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A Short History of Nearly Everything
A journey into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer
A Short History of Nearly Everything offers an enlightening summary of contemporary scientific thinking relating to all aspects of life, from the creation of the universe to our relationship with the tiniest of bacteria.
- Anyone who wants to brush up on their foundational science knowledge
- Anyone interested in the origin of the universe and life on earth
- Anyone who is fascinated by the world’s greatest scientific minds
Bill Bryson is an American bestselling author who writes on topics as diverse as the English language, science and travel. He is also well-known for his humorous portrait of Great Britain in his book, Notes From A Small Island, voted by BBC4 Radio listeners as the book most representative of their country.
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A Short History of Nearly Everything
- Read in 21 minutes
- Audio & text available
- Contains 13 key ideas
Synopsis
A Short History of Nearly Everything offers an enlightening summary of contemporary scientific thinking relating to all aspects of life, from the creation of the universe to our relationship with the tiniest of bacteria.
Key idea 1 of 13
The Big Bang theory suggests the universe was formed by a singularity in a brief moment.
In 1965, two radio astronomers puzzled over a strange noise they noticed while experimenting with a communications antenna. It turned out that this noise wasn’t just an annoyance.
The sound originated 90 billion trillion miles away, at the very moment of the universe’s creation: an event now known as the Big Bang.
Although the discovery was accidental, it earned the astronomers the Nobel Prize in physics and helped popularize the Big Bang theory. This states that our universe began from a single point of nothingness called a singularity, a point so compact that it has no dimensions.
It is in this single, dense point that the building blocks of the universe were once confined. Suddenly, for reasons yet unknown, this singularity exploded in “a single blinding pulse,” flinging the future contents of our universe across the void.
Although the reasons why the “bang” happened are still unknown, scientists have more clarity about what happened afterwards.
In the Big Bang, matter, or the contents of that singularity, expanded so rapidly that the entire universe formed within the time it might take you to assemble a sandwich. Practically immediately after the explosion, the universe inflated dramatically, doubling in size every 10^-34 seconds – that is, very very quickly.
We know that, alongside the fundamental forces that govern our universe, 98 percent of all matter in the universe was created within a mere three minutes. The universe now spans a diameter of at least one hundred billion light years, and continues to expand, even now.
Key ideas in this title
- The Big Bang theory suggests the universe was formed by a singularity in a brief moment.
- The enormity of the universe makes it likely that there are other thinking beings out there.
- Newton made sense of how the earth moves, how it is shaped and how much it weighs.
- Rocks and fossils showed that the earth was old, but it was radioactivity that showed how old.
- Einstein’s theory of relativity had huge implications for understanding the universe at large.
- Quantum theory helped explain the subatomic world, but then physics had two bodies of laws.
- Though life on earth is challenging, it’s a wonder of the universe that it even exists at all.
- We know surprisingly little about the dynamics that rule life in the oceans.
- Bacteria are earth’s most abundant life forms, and we’re here because they allow us to be.
- Life started spontaneously as a bundle of genetic material that found a way to copy itself.
- Though the earth supports an uncountable number of species, all life can be seen as one.
- The earth is always at risk of asteroid collisions, volcanic eruptions or earthquake damage.
- Final summary