A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

(It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)

Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary drugstore—and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life.

Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.

In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced.

Most star systems in the cosmos are binary (double-starred), which makes our solitary sun a slight oddity.

On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway).

Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will ever visit the edge of our own solar system—ever. It is just too far.

The basic unit of measure in the solar system is the Astronomical Unit, or AU, representing the distance from the Sun to the Earth.

The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds.

Zwicky also was the first to recognize that there wasn’t nearly enough visible mass in the universe to hold galaxies together and that there must be some other gravitational influence—what we now call dark matter.

Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot. With binoculars the number of stars you can see from a single location rises to about 50,000, and with a small two-inch telescope it leaps to 300,000.

Halley was an exceptional figure. In the course of a long and productive career, he was a sea captain, a cartographer, a professor of geometry at the University of Oxford, deputy controller of the Royal Mint, astronomer royal, and inventor of the deep-sea diving bell. He wrote authoritatively on magnetism, tides, and the motions of the planets, and fondly on the effects of opium. He invented the weather map and actuarial table, proposed methods for working out the age of the Earth and its distance from the Sun, even devised a practical method for keeping fish fresh out of season. The one thing he didn’t do, interestingly enough, was discover the comet that bears his name. He merely recognized that the comet he saw in 1682 was the same one that had been seen by others in 1456, 1531, and 1607.

It was the first really universal law of nature ever propounded by a human mind, which is why Newton is regarded with such universal esteem.

The second half of the eighteenth century was a time when people of a scientific bent grew intensely interested in the physical properties of fundamental things—gases and electricity in particular—and began seeing what they could do with them, often with more enthusiasm than sense.

Hutton was born in 1726 into a prosperous Scottish family, and enjoyed the sort of material comfort that allowed him to pass much of his life in a genially expansive round of light work and intellectual betterment.

Hutton’s Theory of the Earth is a strong candidate for the least read important book in science (or at least would be if there weren’t so many others).

It is hard to imagine now, but geology excited the nineteenth century—positively gripped it—in a way that no science ever had before or would again.

The field attracted many extraordinary figures, not least the aforementioned Murchison, who spent the first thirty or so years of his life galloping after foxes, converting aeronautically challenged birds into puffs of drifting feathers with buckshot, and showing no mental agility whatever beyond that needed to read The Times or play a hand of cards. Then he discovered an interest in rocks and became with rather astounding swiftness a titan of geological thinking.

Although there was no reliable way of dating periods, there was no shortage of people willing to try. The most well known early attempt was in 1650 when Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on October 23, 4004 B.C., an assertion that has amused historians and textbook writers ever since.

“No geologist of any nationality whose work was taken seriously by other geologists advocated a timescale confined within the limits of a literalistic exegesis of Genesis.”

Even the Reverend Buckland, as pious a soul as the nineteenth century produced, noted that nowhere did the Bible suggest that God made Heaven and Earth on the first day, but merely “in the beginning.” That beginning, he reasoned, may have lasted “millions upon millions of years.” Everyone agreed that the Earth was ancient.

Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious élan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life. No one knew where this ethereal essence lay, but two things seemed probable: that you could enliven it with a jolt of electricity (a notion Mary Shelley exploited to full effect in her novel Frankenstein) and that it existed in some substances but not others, which is why we ended up with two branches of chemistry: organic (for those substances that were thought to have it) and inorganic (for those that did not).

It wasn’t until 1846 that anyone got around to finding a practical use for nitrous oxide, as an anesthetic. Goodness knows how many tens of thousands of people suffered unnecessary agonies under the surgeon’s knife because no one thought of the gas’s most obvious practical application.

“Without a doubt, the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements is the most elegant organizational chart ever devised,”

AS THE NINETEENTH century drew to a close, scientists could reflect with satisfaction that they had pinned down most of the mysteries of the physical world: electricity, magnetism, gases, optics, acoustics, kinetics, and statistical mechanics, to name just a few, all had fallen into order before them.

Einstein took a job with the Swiss patent office, where he stayed for the next seven years. He enjoyed the work: it was challenging enough to engage his mind, but not so challenging as to distract him from his physics. This was the background against which he produced the special theory of relativity in 1905.

Einstein’s papers attracted little notice. Having just solved several of the deepest mysteries of the universe, Einstein applied for a job as a university lecturer and was rejected, and then as a high school teacher and was rejected there as well. So he went back to his job as an examiner third class, but of course he kept thinking. He hadn’t even come close to finishing yet.

In essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute, but relative to both the observer and to the thing being observed, and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become. We can never accelerate ourselves to the speed of light, and the harder we try (and faster we go) the more distorted we will become, relative to an outside observer.

A static universe, as should have been obvious to Newton and every thinking astronomer since, would collapse in upon itself. There was also the problem that if stars had been burning indefinitely in a static universe they’d have made the whole intolerably hot—certainly much too hot for the likes of us. An expanding universe resolved much of this at a stroke.

Since Nobel Prizes are never awarded posthumously, longevity can be as important a factor as ingenuity for prizewinners.

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.

So we are all reincarnations—though short-lived ones. When we die our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere—as part of a leaf or other human being or drop of dew. Atoms, however, go on practically forever.

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting,”

In fact, as physicists were soon to realize, electrons are not like orbiting planets at all, but more like the blades of a spinning fan, managing to fill every bit of space in their orbits simultaneously (but with the crucial difference that the blades of a fan only seem to be everywhere at once; electrons are).

According to the new theory, an electron moving between orbits would disappear from one and reappear instantaneously in another without visiting the space between. This idea—the famous “quantum leap”—is of course utterly strange, but it was too good not to be true.

you can never predict where an electron will be at any given moment. You can only list its probability of being there. In a sense, as Dennis Overbye has put it, an electron doesn’t exist until it is observed. Or, put slightly differently, until it is observed an electron must be regarded as being “at once everywhere and nowhere.”

Einstein couldn’t bear the notion that God could create a universe in which some things were forever unknowable.

physics ended up with two bodies of laws—one for the world of the very small, one for the universe at large—leading

On the other hand, lead was easy to extract and work, and almost embarrassingly profitable to produce industrially—and tetraethyl lead did indubitably stop engines from knocking. So in 1923 three of America’s largest corporations, General Motors, Du Pont, and Standard Oil of New Jersey, formed a joint enterprise called the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation (later shortened to simply Ethyl Corporation) with a view to making as much tetraethyl lead as the world was willing to buy, and that proved to be a very great deal. They called their additive “ethyl” because it sounded friendlier and less toxic than “lead” and introduced it for public consumption (in more ways than most people realized) on February 1, 1923.

Beneficial ozone is not terribly abundant, however. If it were distributed evenly throughout the stratosphere, it would form a layer just one eighth of an inch or so thick. That is why it is so easily disturbed, and why such disturbances don’t take long to become critical.

After eight half-lives, only 1/256 of the original radioactive carbon remains, which is too little to make a reliable measurement, so radiocarbon dating works only for objects up to forty thousand or so years old.

What Patterson found was that before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere, and that since that time its level had climbed steadily and dangerously. He now made it his life’s quest to get lead taken out of gasoline. To that end, he became a constant and often vocal critic of the lead industry and its interests.

Eventually his efforts led to the introduction of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and finally to the removal from sale of all leaded gasoline in the United States in 1986. Almost immediately lead levels in the blood of Americans fell by 80 percent. But because lead is forever, those of us alive today have about 625 times more lead in our blood than people did a century ago. The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow, quite legally, by about a hundred thousand metric tons a year, mostly from mining, smelting, and industrial activities. The United States also banned lead in indoor paint, “forty-four years after most of Europe,” as McGrayne notes. Remarkably, considering its startling toxicity, lead solder was not removed from American food containers until 1993.

What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of facilities required to do the searching.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness—or as Lederman put it: “There is a deep feeling that the picture is not beautiful.”

In an attempt to draw everything together, physicists have come up with something called superstring theory. This postulates that all those little things like quarks and leptons that we had previously thought of as particles are actually “strings”—vibrating strands of energy that oscillate in eleven dimensions, consisting of the three we know already plus time and seven other dimensions that are, well, unknowable to us. The strings are very tiny—tiny enough to pass for point particles.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

Taylor came from a wealthy family and had both the means and freedom from academic constraints to pursue unconventional lines of inquiry.

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.