Summary
Bill Bryson was flying over an ocean one day when he realized just how little he knew about how everything worked. This propelled him into over three years of research, talking to experts in various fields, visiting important museums and visiting some of the most important places on Earth, including Ohio. Bryson was unimpressed with the science books of his youth, feeling that they hinted at the wonders of the world before drowning them in abstruse terms and he set out to change that. Covering everything from Biology to Astrophysics, Bryson flies through the various disciplines giving the reader a brief and exciting overview of how they started as well as where they are currently.
Thoughts
This book is a work of art, an object lesson on science education for the unwashed masses. Bryson manages to make the lives of British paleontologists as salacious as a mid-day soap opera. There are three major things I took away from this book:
Practically All Knowledge is Recent Knowledge
We tend to learn the little we do as kids in school. These “facts” are handed down to us on high from our teachers. What this process doesn’t reveal is the tumultuous history of how those facts came to be, not to mention the tenuous future they may have. For example, it is commonly taught that around 66 million years ago (a number that defies imagination) an asteroid hit near the gulf of Mexico and purportedly caused the extinction of all the dinosaurs. What is less commonly known is that this discovery was made as recently as 1970. In the grand scheme of things that is practically yesterday. Often before the key discovery, like the impact crater in this case, scientist often have these data points like the fossil record that they try to connect with a narrative. Without the right information these theories are often laughable in hindsight. What is obvious to the current generation was not so to previous ones, regardless of their intelligence. For example Einstein famously rejected the possibility of plate tectonics near the end of his life.
Much of What We Do Know is Based on Very Little
This fact was most clearly made to me when talking about the core of the earth. When I say “core of the earth”, I imagine that you get the same image of a globe with a quarter missing that I do. You have a sort of crust, a lot of orange and at the perfectly spherical dark gray rock at the center. So how do we know for sure this image is accurate? Well we don’t really, the deepest hole ever dug was completed only in 1992 and they didn’t make it even halfway through the crust. Even so, the depth that they managed to reach (12km) revealed really surprising results. Not only were the temperatures much higher than the current geological models suggested, they also found water much deeper than it was “supposed” to be. All this from a single deep hole, and when you come to the fossil record things get even more scarce. It was said that all pre-Homo-Sapien (i.e. Neandethals, Cro Magnum, etc.) bones could fit in the back of a pick up truck. That isn’t very many bones, I speak from experience. Needless to say, each new find sheds a bit more light on our past while often managing to cause issues with a lot of previous theories.
There is Much More to Learn Than I Would Have Guessed
Living in the age of the ten day weather forecast, it often feels like we have nature figured out. While it is true that we have figured out a great deal there is still plenty to learn. Take intraplate earthquakes for instance, these are earthquakes that strike in the middle of tectonic plates instead of at their borders. The mechanisms behind these types of quakes remain largely unknown.. Every new breakthrough in science tends to disprove more theories than it confirms. They bring new insights into the mechanism of things while also bringing new questions. This book was highly entertaining, if I was to level one critique, it would be that it marches the reader to the peak of the Dunning-Kruger graph of confidence and moves onto the next topic. I often felt that I had finally grasped a concept, only to realize, upon attempting to explain it to someone, just how little I actually comprehended. This is hardly a critique, but more a testament to how clear of a communicator Bryson is. I think this is one of those books that everyone should read to get a clearer understanding of the world they live in and how we came to know what we know about it.