By Bill Bryson
Science's greatest discoveries explained accessibly
Subject
Themes
Everything that exists began from a singularity with no dimensions at all, which roughly 13.7 billion years ago expanded in a blinding pulse that produced 98 percent of all matter within three minutes. From that inconceivable beginning emerged the stars, which forged heavy elements in their cores and scattered them across space when they exploded as supernovae. Those elements eventually coalesced into our solar system, and on one small, fortunate planet they assembled into something even more remarkable: life. The journey from that first cosmic instant to the emergence of a species capable of contemplating its own origins is one of staggering improbability, lucky accidents, and the persistent curiosity of scientists who refused to accept ignorance.
Everything that exists began from a singularity with no dimensions at all, which roughly 13.7 billion years ago expanded in a blinding pulse that produced 98 percent of all matter within three minutes. From that inconceivable beginning emerged the stars, which forged heavy elements in their cores…
Published in 2003, A Short History of Nearly Everything arrived at a moment when popular science writing was undergoing a significant transformation. The late twentieth century had seen an explosion of accessible science books, from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time to Richard Dawkins's The…
The most persistent theme running through every scientific discipline covered is the sheer improbability of human existence. At every scale, from the cosmological to the cellular, the conditions required for life to emerge and persist are so narrowly defined that the slightest deviation would have…
Scientific discovery emerges not as a smooth, inevitable march toward truth but as a chaotic, deeply human process shaped by personality, rivalry, accident, and sheer obstinacy. Virtually every major advance described is entangled with the peculiarities of the people who made it. Henry Cavendish, so…
The planet beneath our feet is not the stable, predictable platform it appears to be. At every scale, from the creeping drift of tectonic plates to the sudden violence of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, the Earth is a dynamic system whose internal processes have repeatedly reshaped the surface…
One of the most striking revelations is just how much remains unknown. For all the extraordinary progress science has made in understanding the universe, the gaps in knowledge are vast, and many of the most fundamental questions remain stubbornly unanswered. This ignorance is not peripheral or…
Behaviourally modern humans have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history. Compressed into a single twenty-four-hour day, the entire span of human civilisation occupies less than two seconds before midnight. Yet in that infinitesimal sliver of time, one species has managed to reshape…
About 13.7 billion years ago, a singularity with no dimensions at all suddenly expanded in a blinding pulse. Within three minutes, 98 percent of all matter that would ever exist had been produced, mostly hydrogen and helium. Alan Guth proposed that in its earliest fraction of a second, the universe…
James Hutton, a prosperous Scottish farmer who became one of Edinburgh's leading intellectuals, singlehandedly founded modern geology in the late eighteenth century. By observing the erosion on his own farmland, he deduced that soil was created from the slow wearing away of rocks, washed downstream…
Atoms are fantastically small, enormously numerous, and practically indestructible. Half a million of them lined up could hide behind a single human hair, yet every cubic centimetre of air at sea level contains 45 billion billion molecules. Every person's atoms have almost certainly passed through…
Beneath Manson, Iowa, lies the largest perfectly preserved impact crater in the mainland United States, over twenty miles across, formed when a rock a mile and a half wide struck at two hundred times the speed of sound. Glacial till filled the crater so perfectly that the landscape is flat as a…
The atmosphere, though barely thicker than two coats of varnish on a desktop globe, is all that separates us from the lethal vacuum of space. It divides into four layers, but only the lowest, the troposphere, contains enough warmth and oxygen to sustain life. Leon-Philippe Teisserenc de Bort…
Becoming a fossil is extraordinarily unlikely: perhaps one bone in a billion is ever preserved, and fewer than one species in ten thousand has made it into the fossil record. In 1909, Charles Doolittle Walcott discovered the Burgess Shale high in the Canadian Rockies, an outcrop containing an…
Charles Darwin sailed aboard HMS Beagle in 1831 at the age of twenty-two, chosen partly because Captain Robert FitzRoy liked the shape of his nose. During five years at sea he collected a vast hoard of specimens, discovered a new dolphin species, and developed a theory of coral atoll formation. Back…
About one and a half million years ago, some early hominid shaped one stone with another and created the first hand axe, a teardrop tool so prized that whole societies produced them by the thousands for a million years. These Acheulean tools disappear mysteriously east of a line drawn by Harvard…
By Bill Bryson
Subject
Themes
Everything that exists began from a singularity with no dimensions at all, which roughly 13.7 billion years ago expanded in a blinding pulse that produced 98 percent of all matter within three minutes. From that inconceivable beginning emerged the stars, which forged heavy elements in their cores and scattered them across space when they exploded as supernovae. Those elements eventually coalesced into our solar system, and on one small, fortunate planet they assembled into something even more remarkable: life. The journey from that first cosmic instant to the emergence of a species capable of contemplating its own origins is one of staggering improbability, lucky accidents, and the persistent curiosity of scientists who refused to accept ignorance.