A Short History Of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” Random House (Large Print), 2003, 787 pp. plus addl 111 pages of notes and bibliography

The author spent three years reading books and journals and questioning experts to produce this book about science at a level that isn’t too technical or demanding, but not superficial.  I judge he has succeeded and this book gets my “Education” tag. 

It is just amazing how much science has changed for anyone over 30 years of age and older.  Each section within the book deals with one sphere of inquiry, such as outer space, the Earth, and living things. Each chapter explores a specific question such as "How did the Universe start?" or "What are supernovae and why are they important?" 

Part 1 focuses on our universe and mankind's place in it. The first chapter details the Big Bang Theory, which suggests that the universe was formed in just a few brief moments.

The size, shape, weight, and orbit of the Earth are the focus of Part 2. Bryson profiles important geologists such as Henry Cavendish, who, in 1797, accurately measured the weight of the Earth and also detail Marie Curie's work with uranium, and why it was a European - not an American - who first described a dinosaur.

In Part 3, presents the theory of relativity and quantum physics as comprehensible as possible. This section illuminates the flexible fabric of space-time and the incredible amount of energy locked inside every molecule. It also attempts to explain the complex, static sub-atomic world, where nothing exists until it is observed, electrons travel from one spot to another without going through the intervening space, the universe is composed primarily of solid nothing, and particles travel faster than light.

Part 4 details the dangers the Earth faces every day. These include being hit by one of the millions of meteors that cross the Earth's path two or three times per week; the potential eruption of the super volcano at Yellowstone; a type of earthquake that can occur anywhere, any time; the ever-present and growing threat of global warming; and the history of ice ages and the possibility of their recurrence.

The final section deals with the topic of life on Earth and how every living thing on it uses the same blueprint for life, suggesting a common ancestor somewhere in the dim, distant past. Bryson concludes by pointing out that humans are very lucky to be here. Over 99.99 percent of species that have lived on Earth since the dawn of time

have become extinct - some by natural processes and others by way of mankind's ignorance.

My Notes:

P. 4:  The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years.  Of the billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent—are no longer around.  We come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.  (There have been five major extinctions on earth during the 3.85 billion years of life on the planet, we may be going through the sixth in the present.)

Pg. 41: The basic unit of measure in the solar system is the Astronomical Unit, or AU, representing the distance from the Sun to the Earth.  Pluto is about 40 AUs from us, the heart of the Oort cloud is about fifty thousand.

Pg. 99:  To a physicist, mass and weight are two quite different things.  Your mass stays the same wherever you go, but your weight varies depending on how far you are from the center of some other massive object like a planet.  Travel to the Moon and you will be much lighter but no less massive.  On Earth, for all practical purposes, mass and weight are the same and so the terms can here be treated as synonymous.

Pg. 197:  In 1901 Einstein had a daughter out of wedlock with a fellow student.  The child was put up for adoption and Einstein never saw her even though he married the mother two years later.

Pg. 203:  Relativity:  in essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute, but relative to both the observer and to the thing being observed, and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become.  We can never accelerate ourselves to the speed of light, and the harder we try (and faster we go) the more distorted we will become, relative to an outside observer. 

Pg. 211:  In 1919 the number of known galaxies was exactly one: the Milky Way.  Everything else was thought to be either part of the Milky Way itself or one of many distant, peripheral puffs of gas.  By 1924, Hubble had determined that the universe consisted of lots of independent galaxies, many of them bigger than the Milky Way.  He also determined that all the galaxies are moving away from us and their speed and distance were neatly proportional: the further away from the galaxy, the faster it was moving. (p. 215).

Pg. 230:  Atoms:  Every atom is made from three kinds of elementary particles: protons, which have a positive electrical charge; electrons, which have a negative electrical charge; and neutrons, which have no charge.  Protons and neutrons are packed into the nucleus, while electrons spin around outside.  The number of protons is what gives an atom its chemical identity.  An atom with one proton is an atom of hydrogen, one with two protons is helium, and with three protons is lithium, and so on up the scale.  Each time you add a proton you get a new element.   (Because the number of protons in an atom is always balanced by an equal number of electrons, sometimes it is the number of electrons that is used to define an element; it comes to the same thing.)

Pg. 231:  Atoms are mostly empty space, and the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion.  When two objects come together in the real world—billiard balls are most often used for illustration—they don’t actually strike each other.  Rather, the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other…were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.  When you sit in a chair you are actually levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

Pg. 259:  Before 1923 there was almost no lead in the earth's atmosphere; since that time lead levels have climbed steadily and dangerously.  A man named Clair Patterson made it his life’s quest to get lead taken out of gasoline.  It would prove to be a hellish campaign; Ethyl was a powerful global corporation with many friends in high places. His efforts led to the Clean Air Act of 1970 and finally to the removal from sale of all leaded gasoline in the US in 1986.  Almost immediately lead levels in the blood of Americans fell by 80 percent.  Forty-four after most of Europe, the US banned lead in indoor paint.

Pg. 279:  In 2003 the best estimate of the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, give or take a hundred million years or so.

Pg. 293:  In the 1950s oceanographers found the most extensive mountain range on Earth was—mostly—underwater.  If you began at Iceland, you could follow it down the center of the Atlantic Ocean, around the bottom of Africa, and across the Indian and Southern Oceans, below Australia; there it angled across the Pacific as if making for Baja California before shooting up the west coast of the US to Alaska.  Occasionally its higher peaks poked above the water as an island or archipelago—the Azores and Canaries in the Atlantic, Hawaii in the Pacific, for instance.  When all its branches were added together, the network extended to 46,600 miles.

Pg. 298:  Today we know that Earth’s surface is made up of eight to twelve big plates (depending on how you define big).  The North American plate is much larger than the continent with which it is associated.  It roughly traces the outline of the continent’s western coast (which is why that area is so seismically active, because of the bump and crush of the plate boundary), but ignores the eastern seaboard because it extends halfway across the Atlantic to the mid-ocean ridge.  Assuming things continue much as at present, the Atlantic Ocean will expand until eventually it becomes much bigger than the Pacific.  Much of California will float off and become a kind of Madagascar of the Pacific. 

Pg. 314:  Only in the last few years have astronomers begun to count and keep an eye on the asteroid community.  As of July 2001, twenty-six thousand asteroids had been named and identified—half in just the previous two years.  With up to a billion to identify, the count has barely begun. 

Pg. 408:  There are ninety-two naturally occurring elements on Earth, plus a further twenty or so that have been created in labs.  The most elusive element of all appears to be francium, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain fewer than twenty francium atoms.  Altogether only about thirty of the naturally occurring elements are widespread on Earth, and barely half a dozen are of central importance to life.

Pg. 439:  We know from samples of very old ice that the ‘natural’ level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 280 parts per million.  By 1958 it had risen to 315 parts per million.  Today it is over 360 and rising by roughly one-quarter of one percent a year.  By the end of the twenty-first century, it is forecast to rise to about 560 parts per million.

Pg. 476:  One of the biggest surprises in the earth science was the discovery of just how early in Earth’s history life arose.  The date presently held is 3.85 billion years ago.  This is stunningly early as Earth’s surface didn’t become solid until about 3.9 billion years ago.

Pg. 482:  The Earth’s crust continually slips back into the interior oven at some point; but just occasionally—in Western Australia and Greenland, for example—geologists have found outcrops of rocks that have remained always at the surface.  In 1982 a 4.3 billion-year-old rock was found in Western Australia.

Pg. 510:  If you totaled up all the bio-mass of the planet—every living thing, plants included—microbes would account for at least 80 percent of all there is, perhaps more.  The world belongs to the very small—and it has for a very long time.

Pg. 516:  We overuse antibiotics.  By one estimate some 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the developed world are given to farm animals, often routinely in stock feed, simply to promote growth or as a precaution against infection.  Such applications give bacteria every opportunity to evolve a resistance to them—and they have.  To make matters worse, the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s, they have toughened up a few antibiotics, but no new ones.

Pg. 520:  The Great Spanish Flu of 1918 arose as a normal, nonlethal flu in the spring of 1918, but somehow over the following months it mutated into something more severe.  A fifth of victims suffered only mild symptoms, but the rest became gravely ill and often died.  Almost 80 percent of American casualties in WWI came not from enemy fire, but from flu.  Between the autumn of 1918 and spring of the following year, 548,452 people died in America.  No one knows the global toll but it was not less than 20 million and probably more like 50 million. 

Pg. 562:  On Earth death of a species is quite common.  It is estimated that 99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.  For complex organisms, the average lifespan of a species is only about four million years—roughly about where we are now.

Pg. 564:  Five Extinctions: The Ordovician (440 million years ago) and the Devonian (365 million) each wiped out about 80 to 85 percent of species.  The Triassic (210 million years ago) and Cretaceous (65 million years) each wiped out 70 to 75 percent of species.  But the real whopper was the Permian extinction of about 245 million years ago, which raised the curtain on the long age of the dinosaurs.  In the Permian, at least 95 percent of animals known from the fossil record were wiped out, never to return.  Even about a third of insect species went.  It is as close as we have ever come to total obliteration.

Pg. 620:  It wasn’t until the 1860s, and some landmark work by Louis Pasteur in France, that it was shown conclusively that life cannot arise spontaneously but must come from preexisting cells.  The belief became known as the ‘cell theory,’ and it is the basis of all modern biology.

Pg. 645:  Darwin’s theory was not a recipe for change, but for constancy (a reversion to the mean).  Lucky flukes might arise from time to time, but they would soon vanish under the general impulse to bring everything back to a stable mediocrity.  If natural selection were to work, some alternative, unconsidered mechanism was required:

Enter Gregor Mendel (born in 1822): although Mendel never used the word gene—it wasn’t coined until 1913—he did invent the terms dominant and recessive.  What he established was that every seed contained two ‘factors’,’ a dominant one and a recessive one.  And these factors, when combined produced predictable patterns of inheritance.  But his findings were for some time virtually ignored. 

Pg. 648:  Together, without realizing it, Darwin and Mendel laid the groundwork for all of life sciences in the twentieth century.  Darwin saw that all living things are connected, that ultimately they ‘trace their ancestry to a single, common source,’ while Mendel’s work provided the mechanism to explain how that could happen. 

Pg 652:  Darwin’s theory didn’t really gain widespread acceptance until the 1930s and 40s when Darwin’s ideas were combined with those of Mendel and others.

 

Pg. 702:  The Earth is still very much in an ice age, it’s just a somewhat shrunken one.  It is mildly unnerving to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history—the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest—has taken place within an atypical path of fair weather.  Previous interglacials have lasted as little as eight thousand years.  Our own has already passed its ten thousandth anniversary.  Three-quarters of all the fresh water on Earth is locked up in ice even now. 

Pg. 703:  For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere.  The current ice age started about forty million years ago and has ranged from murderously bad to not bad at all.  It appears that we have had at least seventeen severe glacial episodes in the last 2.5 million years or so—the period that coincides with the rise of Homo erectus in Africa followed by modern humans.  Two commonly cited culprits for the present epoch weather are the rise of the Himalayas and the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, the first disrupting air flows, the second ocean currents. 

Pg. 704:  At all events, with the oceans and continents arranged as they are now, it appears that ice will be a long-term part of our future.  (Kind of ironic given the current climate change talk).

Pg. 720:  As recently as 1924 only four categories of ancient hominid were known—Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesciensis, Neanderthals, and Java Man—but all that was about to change in a very big way.  By the 1950s, the number of named hominid types had risen to comfortably over a hundred.  Altogether, some twenty types of hominid are recognized in the literature today.  Unfortunately, almost no two experts recognize the same twenty. 

Pg. 728:  For the first 99.99999 percent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees.  Virtually nothing is known about the prehistory of chimpanzees.  Then about seven million years ago a group of new beings emerged from Africa and began to move about on the open savanna. These were the australopithecines, they walked upright, and for the next five million years they would be the world’s dominant hominid species.  The most famous hominid remains in the world are those of a 3.18-million-year-old australopithecine found in Ethiopia in 1974 and became familiarly known as Lucy.  She was only three and a half feet tall, could walk and was evidently a good climber.

Pg. 736:  At one point between three and two million years ago, it appears there may have been as many as six hominid types coexisting in Africa.  Only one, however, was fated to last: Homo, which emerged about two million years ago.  Conventionally, the Homo line begins with Homo habilis, a creature about whom we know almost nothing, and concludes with us: Homo sapiens.  In between, there have been half a dozen other Homo species: Homo ergaster, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo rudolfensiis, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, and Homo antecessor.

Pg. 737:  Homo habilis (handy man) was so called because it was the first hominid to use tools, albeit very simple ones.  It was a fairly primitive creature, much more chimpanzee than human, but its brain was about 50 percent larger than that of Lucy, so it was the Einstein of its day.  No persuasive reason has ever been adduced for why hominid brains suddenly began to grow two million years ago.  Huge brains are demanding organs: they make up only a percent of the body’s mass, but devour 20 percent of its energy.  The brain wants glucose instead of fat, and lots of it, even if it means short-changing other organs. 

Pg. 738:  One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept is that we are not the culmination of anything.  There is nothing inevitable about our being here.  It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.  Even anthropologists tended to think this way right up until the 1970s. 

Pg. 739:  Homo erectus was the first to hunt, use fire, fashion complex tools, leave evidence of campsites, and look after the weak and frail.  Compared with all that had gone before, Homo erectus was extremely human in form as well as behavior.

Pg. 787:  Behaviorally modern human beings—that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities—have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth’s history.  But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.