A Few Lessons from A Short History of Nearly Everything
My list of favorite writers tends to come down heavily on the fiction side of the fiction-nonfiction divide, with one notable exception: Bill Bryson.
The first book I read by Bryson was At Home: A Short History of Private Life. It’s a book about the history of houses, room by room. The premise is so boring it’s practically a sedative, but Bryson’s writing is fascinating. His books are like having a class with your favorite teacher from school; they take topics that should be boring and turn them into stories and imagery that you can remember years later.
Now I’m working through his overview of scientific history in A Short History of Nearly Everything, and I thought I’d share just a few of the facts that I’ve learned so far.
There are at least two thousand asteroids in the path of Earth’s orbit that a collision could completely wipe out civilization. At most, we would have a few weeks warning about these asteroids. At least, many of us would be wiped out before we could even look up.
Sir Isaac Newton was a weirdo. He once stuck a long metal needle between his eye and skull to “see what would happen.” Lucky for us all the answer was, “not much.”
Evidence suggests there’s no edge to the universe. If we started flying in one direction impossibly fast for an impossibly long amount of time, we would eventually get back to right where we started, like a boat sailing around the globe.
Since mass is a form of stored energy, you contain enough energy to explode with the force of thirty hydrogen bombs “assuming you knew how to liberate [the energy] and really wished to make a point.”
The Yellowstone supervolcano explodes, on average, once every 600,000 years. It’s been about 630,000 years since the last explosion.
The same person who invented the CFCs that nearly depleted the ozone layer, Thomas Midgley Jr., also invented leaded gasoline. He’s near the top of the list of “scientists who made the world worse.”
A potato is 80% water, so eating curly fries is probably very good for me (my logic, not his).
Quarks were nearly called “Partons,” like Dolly Parton (but not named for Dolly Parton, which was pretty disappointing).
Slime molds are weird as HELL.
A “short” history can still be over 500 pages, and every one of those pages can be enjoyable and interesting.