In A Short History of Nearly Everything, the bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body, confronts his greatest challenge yet: to understand—and, if possible, answer—the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as his territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. The result is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it.

In his book, he accomplishes an important thing, one of the most important things - he presents the data while at the same time never letting go of the terribly exciting feeling of discovery, and presenting information about the discoverers themselves. It's obvious that he did a lot of research, but it's also obvious that these things fascinated him, and he grabs the reader's hand and runs headlong into the unexplored. And it is a world full of wonders. becomes 6.5 x 106. The principle is based very simply on multiples o f ten: 10 x 10 Cor 100) becomes 102; 10 x 10 x 10 (o r 1,000) is 103; and so on, obviously and indef­ initely. The little superscript number signifies the number o f zeroes following the larger principal number. Negative notations provide essentially a m irror image, with the superscript number indicating the num ber o f spaces to the right o f the decimal point (so 104 means 0.0001). Though I salute the principle, it remains an amazement to m e that anyone seeing '1.4 x 10s km3' would see at once that that sig­ nifies 1.4 billion cubic kilometers, and no less a wonder that they would choose the former over the latter in print (especially in a book designed for the general reader, where the example was found). On the assumption that m any general readers are as unmathematical as I am, I will use them sparingly, though they are occasionally unavoidable, not least in a chapter dealing with things on a cosmic scale. I won't bother you with all the scientific stuff I learned. Instead, I compiled a top 5 list of the frightful fates of some scientists.A Short History deviates from Bryson's popular travel book genre, instead describing general sciences such as chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics. In it, he explores time from the Big Bang to the discovery of quantum mechanics, via evolution and geology. William McGuire "Bill" Bryson, OBE, FRS was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. He settled in England in 1977, and worked in journalism until he became a full time writer. He lived for many years with his English wife and four children in North Yorkshire. He and his family then moved to New Hampshire in America for a few years, but they have now returned to live in the UK. This, Evans told me, was a star in a constellation called Fornax from a galaxy known to astronomy as NGC1365. (NGC stands for New General Catalogue, where these things are recorded. Once it was a heavy book on someone’s desk in Dublin; today, needless to say, it’s a database.) For sixty million silent years, the light from the star's spectacular demise traveled unceasingly through space until one night in August o f 2001 it arrived at Earth in the form o f a puff o f radiance, the tiniest brightening, in the night sky. It was o f course Robert Evans on his eucalypt-scented hillside who spotted it 'There’s something satisfying, I think," Evans said, 'about the idea o f light traveling for millions o f years through space and just at the right mo­ ment as it readies Earth someone looks at the right bit o f sky and sees it It just seems right that an event o f that magnitude should be witnessed.' Supemovae do much more than simply impart a sense o f wonder. They come in several types (one o f them discovered by Evans) and o f these one in particular, known as a la supernova, is important to astronomy be­ cause it always explodes in the same way, with the same critical mass. For this reason it can be used as a standard candle to measure the expansion rate o f the universe. In 1987 Saul Perlmutter at the Lawrence Berkeley lab in California, needing more la supemovae than visual sightings were providing, set out to find a more systematic method o f searching for them. Perlmutter de­ vised a niffy system using sophisticated computers and charge-coupled devices-in essence, really good digital cameras. It automated supernova hunting. Telescopes could now take thousands o f pictures and let a com­ puter detect the telltale bright spots that marked a supernova explosion. In five years, with the new technique, Perlmutter and his colleagues at Berke­ ley found forty-two supemovae. Now even amateurs are finding super­ novae with charge-coupled devices. "With CCDs you can aim a telescope at the sky and go watch television,' Evans said with a touch o f dismay. Tt took all the romance out o f i t ' I asked him if he was tempted to adopt the new technology. 'Oh, no,' he said, 'I enjoy my way too much. Besides'-he gave a nod at the photo o f his latest supernova and sm iled-T can still beat them sometimes.'

find a suit that fits. If there are many universes, each governed by a differ­ ing set o f numbers, there will be one where there is a particular set o f numbers suitable to life. We are in that one." Rees maintains that six numbers in particular govern our universe, and that if any o f these values were changed even very slightly things could not be as they are For example, for the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner-spedfically, in a way that converts seven one-thousandths o f its mass to energy. Lower that value very slightly-from 0.007 percent to 0.006 percent say-and no transformation could take place: the universe would consist o f hydrogen and nothing else. Raise the value very slightlyto 0.008 percent-and bonding would be so wildly prolific that the hydro­ gen would long since have been exhausted. In either case, with the slightest tweaking o f the numbers the universe as we know and need it would not be here. Bryson describes graphically and in layperson's terms the size of the universe and that of atoms and subatomic particles. This is Bill Bryson's reasoning that we all know we have thought to ourselves but never dared ask; often more than once. The book he has written justifies his view, and makes the word of science seem like an interesting, bright and often mind-blowing world of its own, that we can understand. AT JUST THE time that Heniy Cavendish was completing his experiments in London/ four hundred miles away in Edinburgh another kind o f con­ cluding moment was about to take place with the death o f James Hutton. This was bad news for Hutton, o f course, but good news for science as it cleared the way for a man named John Playfair to rewrite Hutton’s work without fear o f embarrassment Hutton was by all accounts a man o f the keenest insights and liveliest conversation, a delight in company, and without rival when it came to un­ derstanding the mysterious slow processes that shaped the Earth. Unfor­ tunately, it was beyond him to set down his notions in a form that anyone could begin to understand. He was, as one biographer observed with an all but audible sigh, "almost entirely innocent o f rhetorical accomplishments." Nearly every line he penned was an invitation to slumber. Here he is in his 1795 masterwork, A Theory o f the Earth w ith Proofs and Illustrations, dis­ cussing ... something: The world which we inhabit is composed o f the materials, not o f the earth which was the immediate predecessor o f the present, but In my opinion this book is a great read for all ages. You are never too young or too old to learn something new! It shows many great pictures, drawings, and diagrams which can help you understand better. Bill Bryson makes science exciting, interesting and understandable. It contains a mountainous number of facts.Doctor Thomas Midgley Jr. (1889 – 1944) was an American mechanical engineer and chemist. He was a key figure in a team of chemists that developed the lead additive to gasoline (TEL) as well as some of the first CFCs. His work led to the release of large quantities of lead into the atmosphere as a result of the large-scale combustion of leaded gasoline all over the world. Thomas Midgley Jr. died three decades before the ozone-depleting and greenhouse gas effects of CFCs in the atmosphere became widely known. Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny". In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted poliomyelitis, which left him severely disabled. This led him to devise an elaborate system of strings and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. This system was the eventual cause of his own death when he was entangled in the ropes of this device and died of strangulation at the age of 55. If you burned this book now, its matter would be changed to ash and smoke, but the total amount of ‘stuff’ in the universe would be the same. As I've repeatedly mentioned over the years, every time one of the casual-readers tells me I have to read something, like Harry Potter or the DaVinci Code, I dig my feet in deeper and resolve to never read it. This is one of the occasions I should have shaved a decade off of my stubbornness and caved in right away. Only half a dozen times in recorded history have supemovae been close enough to be visible to the naked eye. One was a blast in 1054 that created the Crab Nebula. Another, in 1604, made a star bright enough to be seen during the day for over three weeks. The most recent was in 1987, when a supernova flared in a zone o f the cosmos known as the Large Mag­ ellanic Cloud, but that was only barely visible and only in the southern hemisphere-and it was a comfortably safe 169,000 light-years away.