A Short History of Nearly Everything

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If you are an average-sized adult, you contain within you enough potential energy to explode with the force of THIRTY very large hydrogen bombs. Assuming, that is, that you KNOW how to actually do this and REALLY want to make a point. Talk about a monstrous temper tantrum.

Also, not introducing and discussing, in a history of science book, the Mesopotamian, ancient Egyptians and Greeks, Mesoamerican civilization, the Islamic Golden Age period, and others, deprives the reader from seeing and grasping the whole picture of the chronological development of the study of the physical and natural world. was forty-three kilometers stouter when measured equatorially than when measured from top to bottom around the poles. Bouguer and La Condamine thus had spent nearly a decade working toward a result they didn’t wish to find only to learn now that they weren’t even the first to find it Listlessly/ they completed their survey/ which con­ firmed that the first French team was correct Then, still not speaking, they returned to the coast and took separate ships home. pen the most lucid and thrilling prose-Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey, and Tim Flannery are three that jump out from a single station o f the alphabet (and that’s not even to mention the late but godlike Richard Feynman)but sadly none o f them wrote any textbook I ever used. All mine were writ­ ten by men (it was always men) who held the interesting notion that everything became dear when expressed as a formula and the amusingly deluded belief that the children o f America would appredate having chap­ ters end with a section o f questions they could mull over in their own time. So I grew up convinced that science was supremely dull, but suspecting that it needn’t be, and not really thinking about it at all if I could help it This, too, became my position for a long time. Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; God said, Let Newton be! and all was light. —Alexander Pope

Okay, so the "approachable textbook"... does it live up to the hype? Every review I have seen is about how great this book is. Let's see. Also? It's heartening to read about the social ineptitude, blind spots, and how utterly incompetent many of these scientist were in other aspects of life. Makes me feel better about never finishing that PhD -- at least I have a life.) While he did not narrate his own book, the Richard Matthews does a great job of reading it. Though, this is one of those books that you cannot tune out on without missing something crucial.

This is a great big-picture book. For a fun microhistory, I'd recommend At Home: A Short History of Private Life also by Bill Bryson.

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Almost at once things began to go wrong, sometimes spectacularly so. In Quito, the visitors somehow provoked the locals and were chased out o f town by a mob armed with stones. Soon after, the expedition’s doctor was murdered in a misunderstanding over a woman. The botanist became deranged. Others died o f fevers and falls. The third most senior member o f the party, a man named Pierre Godin, ran off with a thirteen-year-old girl and could not be induced to return. At one point the group had to suspend work for eight months while La Condamine rode off to Lima to sort out a problem with their permits. Eventually he and Bouguer stopped speaking and refused to work to­ gether. Everywhere the dwindling party went it was met with the deepest suspicions from officials who found it difficult to believe that a group o f French scientists would travel halfway around the world to measure the world. That made no sense at all. Two and a half centuries later it still seems a reasonable question. Why didn’t the French make their measure­ ments in France and save themselves all the bother and discomfort o f their Andean adventure? The answer lies partly with the fact that eighteenth-century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demand­ ing alternative was available, and partly with a practical problem that had first arisen with the English astronomer Edmond Halley many years be­ ond-but it changed the universe from something you could hold in your hand to something at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times big­ ger. Inflation theory explains the ripples and eddies that make our universe possible. Without it, there would be no clumps o f matter and thus no stars, just drifting gas and everlasting darkness. According to Guth’s theory, at one ten-millionth o f a trillionth o f a trillionth o f a trillionth o f a second, gravity emerged. After another ludi­ crously brief interval it was joined by electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces-the stuff o f physics. These were joined an instant later by swarms o f elementary particles-the stuff o f stuff. From nothing at Uncover the mysteries of time, space and life on earth in this extraordinary book - a journey from the centre of the planet to the dawn of the dinosaurs, and everything in between.