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Name: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Rating: 4.5 (1195 reviews)
Author: Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson

A journey into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer

4.5 (1195 ratings)

38 mins

Brief summary

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is a fascinating exploration of the origins of the universe, life, and science. With his signature wit and curiosity, Bryson takes us on a journey through time and space, revealing the incredible stories behind the world around us.

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General Knowledge Natural Sciences

Table of Contents

A Short History of Nearly Everything
Summary of 13 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 13

What’s in it for me? Learn about the basics of life, the universe, and everything.

How did we get here? Where did the universe come from? What is the universe, even? Great thinkers and scientists have been tackling these questions for millennia, but only now are we beginning to come close to creating a complete picture of our fascinatingly complex universe.

These blinks will give you a crash course in all of the major existential questions. You’ll learn how the universe was formed, how life came to be, and how the world’s great minds came up with their groundbreaking ideas.

But as much as science has given us in terms of our understanding of the world, numerous questions are yet unanswered. The many life forms living in the depths of our oceans, much of what makes up the universe, and even elements of the world beneath our feet still remain shrouded in mystery.

In these blinks, you’ll also discover

how you can hear the remnants of the big bang today;
why we owe our very existence to the good graces of bacteria; and
how many things you have in common with a banana or a fruit fly.

The big bang theory states that the universe developed from an incredibly dense point, and at terrific speed.

It’s 1965. Two radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, are working with a large communication antenna in New Jersey. They’re trying to find a bit of radio silence so that they can perform experiments. But it’s proving tricky. Wherever they point the antenna, there’s persistent interference – a weird, unfocused hiss that just won’t go away.

Penzias and Wilson try everything to get rid of the hiss. They rebuild their instruments. They rejig and retest their systems. They climb onto the antenna and clean off the bird poo. The hiss just won’t go away.

In exasperation, they call Robert Dicke, an astrophysicist at Princeton. When Dicke hears their story, he instantly knows what they’re on to – it’s cosmic background radiation left over from the birth of the universe. By complete accident, Penzias and Wilson have found the first concrete evidence of the big bang – the moment when our universe was born.

Here’s the key message: The big bang theory states that the universe developed from an incredibly dense point, and at terrific speed.

So what exactly happened when the universe was formed?

The big bang theory states that the universe began as a single point of nothingness called a singularity. This point was so compact that it had no dimensions. Confined in this single, infinitely dense point were all the building blocks of the universe.

Suddenly – and no one quite knows why – this singularity exploded. In a single moment, all the future contents of the universe were flung across the void.

The sheer scale and speed of this explosion are hard to fathom. Scientists believe that immediately after the big bang, the universe doubled in size every 10^-34 seconds. It may be hard to grasp just how fast that is, so let’s put it another way. In just three minutes, the universe grew from the tiniest of specks to over 100 billion light-years in diameter. 98% percent of all matter, along with the fundamental forces that govern the universe, were created in the time it takes you to make a sandwich.

So going back to Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson and their hiss, what exactly was it that they had discovered?

The intense energy unleashed during the big bang eventually cooled and transformed into microwaves. It was these microwaves that Penzias and Wilson picked up as a hiss. And you don’t even need a huge communications antenna to see this evidence; anyone with a television can manage. Just detune your TV, and listen for that weird static you get between stations. Around 1 percent of this static is a remnant from the big bang – a relic of our universe’s earliest moments.

The universe is so big, there are probably other beings out there – we just haven't found them yet.

Here’s a question for you: Do you think we’re alone in the universe?

Before you answer, let’s first take a look at the universe’s particulars. Since the big bang, the universe has been expanding. From the so-small-it’s-impossible-to-measure speck that was the singularity, the visible universe has grown to more than one million million million million miles across.

Isaac Newton was focused on making sense of how the universe and Earth moved.

Isaac Newton was devoted to the advancement of science. And he was prepared to put his body on the line for the cause.

Few others, for example, would try and explore the mechanics of human sight by pushing a needle into their eye. And many scientists likely wouldn’t stare at the sun to test the limits of our ability to, well, stare at the sun.

Rocks and fossils showed that the Earth was old, but radioactivity showed just how old it was.

In 1650, an Irish archbishop named James Ussher decided he’d try and answer a long-standing question: Just how old is the Earth?

Using information contained in the Old Testament and a few other historical documents, Ussher got to work. After careful deliberation, he came up with a very precise answer: the Earth was created at midday on October 23, 4004 BCE.

Einstein’s special theory of relativity states that time is relative.

We all know Albert Einstein to be one of the most famous scientists of all time. Yet Einstein’s early life was far from brilliant. As it turns out, he wasn’t a great scholar and even failed his first college entrance exams. At university, the young Einstein actually studied to become a high-school science teacher but then couldn’t land a teaching job.

Einstein eventually found himself working in the Swiss patent office. It was in 1905, in this humble role as a patent clerk, that Einstein first made his mark on the world. And it was quite a mark! The papers he published that year would change science completely.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity totally changed how we look at gravity.

Did you know there’s an enormous amount of energy inside of you? There’s a whole bunch of potential energy contained within all the atoms and molecules in your body. If you were to unleash all the energy in your body, you’d generate an explosion equivalent to 30 hydrogen bombs.

And this energy isn’t just found in our bodies. Everything with mass – every rock, life-form, and planet – has a huge amount of potential energy.

Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle helps explain how particles move.

As we’ve just discovered, Albert Einstein helped us understand huge phenomena like time and gravity. But what about the smallest things in the universe? What about atoms, molecules, and particles? Do Einstein’s theories work on this tiny scale? Not quite.

The key message here is: Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle helps explain how particles move.

There are four unique criteria that make life on planet Earth possible.

The next time you leave your house, take some time to notice your surroundings. In particular, try and notice the sheer diversity of life. You might see birds, insects, lizards, rodents, dogs, cats, and, of course, your fellow human beings.

Planet Earth seems to be teeming with life. This might lead you to think that our planet is a friendly place to live.

We know surprisingly little about life in the oceans.

Blink 9 of 13

Most of us spend our lives on dry land. Sea captains and Olympic sailors aside, few of us spend much time on open water.

Bacteria are Earth’s most abundant life forms, and we’re here because they enable us to be.

As children, we’re taught to wash our hands. We learn that it’s important to scrub for 30 seconds and rinse with warm, soapy water. That’s because we want to get rid of any bacteria and germs we may have picked up, right?

Well, while washing your hands is certainly an important hygienic routine, there’s no escaping bacteria. Everywhere you go, countless bacteria travel with you.

Life started spontaneously as a bundle of genetic material that found a way to copy itself.

Picture this scene. All of a sudden, certain ingredients in your kitchen start to magically mix together. Eggs, baking soda, flour, and butter all start combining and baking themselves into a delicious cake. You’re shocked at the sight of this self-making cake! And then, things get even weirder. The cake starts splitting to produce more delicious cakes. Then, these cakes also start dividing, creating even more sweet treats.

Does this bizarre situation sound impossible to you? Well, it’s actually pretty similar to how amino acids combine into proteins – a process that is essential to life.

Though the Earth supports an uncountable number of species, all life can be seen as one.

We’ve just discovered that life on Earth began when bundles of molecules learned how to divide themselves and share their genetic code. Since this fateful day, four billion years ago, life has more or less flourished.

Just take a look at the sheer variety out there. To say that there are many different species on the planet is an understatement. Estimates range from 3 million to 200 million. According to one report in the Economist, up to 97 percent of the world’s plant and animal species remain undiscovered. Yet, despite this amazing variety, all life is linked.

The Earth is always at risk of existential dangers looming within the solar system – and even on our own planet.

Although we probably don’t realize it on a day-to-day basis, our solar system is actually a dangerous place to live. In fact, the Earth often comes dangerously close to colliding with asteroids. There are at least a billion of these rock-like objects zooming through space. Each asteroid follows particular orbits within our solar system, and many of them make regular passes near Earth.

Even more terrifying is the fact that there are around 100 million asteroids larger than 10 meters across that regularly cross the Earth’s orbit. Scientists estimate that as many as 2,000 of these are large enough to put civilization in danger – if they hit. Think it won’t happen? It’s predicted that near misses with deadly asteroids could be happening around two or three times a week, entirely unnoticed.

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What is A Short History of Nearly Everything about?

A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) 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.

Best quote from A Short History of Nearly Everything

So even if we are not really alone, in all practical terms we are.

—Bill Bryson

Who should read A Short History of Nearly Everything?

Adults who want to brush up on their foundational science knowledge
People interested in the origin of the universe and life on Earth
Anyone fascinated by the world’s greatest scientific mind

About the Author

Bill Bryson is an American best-selling 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 Notes From a Small Island, voted by BBC4 Radio listeners as the book most representative of their country.

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