The Wonder Of It All

 A Short History of Nearly Everything

By Bill Bryson

Centuries of scientific knowledge and discovery about our cosmos, condensed into a wonderful 600 page book that a complete layman can find interesting. That is Bryson's achievement. Some delightful factoids from the book:

• For all we know, the North Star may have burned out at any time since the early fourteenth century - and news of it hasn't reached us as yet.
• Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. And so we will have atoms in our body that once belonged to Shakespeare, and the Buddha and Genghis Khan! A little bit of genius in each of us.
• Rutherford, the 'father of nuclear physics' as we know him, was terrible at mathematics!! There is still hope for that kid who hates it.
• Since atoms are mostly empty space, the solidity we experience around us is an illusion. So when you are sitting on a chair, you are not actually sitting, but levitating above it (albeit at a height of a hundred millionth of a centimeter).
• There are two bodies of laws in physics - both leading quite separate lives. One for the world of the very small (quantum theory) and one for the universe at large (relativity).
• We, us brilliant humans, really know very little! We live in a universe whose age we cannot calculate, surrounded by stars whose distance from us or each other we do not know, filled with 'dark' matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws we don't understand.
• The study of plate tectonics tells us Kazhakstan was once attached to Norway and New England. Pick up a pebble in a Massachusetts beach and it is most closely related to ones in Africa. And sometime in the future, California will float off and become a Madagascar in the Pacific.
• There are about a hundred million asteroids larger than 10 meters, at any point in time, in trajectories that cross earth's orbit. Earth is of course, trundling along at a brisk 100,000 kilometers an hour. These speeding bullets are impossible to track. Near misses happen two or three times a week and go unnoticed. Talk about living on borrowed time.
• The distance from the surface of the earth to its middle is 6370 km. We have penetrated 3 kilometers at the most (searching for gold). So as Bryson says, if the planet were an apple, we wouldn't have even come close to breaking the skin!
• All the glass on earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. So a pane of old glass from the window of a European cathedral is noticeably thicker at the bottom than the top.
• The earth's magnetic field reverses itself every once in a while - the last reversal happened 750,000 years ago. And we have no idea why it happens!
• The last supervolcano explosion happened in Sumatra 74000 years ago. That whopper was followed by 6 years of volcanic winter. It reduced global human population to no more than a few thousand (all of us are descended from those thousands - and so all that fighting over race and caste is quite insane, given the lack of our genetic diversity).
• And Yellowstone National Park is an active supervolcano. It's cycle of eruptions is a massive one every 600,000 years. The last one was 630,000 years ago. Still want to visit?
• The world belongs to the very small! If you totaled up all the biomass in the planet, microbes would account for at least 80% of all there is!
• When you see lichen the size of a dinner plate, know that it is likely to be hundreds of years old! That is slow-growing!
• The dust on your table or shelf is most likely old skin. You slough off several billion fragments of your dead skin every day.
• When man arrived, North and South America lost about three quarters of their big animals. Australia lost 95%.
• The second Baron Rothschild was a scientific collector of species - and a very deadly one. When he became interested in Hawaii, it lost 9 species of birds in a decade of his collecting!

The sense of curiosity and awe that Bryson imbues through everything he explains, the very things that are missing in all the science textbooks I have read, is what makes this book such a treasure. Add in his trademark humour and you have one of the most engaging pop science books ever!

And it has a lesson - that we, humans, are truly lucky to be here, at this time, in this planet, a tiny speck, both in terms of size and time, in this infinitely vast and unknowable universe. So as a poet once said, "Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."