Bill Bryson Takes on the Universe

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, in the words of The New York Times, "is destined to become a modem classic of science writing." Since it was published in 2003, it already has. If you don't already know Bill Bryson or this work of his, you're in for a treat. It is the most readable, most interesting, and wittiest, history of science that I know of.

Bryson starts his story with the Big Bang theory and its validation in 1965 by the Bell Lab scientists Amo Penzias and Robert Wilson, when they inadvertently detected the cosmic background radiation. It's not possible to summarize in a short space all of the areas of our scientific knowledge that Bryson covers. Suffice it to say that he covers almost everything-cosmology, astronomy, physics (including subatomic particle physics), chemistry, geology, biology. In all of it Bryson writes with ease, at home with difficult conceptual material, enlivening his explanation with interesting and sometimes quirky biographical stories about the habits and propensities of some of our odder scientists.

Bryson's writing is felicitously marked by several traits that I find appreciate much. He is able to find an unusual and interesting way into a topic, as when he writes about the immense meteor strike at Manson, Iowa, to begin his exploration of meteor strikes, volcanoes, and the interior of the earth. He constructs vivid illustrations and/or analogies to demonstrate his material. Take, for example, this explanation of the vast size of our solar system. "On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway)."

Bryson is simultaneously readable, clear, amusing, witty, knowledgeable. And in preparing to write this book, he seems to have read almost everything . The bibliography is ten pages long. Perhaps the best summary is a sentence from the book. "The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within it is a wonder."

Readers who enjoy this book will no doubt enjoy others ofBryson's many works, only some of which are A Walk on the Wild Side (Bryson and the Appalachian Trail), In a Sunburned Country (traveling through Australia), Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, Shakespeare: The World as Stage (biography), One Summer: American 1927. They are all good.