a short history of nearly everything book

Yet by the end of these chapters, each of these ideas is related back to how the Earth was ultimately measured. Along the way, he explains how geology and chemistry became branches of science, the idea of plate tectonics, the discovery of dinosaur fossils and chemical elements, and a bit about thermodynamics. Bryson introduces a wide array of scientists who had a hand in determining these measurements, and gives helpful and often eccentric background information about each individual. Part Two, Chapters 4-7, is about the size of the Earth and the painstaking lengths scientists have gone to in order to figure out the age and weight of our planet.

Finally, he explores how the planets were discovered and how the universe was measured, supernovae, and how these things all relate back to theory of the Big Bang. He also introduces the theory of the Big Bang, and describes the complexities and disputes that inherently go along with it. Here, Bryson starts by talking about the origins, theories, and qualities of the atom. Part One, consisting of Chapters 1-3, is about the cosmos.

In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.Throughout the course of an introduction, thirty chapters, and nearly five-hundred pages, Bryson highlights the creation of the Earth, where we are now as a species, and a lot of what has happened in between. On his travels through time and space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us.īill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him.

A short history of nearly everything book