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A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson · 2003

Science
Cover of A Short History of Nearly Everything

Science for the Rest of Us

Bill Bryson set out to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization — and to find out how we know what we know. The result is a witty, accessible, and thoroughly delightful tour through the sciences, from cosmology and geology to chemistry and paleontology, told through the stories of the brilliant, eccentric, and often overlooked scientists who made the discoveries.

Bryson, a bestselling travel writer with no scientific background, asked the questions that ordinary readers are afraid to ask: How do we know how much the Earth weighs? What is a quark? Why did the dinosaurs disappear? His willingness to be the curious layperson in the room produced the most engaging popular science book in a generation.

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.
— Bill Bryson
from A Short History of Nearly Everything
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
— Bill Bryson
from A Short History of Nearly Everything
It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.
— Bill Bryson
from A Short History of Nearly Everything
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