A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

“Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts.”

This states that every object in the universe exerts a tug on every other. It may not seem like it, but as you sit here now you are pulling everything around you—walls, ceiling, lamp, pet cat—toward you with your own little (indeed, very little) gravitational field. And these things are also pulling on you.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare.

It is as if, in the words of the science writer Lawrence Joseph, you had two identical pool balls, one in Ohio and the other in Fiji, and the instant you sent one spinning the other would immediately spin in a contrary direction at precisely the same speed. Remarkably, the phenomenon was proved in 1997 when physicists at the University of Geneva sent photons seven miles in opposite directions and demonstrated that interfering with one provoked an instantaneous response in the other.

His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons, as in Dolly, but was overruled. Instead they became known as quarks.

Interestingly, oil company geologists had known for years that if you wanted to find oil you had to allow for precisely the sort of surface movements that were implied by plate tectonics. But oil geologists didn’t write academic papers; they just found oil.

The rocks are viscous, but only in the same way that glass is. It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downward under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top. That is the sort of “flow” we are talking about.

A tropical hurricane can release in twenty-four hours as much energy as a rich, medium-sized nation like Britain or France uses in a year.

Almost 80 percent of American casualties in the First World War came not from enemy fire, but from flu. In some units the mortality rate was as high as 80 percent.

Fossils are in every sense vanishingly rare. Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all. It has been estimated that less than one species in ten thousand has made it into the fossil record.

There was so much unrecognized novelty in the collection that at one point upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, “Oh fuck, not another phylum.”

At least 99 percent of flowering plants have never been tested for their medicinal properties.

Saltationists (the word comes from the Latin for “leap”) couldn’t accept that complicated organs could ever emerge in slow stages. What good, after all, is one-tenth of a wing or half an eye? Such organs, they thought, only made sense if they appeared in a finished state.

Then, beginning about five million years ago, Panama rose from the sea, closing the gap between North and South America, disrupting the flows of warming currents between the Pacific and Atlantic, and changing patterns of precipitation across at least half the world. One consequence was a drying out of Africa, which caused apes to climb down out of trees and go looking for a new way of living on the emerging savannas.

As Alan Walker and Pat Shipman have drily observed, if you correlate tool discovery with the species of creature most often found nearby, you would have to conclude that early hand tools were mostly made by antelopes.

At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn’t even actually known that she was a female. Her sex is merely presumed from her diminutive size.

As we have noted elsewhere in the book, modern human beings show remarkably little genetic variability—“there’s more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps than in the entire human population,” as one authority has put it—and this would explain why. Because we are recently descended from a small founding population, there hasn’t been time enough or people enough to provide a source of great variability.

It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people who were most intensely interested in the world’s living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.

It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.