Anytime a voracious reader learns for the first time about the author Bill Bryson and his bestselling books, he regrets not knowing him earlier. Every book is a masterpiece and the more the reader explores his work, the more he looks forward to starting the next one.
A Short History of Nearly Everything is one such book that can be read repeatedly. Bill Bryson’s curiosity, in-depth research, complex concepts broken into smaller chunks of knowledge are all wrapped in wit and wisdom to create a chronologically flowing story of the planet and its life.
There’s no way that you will not be hooked to the book from sentence one till the last. You may not remember the many names and exact theories but you would surely remember the way this book of science makes you feel every time you read it. Mysteries, nuggets of interesting information, spicy adventures from the personal lives of our scientists, discoveries, inventions, and myths are all part of this painstakingly detailed book.
For instance, Atom has never been discussed with such aplomb and reverie. Nor has anybody in the same breath revealed that physicists are scornful of scientists from other fields and Wolfgang Pauli’s wife left him for a chemist. This interplay of revelations of all kinds keeps you in the wonder zone where one is only appreciative and admiring of our living, breathing, heaving planet.
If you haven’t picked your copy yet, pick it now before you too join the regretful gang.
Excerpt
For a long time the Big Bang theory had one gaping hole that troubled a lot of people – namely, that it couldn’t begin to explain how we got here. Although 98 per cent of all the matter that exists was created with the Big Bang, that matter consisted exclusively of light gases: the helium, hydrogen and lithium that we mentioned earlier. Not one particle of the heavy stuff so vital to our own being – carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the rest – emerged from the gaseous brew of creation. But – and here’s the troubling point – to forge these heavy elements, you need the kind of heat and energy thrown off by a Big Bang. Yet there has been only one Big Bang and it didn’t produce them. So where did they come from? Interestingly, the man who found the answer to that question was a cosmologist who heartily despised the Big Bang and coined the term Big Bang sarcastically, as a way of mocking it.
We’ll get to him shortly, but before we turn to the question of how we got here, it might be worth taking a few minutes to consider just where exactly ‘here’ is.
