This is a book that discusses the formation of the universe, the determination of earth’s size and age, the role of physics and chemistry in enhancing our knowledge of the universe, volcanoes and glaciers, genetics and anthropology — in short, as Bryson puts it, “how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us.
This book addresses an amazing range of scientific topics and is a sort of cheat sheet on them. As Bryson puts it, “we live in a universe whose age we can’t compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other 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” — in this book, he attempts to address some of this ignorance. And incredibly, he does it with some humour along the way!
As with any Bryson book, there are several interesting tidbits strewn on the way. For example, if the diagram of our solar system in our school geography books were drawn to scale, and if Earth was pea-sized in that diagram, Pluto would have been two and a half kilometres away! Or when we sit on a chair, we are actually levitating (albeit at a height of only one hundred millionth of a cm. Or that the origin of the phrase “cloud nine” comes from an old classification of clouds into ten types in which the ninth type was the fluffiest cloud. The book is filled with large numbers and Bryson finds interesting ways of presenting them. For example, the earth is 4,500 billion years old, or put another way, if the entire history of the Earth was a day, humans emerge only one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. On a lighter note, I managed to deduce that the movements of Harry Potter’s Knight Bus may have been an application of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity!
As to be expected in a book of this genre, there are parts that drag. And given the 500+page length of the book, it may make sense to skim over a few parts. Also, Bryson often dumbs down the science for us. This may be a good thing or a bad one — it could irritate more knowledgeable readers but then, this book is probably not meant for them.
This book helped me revisit parts of the physics, biology and chemistry that I had learnt in high school. Ultimately, It’s a book that makes readers marvel anew at the size of the universe and allows them to look at things around them in a new way — Bryson’s senses of wonder is contagious. And for that, it’s worth a read!
Interesting factoid: Mary Anning used to gather fossils (including the ichthysorausus) and sell them and is most likely the source of the tongue twister “she sells sea-shells on the seashore)!
Pros: Wide range of scientific stories, interesting tidbits and analogies
Cons: Drags at times
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