A Short History of Nearly Everything

I've been reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which takes the reader through the history of the sciences, recalling what we knew, or what we thought we knew, and when we knew it, in amazing detail. It's left me with three impressions which have somewhat altered my world view.

The first is that we have astounding amounts of knowledge about some things and astoundingly little about other things. We have better maps of the surface of Mars than we do our own ocean floors. I was amazed at the manner in which we continually stumble forward into the accepted assumptions of our time, refining them as we go until we can determine something with enough certitude to stop debating it.

A second revelation is that nobody gets away with anything. Not only does Bryson illuminate the foibles of scientists and scholars in their respective laboratories, he provides many details of their social shortcomings; scandalous affairs, petty jealousies, and attempts to steal credit for other's work.

Lastly, one of the major threads Bryson hangs his narrative on is just how unlikely it is that there could ever be a planet like earth suspended in the right balance around the right star with the right moon and the right chemicals sustaining life like us. And yet, as rare a gem as earth is, life is so amenable to its surroundings, and the universe so vast, there could be billions of planets like ours.

-DH