A walk through the universe

A Short History Of Nearly Everything
By Bill Bryson
Broadway Books, 544 pages
Available at Powerbooks

If you’re sitting down while reading this, consider the following: you’re not really sitting in that chair or lounging on that sofa. The trillions of atoms that compose your body are actually hovering an angstrom or two above the chair or sofa on which you "sit," your electrons constantly being repelled from closer contact by its electrons.

This is the kind of subatomic theory that interests physicists, and just one of the interesting notions raised by Bill Bryson in his science book, A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Bryson, an American, is known for his travel books. Here, he takes us on a walk through the universe. He embarked on this journey, he notes in the introduction, because he one day realized that he was completely ignorant of the natural world around him: "I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn’t know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on."

With this humble admission, Bryson went on to spend five years digesting science literature – and presents his findings to similarly perplexed citizens of Planet Earth.

Being Bryson, he makes it all interesting, and worth the journey. Covering chapters on geology, chemistry, physics, genetics and astronomy, you’ll encounter all kinds of interesting facts in A Short History of Nearly Everything. For instance, did you know:

• It would be virtually impossible for man to venture as far out in space as Pluto, the edge of our solar system. Humans just don’t live long enough to travel that far. In fact, "a manned mission to Mars, called for by the first President Bush in a moment of passing giddiness, was quietly dropped when someone worked out it would cost $450 billion and probably result in the deaths of all the crew, their DNA torn to shatters by high-energy solar particles from which we could not be shielded."

• The habitable part of our earth makes up a depth of only about a dozen miles, "from the bottom of the deepest ocean trench to the top of the highest mountain," while 99.5 percent of the world’s space by volume remains "fundamentally off-limits to us."

• The entire surface of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming is, in fact, an active volcano — tourists notwithstanding. Unlike the usual volcanic peaks, Yellowstone resulted from a "single mighty rupture" that left behind a huge, sprawling volcanic pit or caldera. It usually explodes every 600,000 years, and the last such blast was… 630,000 years ago.

• The chance of a meteor striking the Earth is much greater than most people think. Its impact would be so devastating that billions would be killed within a day from the release of noxious gases, tsunamis and earthquakes. But don’t worry: it’s unlikely we would know it was about to hit the planet until about a second after it entered our atmosphere. Then, of course, it would be too late.

One encounters much food for thought in Bryson’s book, but you come across such facts almost incidentally, while enjoying the learning adventure. Science, it turns out for those of us who were turned off in high school, makes for quite good reading.

It helps that Bryson uncovers some very interesting scientific personalities – people who made brilliant observations about the planet almost despite themselves. (Science, Bryson seems to suggest, is more like blind archery than laser surgery.)

Bryson points out that science has never been a harmonious world. Disciplines look upon one another with scorn and pity. Ever since the 19th century, for example, physicists have felt that they reign supreme; to this day, they lord it over geologists and paleontologists. Tales of backbiting, sabotage and credit-grabbing are not unusual in the lofty world of science.

Then there is the tale of Marie Curie, a geology graduate student who discovered radioactivity, among other things, after a Frenchman named Henri Becquerel gave her a packet of uranium salts to study. The salts, and other radioactive rocks she and husband Pierre Curie later discovered, poured out an amazing and constant amount of energy – an effect thought to be so miraculous that manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives quickly put radioactive thorium in their products. Unfortunately, both Curies were slowly being cooked by their experiments; they both died of radioactive poisoning and the Curies’ paperwork, experimental notes and even personal items are today still too radioactive to handle.

Then there is Thomas Midgley Jr., an Ohio inventor who came up with possibly the two worst inventions of the 20th century: leaded gasoline and chloroflurocarbons (CFCs), the nasty compounds that eat up acres and acres of irreplaceable ozone daily. The auto industry loved leaded gasoline because it stopped engine knocking, but it is also a neurotoxin that causes cancer, blindness, brain damage and coma in humans (Midgley himself died of lead poisoning). Its use wasn’t banned until 1970. CFCs, of course, are now banned in the US but won’t be outlawed in the Third World until 2010.

You come across familiar names in A Short History of Nearly Everything, and it’s interesting to learn, for instance, how the Dopplar Effect was discovered and the Richter Scale got its name, and who the Hubble was whose large telescope now drifts through space. And you read about Albert Einstein, whose "daydreaming" at his day job as a Swiss patent office clerk led in a single burst to theories on relativity (later summed up as E=mc2), the photoelectric effect (which posited that light may be both wave and particle) and Brownian motion (which offered scientific proof that atoms exist). Bryson’s book offers us a glimpse of the miracles of the planet that science may someday hope to explain, but will never be able to explain away.

One of the more curious facts Bryson mentions is that atoms are so durable – practically indestructible over eons of time – that they are constantly "recycled" and recombined in new batches of matter and living things. This means, theoretically, that about a billion of your own atoms probably once belonged to William Shakespeare, or Buddha, or Beethoven, or Jesus Christ.

Yes, it’s just possible. But, Bryson adds wryly, since it takes decades for atoms to become thoroughly redistributed, "however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley."

After reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, you may not be one with Elvis, but you’ll definitely feel smarter than Elvis.