A Short History of Nearly Everything

  

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Author: Bill Bryson 

 

Preview 

The answers to most of the whys, the hows, and the whens! This book is a condensation of the foundations of Science, presented in a narrative style, interspersed with humorous anecdotes and witty comments, covering the origins of the Universe to the birth of Earth and life itself. No other casual book on Science packs such a powerful punch! 

 

About the Author  

Bill Bryson is a best-selling Anglo-American author of books on travel, the English language, and science, among others. He received widespread recognition with the publication of A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003). He is also famous for the book: Notes from a small island. 

 

What to Expect? The greatest story ever told-Science 101 

 

Bill describes graphically and in layperson's terms, the size of the universe and that of atoms and subatomic particles. He explores the history of geology and biology, tracing life from its first appearance, to today's modern humans. He also discusses the possibility of the Earth being struck by a meteor and reflects on human capabilities of spotting a meteor before it impacts the Earth, the extensive damage that such an event would cause; and other scientific topics such as the Big bang and Quantum Mechanics. 

In this book, you will learn: 

• How the Universe began 

• Why the Yellowstone National Park is the most dangerous place on Earth 

• That Species last for an average of four million years 

• Why you should thank the microbes for letting you flourish 

 

 

One Bang to rule them all-The Origin of Origin 

 

No one knows exactly why or how it all began, but the consensus is that it began with a bang.  

In the beginning, there was a tiny point-like space called the Singularity, and for some reason, it expanded to unimaginable proportions within a fraction of a second-What is known as the Big Bang.  

 

The rapid expansion akin to an explosion (without the sound), generated extreme heat to the tune of billions of degrees centigrade and created the lighter elements-Hydrogen, helium, and Lithium.  

 

It sounds counterintuitive, but the universe did not expand into anything. The Universe creates space as it expands, and there is no space outside it by definition. Almost all the matter in the Universe and the forces which govern it, was formed in as a short a time as it would take you to make instant noodles. The Universe has been expanding ever since, and it estimated that the visible universe is more than 90 billion light-years across. 

 

 

There are several propositions as to why the Big Bang happened in the first place. Some say that it was one of many bangs and that our universe is one amongst many. Some say that it is a result of a collapse of a previous universe. Nonetheless, no one knows why it all started. 

 

Due to the violent expansion and severe heat, the remnants of the explosion are still detectable. In fact, they are so abundant, that you are likely to have seen them whenever your television picked up static. The Cosmic background microwave radiation is a window to the ancient bang. The radiation was picked up first in 1965 by two unwitting astronomers who received a Nobel prize in Physics thirteen years later. 

 

If there is at least one life bearing planet in our solar system, there must be millions of planets which may possibly bear life, since the Universe is unimaginably large. 

 

The solar system has been said to have nine planets, with Jupiter being the largest and Pluto the smallest. However, the system itself is massively larger than the planets that inhabit it. The diagrams of the system which are abundant in school text books are not even close to being on scale. In fact, it is so big that if you scale the Earth down to the size of a pea, Jupiter would still be more than 300 metres away! 

 

It was believed that the Universe consisted of just the Milkyway Galaxy. Edwin Hubble changed that in the 1920's when he discovered other galaxies which were earlier thought of as gas clouds in our own galaxy. Along with the discovery of galaxies other than the milky way, he also observed that the Universe itself was expanding, with its farthest corners receding the fastest. 

 

The enormity of the Universe and the existence of billions of galaxies which have billions of stars each, means that there is an unimaginable number of locations in the Universe which can support life. In fact, Physicist Frank Drake formulated an equation to give an indication of the possible number of intelligent civilizations in the Universe. Even with the most conservative estimates, the formula gives an answer to the number of possible intelligent civilizations, in the millions! 

 

Not just Gravity, Newton's principles helped us in measuring the shape and size of our planet. 

 

Isaac Newton was one of those brilliant minds which came along once in a while and changed the world. His discovery of various scientific ideas, especially the one on Gravity, mathematically explained in the Principia Mathematica, changed our understanding of the way the world works (or moves!).  

 

Newton explained that the pull of any two objects (even on Earth) is “proportional to the product of the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them.” Therefore, if you double the distance between two objects, the attraction between them becomes four times weaker, represented mathematically as F = Gm1m2/R2.  Where F is the force of gravity, G is the gravitational constant, m1 and m2 are the masses of the two objects, and R is the distance between the objects. 

 

 

 

With the laws of motion and that of gravity in place, the world understood the roll of the tides, planetary motions, curved path of a projectile, etc. Newton's equations and theory also predicted that the Earth was not a perfect sphere but was flat at the poles and bulged a bit in the middle.  

 

In 1797, Henry Cavendish measured the Gravitational Constant G through an innovative experiment which involved measuring the gravitational deflection of two different spheres. He subsequently calculated the weight of the Earth by using Newton's formula and arrived at a number of six billion trillion metric tonnes. A number which is just 3% more than what recent calculations suggest! 

 

How old is too old? Down to Earth, and within it! 

 

James Hutton, the father of Geology, was the first one to realise that there must be something deep inside the Earth which results in the formation of Geographical features like mountains. After all, why would fossils of marine life be found high up in the mountains?  

 

For centuries, scientists and philosophers had been speculating as to how old the Earth was. Lord Kelvin calculated it as about a hundred million years, Charles Darwin calculated it to be around 300 million years. However, it was not till 1956, that the first accurate estimate of the age was calculated. 

 

Palaeontologists and other scientists had been finding fossil records for a period of time and even segmented the strata of the earth according to their vintage. However, they had no way of dating these strata, they only knew the order.  

 

With the discovery of radioactivity by the Curies and the subsequent work on its applications by Ernest Rutherford, Radiometric dating emerged as a possible method of determining how old the Earth was.  If one knew the rate of decay (half-life) of radioactive material, and the concentration of the resultant stable element (lead), one could estimate the age of the material.  

 

Clair Patterson calculated the age of the earth as nearly 4.55 billion years based on radiometric dating of meteorites. He correctly assumed that the meteorites and Earth must have originated around the same time as early formations in the Solar System. 

 

The fundamental constituents of matter are fermions and bosons 

For quite some time, atoms were considered to be the building blocks of matter. Atoms are durable to the extent of being immortal. They can take the form of different things-a leaf, a human, a plant, air, anything. As such, all the atoms in your body will survive after your death and take on different forms, and some of them will even reassemble in a new body!  

 

It was discovered that atoms had a dense mass around which negatively charged particles called electrons revolved. The dense mass is the nucleus, and it has positively charged particles called protons, and neutral particles called neutrons. Most of the atom is just like the Solar System, empty space. If you blew up a chair to a billion times its size, the atoms constituting it would be the size of melons, and the nucleus would still be invisible to the naked eye! 

 

 

 

School text books told us that electrons revolved around the nucleus in a circular fashion, much like planets revolve around the sun. This, however, is false. Rather than have a circular path, electrons behave like swarms around the nucleus and as was later found out, had a probabilistic movement pattern!  

 

We know now that atoms, or even the protons, neutrons, or electrons for that matter, are not fundamental constituents of matter. Fermions and Bosons, which are particles even more fundamental, have been discovered. Currently the sub structure of these fundamental particles in unknown. 

 

 

The 20th Century saw a split in Physics 

 

Albert Einstein was a patent clerk in 1905 when he wrote a series of papers which blew away the world. More importantly, his work on the photoelectric effect won him the Nobel Prize some sixteen years later. However, it was his paper on the special theory of relativity, which became the first step in transforming our perception of the world and the Universe. 

 

Einstein postulated that while the speed of Light was constant, Time was relative, and depended upon the relative velocities of the observers or frame of reference. Later with his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein changed the way we understand the world.  

 

He theorised that space and time were a continuum, and that massive objects produced a warp in spacetime due to their masses, and gravity emerged due to the warping of spacetime. Imagine a two-dimensional trampoline with a heavy bowling ball in the centre. Now, if a small ball bearing is rolled towards the bowling ball, as the distance between the two reduces, the slope due to the mass of the bowling ball will cause the smaller ball bearing to fall into it circularly. This, is Gravity! 

 

Max Planck had shown that energy existed in packets called quanta, and Einstein's work on the photo-electric effect had supported this. A new era in Physics dawned with the realisation that many of the features of an atom were not explainable by conventional physics. Particles at the atomic and subatomic scale behaved as waves as well as particles! Later with his uncertainty principle, Werner Heisenberg in 1926, led the emergence of Quantum Mechanics which was ably served by Stalwarts like Bohr, Schrodinger and others. 

 

Quantum Mechanics was simply a way of making sense of what went on in the sub atomic world where the laws of relativity or classical mechanics ceased to apply. This world was defined by probabilities. 

 

Thus, Physics was split into two sets of laws, one which governs the massive, and the other which governs the subatomic. 

 

All life on Earth evolved from a single cell. We live on a planet ruled by Bacteria! 

 

Despite harsh conditions, Earth has tremendous diversity in life. How it all began no one knows, but it is hypothesised that the organic ingredients in the primordial soup came together in some fashion and proportion and led to the creation of proteins.  

 

 

Eventually with the chance formation of a protein which could self-replicate, life as we know it began. From such humble beginnings, life has survived the harshest and changing conditions on the planet and evolved to complex forms like us. However, despite the abundance of organisms, the essence of life remains the self-replicating molecules. Hence, all life can be considered to be as one. 

 

The most abundant life form on Earth is Bacteria. No matter what you do, you will never be able to hide yourself from Bacteria. They live all around us, on us, and even inside us. In fact, most of the cells in our body are that of Bacteria! Without them, digestion would be impossible. With such abundance, one would expect that the Earth is, in fact, their planet, and we have evolved to fit their presence! 

 

Bacteria can survive over almost anything, and despite the bad reputation they have, most of them are beneficial or at least neutral to humans. Only about one in a thousand is a pathogen! 

 

There are dangers lurking within and beyond. 

 

The Earth gets hotter as one goes deeper. It is estimated that the core of the Earth is molten and is as hot as the Sun itself. Due to the extreme heat, and build-up of gaseous pressure, weak points in the Earth's crust are prone to eruptions. These weak-points are volcanoes, and their eruptions can be thousands of times stronger than the Atomic Bombs dropped on Japan. 

 

One such Super volcano is located below the Yellow Stone National Park in the western United States. Violent Volcanic eruptions can kill species and change the climate of the planet resulting in a volcanic winter. Volcanic eruptions are unpredictable, and signs and symptoms are not good enough to predict with a degree of reasonable certainty whether an eruption is imminent, and if so, how violent. 

 

Due to the movement of tectonic plates, mountains can emerge, and devastating earthquakes which cannot be predicted can manifest. The tectonic movement is a constant feature of the planet, and though small and moderate earthquakes occur every day, a strong earthquake has the potential to destroy life and property with unimaginable force.  

 

Catastrophe can strike us even from space. Millions of years ago the Dinosaurs were wiped out by directly by and due to the result of a catastrophic collision of an asteroid with Earth. 

Millions of asteroids and other objects like comets are lurking around in the Solar System, and many of them have the potential to spell doom for us and shake up the planet for good. 

 

Final Summary 

 

Science has played a huge role in discovering the how, the why, and the what questions regarding the existence of the universe, and all that exists in it. We still have a long way to go in discovering most secrets.  

 

As it stands, we do not even know much about the depths of our oceans! There is however, hope, because according to Bryson, "Once in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected, that people cannot quite decide which is the more amazing, the fact, or the thinking of it."  

 

A Short History of Nearly Everything is an incredible work of literature, providing a tremendous introduction to incredible revelations in chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, and geology, and shows us how they all work together, to explain the universe, and life itself.