Book Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson is a well know travel writer. According to the introduction he was flying one day and realized he didn't know the difference between a protein and proton. He wanted to understand these things and moreso to understand how it is that people have figured out the various things we know. After 3 years of work the result is the 475 page (plus notes) A Short History of Nearly Everything, a book I thoroughly enjoyed.

He covers a lot, from what we think the universe is like and it origins, the structure of atoms, the age, size and composition of the Earth, to the origins of life and man and how cells and DNA work. He covers much of this by covering the discoverers of the various theries. Newton, Einstein, Watson, Crick, all the heavy weights, but also many others you haven't heard of. What also comes across is how difficult some of this stuff is. How do you measure the mass of the Earth? It turns out Newton suggested to hang something near a mountain and it should hang slightly not straight due to the mountain's gravitation pull on the object. Now measure the mass of the mountain (not easy) and compute what the mass of the Earth must be. Other things were no so easy.

As an example of how he makes this interesting, he describes teh story of Guillaume Le Gentil, a French scientist who travelled to India in 1760 to measure a transit of Venus across the sun to triangulate the distance of the Earth from the Sun. He was one of many who travelled around the world to take precise measurements of the event. Travelling then wasn't easy and despite the fact he left a year ahead of time, he was still at sea during the transit and could get no measurements. The transits come in pairs, 8 years apart, so he stayed in India and prepared for the next one in 1769. He prepared for it by constructing a tower and calibrating his instruments, but just as the transit started, a cloud covered it and remained there for over 3 hours ruining the viewing. So almost 10 years after he left, he returned home to France, contracting dysentery on the way, and finding that his relatives had declared him dead and plundered his estate. Such was often the lot for scientists and their crazy ideas. I don't remember ever learning stories like this in school.