A Short History of Nearly Everything

“The average distance between stars out there is 20 million million miles.”

This statistic emphasizes how alone we are in the universe, and yet, according to many theories, such as Drake’s equation, it’s entirely probable that humans may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. 

“He spent endless hours studying the floor plan of the lost Temple of King Solomon in Jerusalem (teaching himself Hebrew in the process, the better to scan original texts) in the belief that it held mathematical clues to the dates of the second coming of Christ and the end of the world.”

This quote is describing Isaac Newton. Like many of the other scientists described in this book, Newton was an eccentric man with interests that lay far outside the realm of science. He was also quite into alchemy and the idea that he could turn base metals into precious ones. 

“It was the first really universal law of nature ever propounded by a human mind, which why Newton is regarded with such universal esteem.”

This is referring to Newton’s law of gravitation as demonstrated in the famous Principia. Despite his eccentric nature, Newton, like so many other scientists, contributed something invaluable to our understanding of the world today. 

“Today, scientists have at their disposal machines so precise they can detect the weight of a single bacterium and so sensitive that readings can be disturbed by someone yawning seventy-five feet away, but they have not significantly improved on Cavendish’s measurement of 1797.”

Cavendish was the first person to accurately assess the Earth’s weight, which is an amazing feat considering the technological hindrances of his time. But more amazing still is the fact that despite all our technological achievements of the modern age, scientists haven’t been able to improve upon Cavendish’s estimate.

“That the bone didn’t attract greater interest is more than a little puzzling, for its appearance came at a time when America was in a froth of excitement about the remains of large, ancient animals.”

This quote refers to the first dinosaur bone ever discovered. Despite that it was unlike any bone found before, Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation’s leading anatomist of the time, didn’t recognize that he was witnessing a never-before-seen species. Instead, he dismissed the bone, and thus dinosaurs weren’t to be discovered for another half a century. 

“Before Owen, museums were designed primarily for the use and edification of the elite, and even then it was difficult to gain access.”

Richard Owen was the first person to transform our expectations of what a museum should be used for. He believed that everyone should be able to view artifacts. In fact, he even came up with the idea of labeling each museum piece, so that the common person would know what they were looking at.

“Chemistry as an earnest and respectable science is often said to date from 1661, when Robert Boyle of Oxford published The ScepticalChymist—the first work to distinguish between chemicals and alchemists—but it was a slow and often erratic transition.”

For much of the eighteenth century, many chemists also considered themselves alchemists, and the line between the two pursuits often blurred. This led to strange and accidental discoveries. For example, Hennig Brand was convinced that he could turn human urine into gold, but in the process invented phosphorous. 

“Thanks to the devoted and unwittingly high-risk work of the first atomic scientists, by the early years of the twentieth century it was becoming clear that Earth was unquestionably venerable, though another half century of science would have to be done before anyone could confidently say quite how venerable.”

The early twentieth century was a time of vast discoveries, when the first chemists uncovered that the world was comprised of never-before-known elements, many of which were discovered by accident. 

“As the nineteenth century drew to a close, scientists could reflect with satisfaction that they had pinned down most of the mysteries of the physical world: electricity, magnetism, gases, optics, acoustics, kinetics, and statistical mechanics, to name just a few, all had fallen into order before them.”

Because of this fact, many scientists assumed that there wasn’t much left on Earth to be discovered. They were, of course, vastly mistaken, as shortly into the twentieth century Einstein came along with his theory of relativity, and this changed everything we thought we knew about the universe.

“In essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute, but relative to both the observer and to the thing being observed, and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become.”

This is Bryson’s way of simply stating Einstein’s complex theory of relativity. Bryson furthers this analogy by saying that the theory is like a bystander watching a train moving by at a fast speed. Things appear distorted to the bystander, but to those inside the train, things appear normal.

“While Einstein and Hubble were productively unraveling the large-scale structure of the cosmos, others were struggling to understand something closer to hand but in its way just as remote: the tiny and ever-mysterious atom.” 

This is an important realization, in that many of Earth’s biggest discoveries happened simultaneously. 

“The problem with measuring the age of the Earth was that you needed rocks that were extremely ancient, containing lead- and uranium-bearing crystals that were about as old as the planet itself—anything much younger would obviously give you misleading youthful dates—but really ancient rocks are only rarely found on Earth.”

Unable to find such rocks on Earth, scientists used meteor rocks, remnants of creation, to more accurately assess the age of the Earth. This was an important discovery because all previous attempts at dating the Earth had been unsuccessful.

“The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.”

In this quote, Bryson is emphasizing that for all the scientific advancements and discoveries that have been made throughout the ages, we still know so little about the world around us. In fact, it seems, that the more scientists discover, the less they know for sure. 

“Think of the Earth’s orbit as a kind of freeway on which we are the only vehicle, but which is crossed regularly by pedestrians who don’t know enough to look before stepping off the curb.”

Here, Bryson is making an analogy to describe the unpredictable nature of meteors in relation to the Earth. Meteors frequently come close to the Earth, and often scientists didn’t even know they were there until they were close to the Earth’s orbit. 

“For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour.”

Bryson is describing what would happen if a huge meteor were to crash into Earth. We wouldn’t know it was there until too late, and it would devastate the entire planet. 

“We know surprisingly little about what happens beneath out feet. It is fairly remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and baseball has been playing World Series for longer than we have known that the Earth has a core.”

One refrain in the book is the idea that for as much as we do know, we know so little about the world around us. In this case, Bryson is pointing out that so little is known about the Earth’s center, mainly because we have no way of physically looking inside the Earth. What we do know about the Earth’s center has come from examining seismograph readings and reading waves as they travel through the interior.

“In the 1960s, while studying the volcanic history of Yellowstone National Park, Bob Christiansen of the United States Geological Survey became puzzled about something that, oddly, had not troubled anyone before: he couldn’t find the park’s volcano.”

Virtually the entire 2.2 million acres of Yellowstone National Park make up a vast volcano known as a caldera—an enormous hot spot. Even more terrifying is the fact that experts believe Yellowstone is due to erupt any moment. 

“The most striking thing about our atmosphere is that there isn’t very much of it. It extends upward for about 120 miles, which might seem reasonably bounteous when viewed from ground level, but if you shrank the Earth to the size of a standard desktop globe it would only be about the thickness of a couple coats of varnish.”

Despite that our atmosphere is incredibly important—in fact, essential to life itself—it is an incredibly small and fragile thing. 

“What we do know is that because heat from the Sun is unevenly distributed, differences in air pressure arise on the planet. Air can’t abide this, so it rushes around trying to equalize things everywhere. Wind is simply the air’s way of trying to keep things in balance.”

Although meteorologists understand the mechanics of wind, they often have a difficult time making predictions because wind is an unpredictable entity. 

“Because water is so ubiquitous we tend to overlook what an extraordinary substance it is. Almost nothing about it can be used to make reliable predictions about the properties of other liquids and vice versa.” 

Water is unlike any other liquid known on Earth. In fact, scientists still aren’t sure why water behaves the way it does. For example, while most liquids contract by about 10 percent when chilled, water becomes nearly a tenth more voluminous when chilled to the point of freezing. 

“Proteins are what you get when you string amino acids together, and we need a lot of them. No one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body, and each one is a little miracle.” 

Bryson continually expresses how amazing protein is in the human body. Life wouldn’t be possible without protein, and yet scientists still aren’t sure how protein works. They know that statistically speaking, protein shouldn’t exist. That’s because protein makes itself spontaneously, and without direction. 

“The bottom line is that life is amazing and gratifying, perhaps even miraculous, but hardly impossible—as we repeatedly attest with our own modest existences.”

By this point, Bryson has spent much of the book explaining various discoveries and theories that have attempted to explain how life arose and flourished on Earth. It’s clear that life does exist, so it’s not impossible, and yet so much is still an inexplicable mystery. 

“If creatures as intimately associated with us as bed mites escaped our notice until the age of color television, it’s hardly surprising that most of the rest of the small-scale world is barely known to us.” 

Bryson is commenting on the little-known nature of the small-scale world around us. Scientists are still discovering new microorganisms every day. This is because microorganisms are small and easily overlooked, and oftentimes scientists don’t look in the right places.