A short history of Everything
by Bill Bryson
(Doubleday)
Unremitting effort over the past 300 years has yielded an astonishing amount of information about the world we inhabit. By rights we ought to be very impressed and extremely interested. Unfortunately many of us simply aren’t.
Far from attracting the best candidates, science is proving a less and less popular subject in schools. And, with a few notable exceptions, popular books on scientific topics are a rare bird in the bestseller lists. Bill Bryson, the travel-writing phenomenon, thinks he knows what has gone wrong.
The anaemic, lifeless prose of standard science textbooks, he argues, smothers at birth our innate curiosity about the natural world. Reading them is a chore rather than a voyage of discovery. Even books written by leading scientists, he complains, are too often clogged up with impenetrable jargon.
Just like the alchemists of old, scientists have a regrettable tendency to ”vaile their secrets with mistie speech”.
Science, John Keats sulked, ”will clip an Angel’s wings, / Conquer all mysteries by rule and line.”
Bryson turns this on its head by blaming the messenger rather than the message. Robbing nature of its mystery is what he thinks most science books do best.
But, unlike Keats, he does not believe this is at all necessary. We may be living in societies less ready to believe in magic, miracles or afterlives, but the sublime remains. Rather as Richard Dawkins has argued, Bryson insists the results of scientific study can be wondrous and very often are so.
The trick is to write about them in a way that makes them comprehensible without crushing nature’s mystique. Bryson provides a lesson in how it should be done. The prose is just as one would expect — energetic, quirky, familiar and humorous. Bryson’s great skill is that of lightly holding the reader’s hand throughout, building up such trust that topics as recondite as atomic weights, relativity and particle physics are shorn of their terrors.
The amount of ground covered is impressive. From the furthest reaches of cosmology, we range through time and space until we are looking at the smal-lest particles. We explore our own planet and get to grips with the ideas, first of Newton and then of Einstein, that allow us to understand the laws that govern it.
Then biology holds centre stage, heralding the emergence of big-brained bipeds and Charles Darwin’s singular notion about how it all came about. Crucially, this hugely varied terrain is not presented as a series of discrete packages. Bryson made his name writing travelogues and that is what this is. A single, coherent journey, woven together by a master craftsman.
The book’s underlying strength lies in the fact that Bryson knows what it’s like to find science dull or inscrutable. Unlike scientists who turn their hand to popular writing, he can claim to have spent the vast majority of his life to date knowing very little about how the universe works.
Tutored by many of the leading scientists in each of the dozens of fields he covers, he has brought to the book some of the latest insights together with an amusingly gossipy tone.
His technique was to keep going back to the experts until each, in effect, was happy enough to sign off the account of their work he has put together. In short, he’s done the hard work for us.
Bryson enlivens his accounts of difficult concepts with entertaining historical vignettes. We learn, for example, of the Victorian naturalist whose scientific endeavours included serving up mole and spider to his guests; and of the Norwegian palaeontologist who miscounted the number of fingers and toes on one of the most important fossil finds of recent history and wouldn’t let anyone else have a look at it for more than 48 years.
Bryson has called his book a history, and he has the modern historian’s taste for telling it how it was. Scientists, like all tribes, have a predilection for foundation myths. But Bryson isn’t afraid to let the cat out of the bag.
The nonsense of Darwin’s supposed ”Eureka!” moment in the Galapagos — when he spotted variations in the size of finch beaks on different islands — is swiftly dealt with. As is the fanciful notion of palaeontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott chancing on the fossil-rich Burgess Shales after his horse slipped on a wet track.
So much for clarity and local colour. What about romance? For Bryson this clearly lies in nature’s infinitudes. The sheer improbability of life, the incomprehensible vastness of the cosmos, the ineffable smallness of elementary particles, and the imponderable counter-intuitiveness of quantum mechanics.
He tells us, for example, that every living cell contains as many working parts as a Boeing 777, and that pre-historic dragonflies, as big as ravens, flew among giant trees whose roots and trunks were covered with mosses 40m in height.
It sounds very impressive. Not all readers will consider it sublime, but it’s hard to imagine a better rough guide to science. — Â