A Short History of Nearly Everything
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Bill Bryson is one of the world’s most beloved and bestselling writers. In A Fleeting History of Nearly Everything, he takes his essential journey–into the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer. It’s a dazzling quest, the intellectual odyssey of a lifetime, as this insatiably curious writer attempts to know everything that has transpired from the Huge Bang to the rise of civilization. Or, as the leader puts it, “…how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a small of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since.” This is, in fleeting, a tall order.
To that end, Bill Bryson apprenticed himself to a host of the world’s most profound scientific minds, living and dead. His challenge is to take subjects like geology, chemisty, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics and see if there isn’t some way to render them comprehensible to people, like himself, made bored (or frightened) stiff of science by school. His interest is not simply to learn what we know but to find out how we know it. How do we know what is in the center of the planet, thousands of miles beneath the surface? How can we know the extent and the composition of the universe, or what a black hole is? How can we know where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out?
On his travels through space and time, Bill Bryson encounters a splendid gallery of the most fascinating, eccentric, competitive, and foolish personalities ever to question a hard question. In their company, he undertakes a sometimes profound, sometimes amusing, and permanently supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only this superb writer can render it. Science has never been more involving, and the world we inhabit has never been fuller of marvel and delight.Amazon.com Review
From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Fleeting History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from well loved science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to know the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds commendably. Though A Fleeting History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit lacking a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as “The Size of the Planet” and “Life Itself.” Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (leader of Life and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it’s when Bryson dives into some of science’s best and most embarrassing fights–Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould–that he finds literary gold. –Therese Littleton
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This book, and so many additional horrible books, should not be allowed to be published or sold. It was written by a liberal who has been possessed by the Devil. Belief in, and a personal relationship with our Lord, Jesus Christ is the only way to know the truth about these things. The only book you need to read is the Bible. The Bible is 100% accurate and right, this laughable book is a book filled with horrible lies.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Incredible! A predictable C-student’s last-minute make-up paper!
Knowing nothing but pretending to know everything. I like you.
The right sub-title must be one of the followings:
1, For pre-school kids;
2, For high-school drop-out;
3, For persons who know English only but absolutely nothing else
I judge Amazon should have negative rating!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This book was agreed to me as a gift,and while I loved reading it, I establish it to be more Science-Fiction than science. While Bryson presents several theories as fact (Huge Bang, Oort cloud, and macro-evolution), He is honest enough to admit (many times over) that the evidence is either scarce or non-existent. He attempts to present the un-proven and un-provable as fact, and it is really reasonably humorous at times. As a replacement for, I would recomend “Science and the Bible” by Dr. Henry Morris.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Isaac Asimov said it best: ‘The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge quicker than society gathers wisdom.’ This book contains a nice (although heavily colored) super basic synopsis of some of that knowledge, bereft of any of the wisdom as Asimov predicted.
Nowhere is this more obvious when The well loved leader sums up the whole of science as thus: “it does really seem that the purpose of life is to perpetuate DNA” Pg#410. I reflect Bill Bryson has confused the purpose of successful and thriving ecosystems with the purpose of a cancer cell. What’s more (and James Lovelock said it first) scenery tends to favor not persons organism that spread in an orgy of self upholding (like cancer), but rather persons organisms that place the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.
At least Bryson does seem in a way to admit this at the end of the book … and in a Bill McKibben way nearly suggests mankind is the cancer cell and that self-upholding to the destruction of everything is our destiny or at least our predisposition. While I agree with the need to preserve our environment I beg to differ on his predictions and find such opinion remarkably fleeting sighted with respect to the geological record and human psychology.
Bryson states “Scientists have a natural trend to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature”, he says on page 442. It seems in this book that Bryson had this same natural trend.
For example the book read to me like a who’s who in the encyclopedia of wacko brilliant scientists with bizarre habits. The mocking of these to whom we owe so much of our comforts was entirely unnecessary and very disrespectful and was very off-putting for me. I’m sure his “national Enquirer” mocking helps to sell books, but Bill’s irreverence of persons who excelled at the creative process seemed like he was trying to feel better about himself merely leeching off what they did to forwards his career and wealth.
As a synopsis for the actual contents themselves: The first half of the book is spent revealing the incredible fact that we even exist in such an unbelievably inhospitable and unlikely universe, galaxy, world, and ecosystem (and he didn’t even scratch the surface … especially with the latest findings of x-ray and radio astronomy)- all these systems brilliant with mind-boggling improbabilities. For example, just on a biological level: “there may be as many as a million proteins in the human body, and each one is a miracle. By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn’t exist.” pg 288
This part was excellent.
He continues this admitting that evolutionary theories don’t make sense while also insisting that they must be right, like: “if you make monomers wet they don’t turn into polymers-except when making life on Planet. How and why it happens then and not otherwise is one of biology’s fantastic unanswered questions” pg#291. There are so many phrases like “algae learned to tap” and “chemicals fidgeted to life” and “whatever prompted life to start” and “it shouldn’t take place, but somehow it does” and “it’s a puzzle” and “reasonably suddenly an entirely new type of cell arose” and “eukaryotes ‘learned’ to form together into multi-cellular beings” – all lacking any explanation how this could have happened when radiation was destroying life and making malignant cancers incredibly quicker than it was making these serendipitous tiny steps that resulted in a human.
Which also is right and excellent. He’s right again and again here … there is no explanation of these improbabilities, and the theory that we live by mere chance in a pocket of serendipity within a universe of every increasing entropy should be unbelievable to any serious thinker.
It’s mind bogglingly remote: WHY MUST WE HAVE UNWAVERING FAITH THAT OUR SCIENTISTS ARE INFALLIBLE WHEN THEY ARE SO CLUELESS?
I don’t know … and it aggravates me to no end that authors like Bryson suggest that we must have such unwavering faith. Stephen Hawking for example, is considered a god to mainstream scientists who can do no incorrect. But heck, dark energy was just barely accepted as a possible explanation for the increasing expanse of the universe but lacking hardly any proof it’s nearly immediately accepted as fact.
I would be more forgiving if this and similar books would simply admit that hey … the scientific community has a history of acting with mob mentality and does not have a history of permanently being right, but of nearly permanently being proven incorrect eventually as it grows to a greater understanding. But that fact isn’t even broached, nor is it ever in pop-sci books like this (I’m not just trashing Bryson here).
At the crux of this but is that this book is largely concerned with the evolution of the world (which I take place to judge to some degree) and while admitting that we’re clueless, suggesting that science is nearly infallible and that we’ve just about figured out how it all happened by chance (ie. his unending statements of “it just happens”) completely rules out the possibility of some intelligent design, which is completely irrational. Although he never suggests there is no God (nor even factually mentions it), neither does he mention that according to the laws of probability we cannot and must not attribute our being to chance. That’s an vital fact that should be mentioned. That wouldn’t automatically mean there must be a God, but it’s obvious that Bryson and similar authors don’t even want to say the obvious that presents such a possibility to the reader. Maybe it’s out of dread of professional retribution, I don’t know, but I find the exclusion of our scientific fallibility and history of it egregious.
In fleeting his book, which too regularly read more like the national enquirer of dead inventors and scientists than a history book, falls prey to the blind arrogance endemic to a population with unreasonable faith in the infallibility of scientists who aver they have it all figured out despite that for everything new that we learn, we also learn how incorrect we were about additional things that their “theory of everything” relied upon.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This was dreadful. After reading some of Bryson’s earlier books, I assumed that this would be a excellent read, as well. Midway through the first chapter, I was asleep, presumably because it had nearly bored me to death and I had to go into a life-saving stasis to prevent any further brain hurt.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5