A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 {Review}

A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 is Bill Bryson’s updated attempt to understand how we went from nothing, to something, to you and I – and everything that happened in between.

His goal is to make the wonder and achievements of science accessible without being too technical or too superficial, and this book delivers exactly that.

I expected this to be a difficult read and a bit of a slog, and was pleasantly surprised that it was anything but. Despite not considering myself naturally curious (I’ve never looked out of an airplane window and wondered how much salt is in the sea), I found most of this book genuinely interesting. I appreciated learning about topics I previously knew nothing about. How much actually stuck is another story, but it was engaging enough to keep picking up again and again.

Bill Bryson is a wonderful, humorous writer who manages to inject a real sense of joy into what is, essentially, a textbook. He has a gift for explaining complex scientific ideas in simple terms without losing their depth. His enthusiasm is contagious, and you’ll likely walk away feeling more curious about the world.

Our instinct is to regard time as eternal, absolute, that nothing can disturb its steady tick. In fact, according to Einstein, time is variable and ever-changing.

A supernova occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of 100 billion suns.

When we die, our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere – as part of a leaf or another human being or drop of dew. 

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred-millionth of a centimetre).

Look at the globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 percent of the Earth’s history. I.e. continents haven’t always sat this way.

When Daniel Gabriel Farenheit produced an accurate thermometer in 1717, he calibrated the instrument in a way that set freezing at 32 degrees and boiling at 212 degrees. In 1742 Anders Celcius came up with a competing scale and made freeing point zero and boiling point 100.

A potato is 80 per cent water, a cow 74 per cent, a bacterium 75 per cent. A tomato, at 95 per cent, is little but water. Even humans are 65 per cent water, making us more liquid than solid.

A typical litre of sea water will contain only about 2.5 teaspoons of common salt – but much larger amounts of other elements, compounds and other dissolved solids, collectively known as salts.

To spell ‘collagen’, the name of a common type of protein, you need to arrange eight letters in the right order. To make collagen, you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence.

Our white blood cells use oxygen to kill invading bacteria. That oxygen is fundamentally toxic often comes as a surprise to those of us who find it essential for survival.

You’re interested in science and want to better understand the world in an engaging, accessible way.

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