A Short History of Nearly Everything is that pulp science book which is written by and written for non-science educated folks, which STEM-educated folks would equally enjoy. It is a joyous romp across fields as diverse as geology, paleontology, chemistry, biology and atomic physics, and I dare you to find another book which can be described as such.
Bill Bryson, the writer, has made his name in writing travelogues, replete with laughter and joie de vivre. At a point, he realised that the amount of scientific knowledge he possessed was negligible, and decided to do something about it. That something is this, a book on the whats and hows and whys of the human world from the scientific point of view — but written for the non-scientific person.
Bryson starts with basic primary scientific questions — How was the universe created? How did our earth come into existence? How were humans and the natural world evolved? What is every particle consisting of — and what are atoms and molecules? What are the bodies of humans and other animals made of? How do natural disasters happen? Once the question is identified, Bryson chases down the world’s greatest scientists, anthropologists, mathematicians and geologists, and talks with them to try and get the answers he is seeking.
Bryson also reads up on the history of the particular question that he seeks explanation of — there must have been others in history who have asked similar questions. What did they do about it? What happened to them? How did the answer to that specific question evolve from the emerging hypothesis stage, to the final answer that we have agreed upon? Bryson does not fear going off on a tangent and talking about some of the people who endeavored to answer those questions. Thus this book becomes as much a history of science and of scientists, as it is a pure scientific book.
And the writing. Oh the writing! Let me just give you a sample — “We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that some of our atoms probably belonged to Shakespeare, Genghis Khan or any other historical figure. But no, you are NOT Elvis or Marilyn Monroe; it takes quite a while for their atoms to get recycled.” It’s an absolute joy to read.
The greatness of this book is that it simplifies without dumbing down. While reading reviews of this book, a regular refrain is ‘could Bryson please rewrite all our school textbooks?’, and that is true. The dexterity is not in the physics, the geology and paleontology and anthropology, (a fair bit of which a reasonably interested STEM student would be in the know of), but in the presentation.
Bryson is an awesome storyteller, and he weaves these engrossing and sometimes exceedingly funny stories around the mysteries of nature and creation, and the men and women who solved these mysteries for us — this is the perfect book to read beforehand if you are planning to babysit a particularly inquisitive 10-year-old.
Shom Biswas
Twitter@spinstripe
The writer is a business development executive in Hyderabad