A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson says that when he was a kid, he saw a cutaway drawing of the Earth in a school science book, showing the layers down to the core. He was fascinated, but when he asked his teacher how anyone knew what was down there, since nobody had ever dug that deep, the answer was vague.

That question never left his mind. Decades later, now an adult known for travel books, Bryson decided to spend years reading, visiting labs and interviewing scientists just to understand, in his own words, how science came to know what it knows about the universe, the Earth and life.

That sets the tone for the whole book: it is not a formula lecture, it is the story behind the discovery, with doubt, fights and luck included, told like someone striking up a conversation at a bar about a hard subject.

The book begins at the beginning of everything: according to modern cosmology, the universe came from a point smaller than anything imaginable and expanded from there in an event dubbed the Big Bang. The name stuck out of irony: the term was coined by astronomer Fred Hoyle, on a radio show, precisely to mock a theory he disagreed with.

Decades later, evidence such as Edwin Hubble's discovery that galaxies are moving away from one another proved right the theory Hoyle had tried to ridicule.

Bryson tries to give a sense of how big space is by comparing distances between stars to scales any reader can feel in their body, like imagining the Earth as a marble on a neighborhood map, with the nearest star still far away from there. What you're left with is the feeling of an almost invisible dot inside an immense space.

Henry Cavendish was an eighteenth-century English aristocrat, extremely rich, who lived so isolated that he barely spoke to other people. The book says he communicated with his own maids only by note, to avoid direct contact, and panicked when he ran into a woman in the hallway of his house.

Even so, Cavendish set up a brilliant experiment in a room of his own house: a torsion balance with two lead balls, able to measure a force as tiny as the gravitational pull between two ordinary objects. With that device, he calculated the density of the Earth and, from it, the weight of the entire planet.

The episode shows a pattern that repeats in almost every chapter: huge discoveries often came from eccentric people, alone, working on their own, far from universities and immediate recognition.