A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. 

4/5 rating.

Book #129 of 2019. Read November 16, 2019.

If you are going to read one science/history/civilization book over your entire life, let it be this one!

This is the second book of Bill’s that I have read and it cemented the fact that he is one of my favorite authors! I will definitely be reading more books of his.

This book talks about an impressive amount of different topics: from astrophysics, to paleontology, to the creation of Celsius and Fahrenheit as temperature systems. As the title suggests, it seems to cover nearly everything that matters.

Bill has a certain way of writing that combines a great amount of wit, with key topics, while managing to include an insane amount of obscure facts. I constantly find while I’m reading his books that I wish I had someone there to share the “fun facts” with. I feel like if you read enough of his books you’d kill it at Jeopardy!

Just one quote I enjoyed: “The Romans also flavored their wine with lead, which may be part of the reason they are not the force they used to be. As we have seen elsewhere, our own performance with lead (not to mention mercury, cadmium, and all the other industrial pollutants with which we routinely dose ourselves) does not leave us a great deal of room for smirking.” 

I implore you to go read this book: everyone knowing more about the world around them would really be a step up! I’m sure my nerdiness helps, but I loved this book!

Quotes:

“On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with 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). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away.”

“Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in Arizona (they must have teenagers, after all), but it does seem unlikely.”

“‘Bohr once commented that a person who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what had been said.’ Heisenberg, when asked how one could envision an atom, replied: ‘Don’t try.’”

“The first person to crack the problem was Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a Dutch maker of instruments, who produced an accurate thermometer in 1717. However, for reasons unknown he calibrated the instrument in a way that put freezing at 32 degrees and boiling at 212 degrees. From the outset this numeric eccentricity bothered some people, and in 1742 Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, came up with a competing scale. In proof of the proposition that inventors seldom get matters entirely right, Celsius made boiling point zero and freezing point 100 on his scale, but that was soon reversed.”

“Incidentally, the first, much thinner edition of that atlas, produced in 1896, divided clouds into ten basic types, of which the plumpest and most cushiony-looking was number nine, cumulonimbus. That seems to have been the source of the expression ‘to be on cloud nine.’”

“For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today. Name a creature, from a nematode worm to Cameron Diaz, and they all use architecture first created in the Cambrian party.”

IG Link.