Science & ideas

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson

A tour of modern science, from the Big Bang to the first humans, and how scientists worked it all out

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  • Published 2003

Introduction

Bill Bryson, a travel writer who grew up convinced that science was dull, set out to learn how scientists know what they know: how much the Earth weighs, how old its rocks are, what goes on inside an atom, and how a universe that began from nothing ended up with us. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the result, a tour of modern science told largely through the often odd people who made the discoveries.

The book has six parts and thirty chapters. Part One, Lost in the Cosmos, covers the Big Bang and the size of space. Part Two, The Size of the Earth, follows the first efforts to measure the planet's shape, mass and age. Part Three, A New Age Dawns, turns to Einstein, the atom, the age of the Earth and moving continents. Part Four, Dangerous Planet, looks at impacts from space, earthquakes and volcanoes. Part Five, Life Itself, runs from the origin of life and the world of microbes to fossils, extinctions, cells, Darwin and DNA. Part Six, The Road to Us, covers ice ages, human origins and, at the end, what humans have done to other species. This summary follows the 2003 text; in 2025 Bryson published a fully revised edition, A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0.

Note: the science is as Bryson gave it in 2003, and some figures have changed since. He cites a consensus of about 13.7 billion years for the age of the universe; measurements by the Planck satellite, published in 2013, put it at about 13.8 billion. He writes that about seventy planets had been found outside the solar system; by 2025 NASA counted more than 6,000 confirmed. He treats Pluto as a planet; in 2006 the International Astronomical Union classed it as a dwarf planet. He reports a 1997 study that found no genetic link between Neanderthals and modern humans; since the Neanderthal genome was published in 2010, scientists have found that people with ancestry from outside Africa carry a small share of Neanderthal DNA. This summary presents the science as Bryson reports it, and the opinions and jokes in it are his.

  1. 1Bryson argues that simply being here is an astonishing piece of luck, at the level of our atoms and of our ancestors alike
  2. 2The universe began from something smaller than a proton, and the best evidence for it was found by accident
  3. 3Space is so vast and empty that we cannot even draw our own solar system to scale, and the elements we are made of were forged in stars
  4. 4Measuring the Earth took centuries of brilliant, odd and quarrelsome people, and its age proved the hardest number of all
  5. 5In the early twentieth century, Einstein and the atom physicists showed that the very large and the very small defy common sense
  6. 6Clair Patterson found the true age of the Earth, then spent decades fighting the lead that Thomas Midgley had put into the air
  7. 7The Earth is restless and dangerous: its continents drift, rocks fall from space, and a giant volcano sits under Yellowstone
  8. 8Earth is a lucky but grudging home, with the right star, the right distance, a molten interior, a large Moon and good timing
  9. 9Life began just once, was run by microbes for most of Earth's history, and has survived repeated near-wipeouts
  10. 10We still do not know how many species there are, but Darwin, Mendel and the discovery of DNA showed that all life is one
  11. 11Humans arose in Africa during an ice age, and the evidence of how is thin and fiercely argued over
  12. 12Humans may be the only creatures able to look after life on Earth, and so far we have done the job badly

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A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson: summary | Daridanesh