Book Review, Summary, Highlights, and Quotes from *A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Fantastic book!
It covers everything from the Big Bang and the age of the earth to the dinosaurs to the atomic bomb.
I found the latter half of the book utterly fascinating, but it is a huge book and not for the faint of heart.
While Bill Bryson makes it entertaining, it still took me quite a bit to get through it including stopping and starting it up again.
However, in the end, I found it an enjoyable read on not only some of the history of science, but for what WE as a species know.
For anyone who wants to get a REALLY fun and entertaining scientific overview, this book is worth the read!
AR Book Score: 8.5 out of 10
Best Quotes from *A Short History of Nearly Everything
Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on the way to becoming you.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
When we die our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere-as part of a leaf or other human being or drop of dew. Atoms, however, go on practically forever.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
We live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
At any one moment 1,800 thundersotmrs are in progress around the globe-some 40,000 a day. Day and night across the planet every second about a hundred lightning bolts hit the ground. The sky is a lively place.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
Well into the 1950s it was thought that life was less than 600 million years old. By the 1970s, a few adventerous souls felt that maybe it went back 2.5 billion years. But the present date of 3.85 billion years is stunningly early. Earth’s surface didn’t become solid until about 3.9 billion years ago.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains-about-a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
Because we are humans are big and clever enough to product and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don’t you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance toward largeness and complexity-in a word, toward us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes-an interesting side branch.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
It is a curious fact that on Earth species death is, in the most literal sense, a way of life. No one knows how many species of organisms have existed since life began.[…]Whatever the actual total, 99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
Every cell in nature is a thing of wonder. Even the simplest are far beyond the limits of human ingenuity. To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five micros accross; then somehow you would have to pursuade that sphere to reproduce.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
Compare your genes with any other human being’s and on average they will be about 99.9 percent the same. That is what makes us a species. The tiny differences in that remaining 0.1 percent […] are what endow us with our individuality.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
Most of your DNA, is not devoted to you, but to itself: you are a machine for reproducing it, not it for you.
– Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything
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