on climate?  Are there larger patterns related cosmic rays from our galaxy, gravitational fields from comet and meteor streams, planetary alignment effects, etc.?  

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• The Road to Us - Ice Time:  "For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere.  The current ice age - ice epoch really - started about forty million years ago, and has ranged from murderously bad to not bad at all.  Ice ages tend to wipe out evidence of earlier ice ages, so the further back you go the more sketchy the picture grows, but it appears that we have had at least seventeen sever glacial episodes in the last 2.5 million years or so - the period that coincides with the rise of Homo erectus in Africa followed by modern humans.  Two commonly cited culprits for the present epoch are the rise of the Himalayas and the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, the first disrupting air flows, the second ocean currents.  India, once and island, has pushed two thousand kilometers into the Asian landmass over the last forty-five million years, raising not only the Himalayas, but also the vast Tibetan plateau behind them.  The hypothesis is that higher landscape was not only cooler, but diverted winds in a way that made them flow north and toward North America, making it more susceptible to long-term chills.  Then, beginning about five millions years, Panama rose from the sea, closing the gap between North and South America, disrupting the flows of warming currents between the Pacific and Atlantic, and changing patterns of precipitation across at least half the world.  One consequence was a drying out of Africa, which caused apes to climb down out of trees and go looking for a new way of living on the emerging savannas."  There really are countless variables regarding climate change.  Tectonic changes, volcanoes, extraterrestrial impacts, Milankovitch cycles, ocean current changes, solar fluctuations, human influences, and even the moon, all affect Earth's dynamic climate.  Regardless of the overall contribution weight percentage for these varying influences, the climate will continue to change, sometimes slow, other times as fast as a volcano eruption, or an asteroid impact.     

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I took many more notes, but at some point, I need to stop reciting.  Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything stimulated my inner curious-child like my first Space Atlas in fourth grade.  With all the notes above, I'm really only scratching the surface.  Highly, highly recommended.

 

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Summary:  Covering major topics in science and science history with personal stories, interesting analogies, and staggering facts, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a thoroughly researched must-read for anyone with a curious bone in their body.       

 

Rating:  9.5

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-E.B.

 2018-07-22