A Short History of Nearly Everything - SuperSummary Study Guide

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A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING 1
Reader's Club Masood Ali
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PLOT OVERVIEW 2
CHAPTER SUMMARIES AND ANALYSES 4
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Introduction 4
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Chapters 1-3 5
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Chapters 4-7 9
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Chapters 8-12 15
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Chapters 13-15 23
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Chapters 16-26 27
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Chapters 27-30 39
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MAJOR CHARACTER ANALYSIS 44
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Edmond Halley 44
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Isaac Newton 44
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Henry Cavendish 44
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James Hutton 45
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Charles Lyell 45
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Gideon Algernon Mantell 45

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Richard Owen 45
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Albert Einstein 46
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Charles Darwin 46
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THEMES 47
IMPORTANT QUOTES 49
ESSAY TOPICS 56
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A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING Reader's Club Masood 2
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PLOT OVERVIEW
Bill Bryson (b. December 8, 1951) is a nonfiction author whose writing is especially
concerned with travel, the English language, and science. In A Short History of
Nearly Everything, Bryson attempts to succinctly summarize the Earth’s history. By
looking at the most important players in the various scientific disciplines throughout
the ages, he chronicles the most vital discoveries and theories in human history.
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Throughout the course of an introduction, thirty chapters, and nearly five-hundred
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pages, Bryson highlights the creation of the Earth, where we are now as a species,
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and a lot of what has happened in between. Part One, consisting of Chapters 1-3, is
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about the cosmos. Here, Bryson starts by talking about the origins, theories, and
qualities of the atom. He also introduces the theory of the Big Bang, and describes
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the complexities and disputes that inherently go along with it. Finally, he explores
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how the planets were discovered and how the universe was measured,
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supernovae, and how these things all relate back to theory of the Big Bang.
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Part Two, Chapters 4-7, is about the size of the Earth and the painstaking lengths
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scientists have gone to in order to figure out the age and weight of our planet.
Bryson introduces a wide array of scientists who had a hand in determining these
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measurements, and gives helpful and often eccentric background information

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about each individual. Along the way, he explains how geology and chemistry
became branches of science, the idea of plate tectonics, the discovery of dinosaur
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fossils and chemical elements, and a bit about thermodynamics. Yet by the end of
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these chapters, each of these ideas is related back to how the Earth was ultimately
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measured.
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Part Three, Chapters 8-12, visits Einstein’s theories of relativity and gravity,
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quantum theory, and how physics became a scientific discipline. Bryson relates
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these ideas to astronomy and the idea that the universe is constantly expanding.
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He also explains how our understanding of the atom has evolved, and the
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scientists responsible for our current knowledge. Finally, he explores lead in the
atmosphere, electrons, and earthquakes.
Part Four, Chapters 13-15, explores the natural dangers inherent to Earth. Bryson
starts by talking about meteors and their link to life on Earth. He then moves on to
volcanoes and how they relate to the Earth’s molten core. Finally, he describes
Yellowstone National Park as one of the most dangerous places on Earth since it is
essentially a vast volcano just waiting to erupt.
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Part Five, the longest of the sections and comprised of Chapters 16-26, is about a
variety of topics, all relating to life on Earth. The topics include the perseverance of
life even amidst the most desolate and dangerous places (such as gas vents on the
seafloor), the various layers of our atmosphere, the prolific and strange nature of
water, the rise of life on Earth, the resilient quality of bacteria, life’s ability to
ultimately persevere, and how amazing cells are.
Part Six, Chapters 27-30, discusses the various ice ages that have frequented Earth
since the beginning of time. Bryson mentions that we are currently still in an ice
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age, albeit a mild one. He also digs deeply into the theory that humans evolved
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from apes, and he explores the findings and implications of various Homo erectus
and Homo sapiens artifacts. He concludes by stating that a definitive fossil link
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between ape and human has never been discovered.
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CHAPTER SUMMARIES AND ANALYSES

Introduction
Introduction Summary
Here, Bill Bryson reflects on the miracle of life, the fact that “trillions of drifting
atoms had to somehow assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to
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create you” (1). He explains how atoms are mindless particles, and yet they work
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together to comprise each person on the planet. This is an incredibly unique
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phenomenon because, so far as we know, the atoms that “so liberally and
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congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are the same atoms that
decline to do it elsewhere” (2).
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He describes life as mysteriously mundane because the basic building blocks of
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life such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and sulfur, are very
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elementary elements that can be found at a drugstore. And yet, somehow, they
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work together to make complex human beings. In fact, atoms comprise everything
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in the known universe. Before atoms, there was a vast nothingness.

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He explains that life on Earth is “a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and
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billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—
99.9 percent—are no longer around” (3). And yet, here we are, able to think and
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reason and contemplate our existence. He briefly chronicles evolution, our journey
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from a “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” to a sentient human being (3).

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Basically, we are incredibly lucky to be here; since the beginning of time,

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everything had to align perfectly for us to be here today.

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Bryson states that the book is “about how it happened—in particular, how we went
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from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of
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that something turned into us, and also some of what happened in between and
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since” (4). Bryson was inspired to write the book for two reasons. One, he realized
just how little he knew about the world around him, and writing the book would
enable him to dedicate three years to researching. Two, he remembers being
fascinated by science as a child, but completely bored by every science book. A
Brief History of Nearly Everything is an attempt to provide a comprehensive yet
exciting and fun view of the science behind our world.
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Introduction Analysis
The introduction is intended to explain the reasons why Bryson wrote this book.
Since he isn’t a scientist by trade, the introduction gives Bryson a space to state his
personal interest in the subject matter. Rather than being an expert himself, he
recognizes that throughout his life he has severely lacked understanding regarding
our universe and planet Earth. In particular, he realized he had no idea how there
“went from being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of
that something turned into us” (4). He furthers this idea by stating that science has
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always been inaccessible to the common person because the text books always
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convey science in a dry, difficult to understand way. He says that his desire is to
change that through this book. In this sense, through the introduction Bryson is
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admitting that although he is not an expert, his curiosity has driven him to find the
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answers not just for himself, but for the common good.
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On a stylistic level, he uses a plethora of religious language, such as “miracle of
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life” (2), “blessed” (3), and “miracle” (5), to emphasize just how amazing it is that life
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on this planet exists. While Bryson doesn’t state a belief in a higher power, this
language demonstrates a recognition that we humans are here on this Earth
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against all odds, a notion that is thoroughly explored in later chapters.

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Chapters 1-3
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Chapter 1 Summary: “How to Build a Universe”

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Bryson opens the chapter by talking about protons, “the infinitesimal part of an
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atom.” Protons are the basic building blocks of life, yet they’re so small that “a little
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dib of ink like the dot on this ican hold something in the region of
500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in
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half a million years” (9). Despite their miniscule size, protons were fundamental to
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the creation of the universe. In a theory known as singularity, the creation of the
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universe occurred when every single particle of existence, every single atom, was
squeezed into a space so small that it had no dimensions at all.It is hypothesized,
although no one knows for certain, that this moment of singularity combined with a
big bang created the universe. Yet, the mystery remains how, from nothing, the
universe was birthed.
There is controversy in the scientific community regarding when the moment of

creation occurred—some argue that it was 10 billion years ago, while others
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hypothesize twice that number. While the exact date of creation can never be
known, The Big Bang is the most widely accepted theory for how creation came
about. The theory was first made in the 1960s, when Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson, two radio astronomers, discovered a persistent background noise coming
from a large communications antenna. After relentless searching, the astronomers
couldn’t find the source of the noise. They came to find outthe noise was the
realization of what astrophysicist George Gamow had hypothesized in the 1940s as
“cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang” (11).
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There are many theories regarding what caused the Big Bang. However, Bryson
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stresses that the theory “isn’t about the bang itself but about what happened after
the bang” (13). To understand what happened in the early moments of the universe
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comes inflation theory. First discovered by a junior particle physicist, Alan Guth,
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inflation theory postulates that “a fraction of a moment after the dawn of creation,
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the universe underwent a sudden dramatic expansion. It inflated—in effect ran
away with itself, doubling in size every 10^34 seconds” (14). While the episode of
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expansion lasted a fraction of a second, it changed the universe from something
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palm-sized to something at least a trillion times bigger. Inflation theory helps to
explain “the ripples and eddies that make our universe possible” (14).
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Bryson ends the chapter by posing the question, “what would happen if you
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traveled out to the edge of the universe and, as it were, put your head through the
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curtains?” (16). It’s impossible, not because it’s too far away (although it
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hypothetically would be), but rather because after traveling in a straight line, you
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would end up where you started. This is because the universe bends. Similar to
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how our Earth is a sphere, there is no edge to the universe.

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Chapter 2 Summary: “Welcome to the Solar System”

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There have been such monumental advances in astronomy that “If someone struck
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a match on the moon, they [astronomers] could spot the flare” (19). Yet, despite
these advances, astronomers hadn’t noticed that Pluto has a moon until 1978. But
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it’s not just any moon—it’s the biggest moon in the solar system. The size of Pluto’s
moon means that Pluto is much smaller than originally thought, which made many
scientists question the legitimacy of Pluto’s label as a planet. Despite these
controversies, the real question is why did it take so long for astronomers to
discover such a vast moon in our own solar system? According to astronomer Clark
Chapman:
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Most people think that astronomers get out at night in observatories and
scan the skies. That’s not true. Almost all the telescopes we have in the world
are designed to peer at very tiny little pieces of the sky way off in the
distance to see a quasar or hunt for black holes or look for distant
galaxies(20).
Nobody knows how big Pluto is, or what it’s made of, or much of anything about it.
Some hypothesize that Pluto isn’t a planet but rather the largest known object in
Kuiper Belt, a zone of galactic debris famous for Halley’s Comet. Pluto also doesn’t
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act like any other planet. While other planets follow a routine orbit, Pluto’s orbital
path is slanted and unpredictable.
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Many people imagine Pluto as the end of space, but in reality, space is so
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enormous that the size is beyond imagining—so much so that even our best efforts
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to draw our solar system to scale will always fail. This is because “On a diagram of
the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to the about the diameter of a pea,
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Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half
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distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it
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anyway)” (24). If Pluto could ever be reached, the sun would be the size of a pin-
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head. Given the vast distance and emptiness of space, it’s no wonder that Pluto’s
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huge moon had gone unnoticed for so long.

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Bryson makes the point that “when considering the universe at large we don’t
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actually know what is in our solar system” (25). According to Drake’s equation, a
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theory coined by Cornell professor Frank Drake in the 1960s, the probability that
there is intelligent life somewhere out there is good.
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Chapter 3 Summary: “The Reverend Evan’s Universe”

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The Reverend Robert Evans, a semiretired minister living in the Blue Mountains of
Australia, hunts supernovae with his home telescope. Bryson explains that
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“Supernovae occur when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun,
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collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a

hundred billion suns, burning for a time brighter than all the stars in the galaxy”
(30). If a supernova were to go off near Earth, everyone would die. However, the
chances of that happening are slim because Supernovae are rare. Yet, despite
being rare, Reverend Evans can spot them with his telescope. To understand just
how amazing a feat this really is, Bryson tells readers to imagine fifteen hundred
tables with black tablecloths covering them. Then throw salt across the tables. The
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salt grains are the stars in the galaxy. Now add a grain here and there, and
Reverend Evans can spot that change.
The term supernova was first coined in the 1930s, by Fritz Zwicky, an astrophysicist
working at the California Institute of Technology. While astronomers had long been
puzzled by the appearance of rare and unexplained points of light in the night sky,
Zwicky hypothesized that if a star collapsed, it would result in an “unimaginably
compact core. Atoms would literally be crushed together, their electrons forced
into the nucleus, forming neutrons” (32). This would basically result in the biggest
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bang in the universe.
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Bryson gives the interesting fact that “Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the
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naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot” (33).
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However, when Reverend Evans looks at the night sky with his sixteen-inch
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telescope, he is able to see tens of billions of stars in nearly 10,000 galaxies.
Bryson says that the odds of Reverend Evans finding a supernova is like “standing
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on the observatory platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and
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searching windows in Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone
lighting a twenty-first-birthday cake” (33). And yet, Reverend Evans has found thirty-
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six supernovae to date.

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Bryson concludes that supernovae are critical to the foundation of creation

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because they provided the necessary heat to produce the new elements needed
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for life to begin.

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Chapters 1-3 Analysis

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Bryson uses these first three chapters to explain what scientists know about the
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origins of life on Earth. Each chapter follows a similar pattern, in that Bryson starts
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with an anecdote, introduces the various scientists associated with each topic, and
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then uses analogies to explain each scientist’s findings and theories. Each chapter
within this section systematically seeks to understand the origins of planet Earth
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and life itself. The first chapter focuses heavily on the theory of the Big Bang and
what happened after the explosion, while the second and third chapters focus
more on astronomy and supernova. However, by linking these ideas together,
Bryson illustrates that the key to understanding anything about Earth’s origins is
found in space.
Although Bryson isn’t a scientist himself, he frequently interjects his voice into the
narrative and addresses the audience directly, which often makes him feel like an
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authority on the subject. For example, he says, “Now imagine if you can (and of
course you can’t) shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal
size into a space so small that it would make a proton look enormous” (9). Here, as
is often found throughout the text, Bryson is urging the reader to imagine a
scenario that he has conjured, in the hopes of helping the reader to better
understand the larger idea. This simultaneously implicates the reader, while also
demonstrating Bryson’s understanding of the topic, lending to his overall ethos.
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Chapter 4 Summary: “The Measure of Things”
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This chapter deals with measuring the Earth, and Bryson begins by introducing the
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French Royal Academy of Sciences’ Peruvian Expedition of 1735, led by Pierre
Bouguer, a hydrologist, and Charles Marie de La Condamine, a mathematician. The
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purpose of the journey was to triangulate distances through the Andes, which
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would ultimately allow the French scientists to measure the circumference of the
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planet.
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Part of what led the French scientists to the Andes instead of simply measuring
France was a problem that had first come about with the English astronomer
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Edmond Halley. Halley, a well-respected scientist and inventor, was driven by a

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wager he made with fellow scientist Sir Christopher Wren. Wren offered a prize of
forty shillings (worth a couple of weeks’ pay), to whoever could figure out why
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planets orbited in an elliptical pattern. Halley became obsessed with knowing the
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answer and went to Cambridge to ask Isaac Newton for the answer.
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Newton, Cambridge’s Professor of Mathematics, was a genius, and equally strange

as he was intelligent. Although he is known for inventing calculus, he also spent
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much of his secret life studying alchemy and the floor plans of the lost Temple of
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King Solomon in Jerusalem, in the hopes of predicting Christ’s second coming and
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the subsequent apocalypse. Despite these eccentric tendencies, Newton

produced some of the most influential findings in our world. Two years after
meeting with Halley, Newton produced Principia, which Bryson says “not only
explained mathematically the orbits of heavenly bodies, but also identified the
attractive force that got them moving in the first place—gravity. Suddenly
everything in the universe made sense” (48).
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Principia made Newton immediately famous because it proposed the first universal
laws of nature. However, one controversy that arose from the book was the idea
that the Earth, contrary to popular opinion,wasn’t exactly round. Instead, Bryson
says, according to Newton’s theory, “the centrifugal force of the Earth’s spin should
result in a slight flattening at the poles and a bulging at the equator, which would
make the planet slightly oblate” (50). Before this theory, people had been trying to
calculate the size of Earth. However, this new theory made any previous attempts
at calculation obsolete. If the Earth wasn’t a perfect sphere, then previous
measurements would be inherently wrong.
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This is why Bouguer and La Condamine, the two scientists introduced in the
beginning of the chapter, needed to take measurements in South America—they
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needed to be near the equator, to determine if there really was a difference in the
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size of the sphere there. It turned outNewton was correct: the Earth was forty-three
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kilometers fatter when measured equatorially than when measured from top to
bottom near the poles.
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Bryson mentions other scientists who had a hand in bringing about the eventual
measurement of the Earth. NevilMaskeylene, an astronomer, invented contour
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lines. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixonfounded the famous Mason and Dixon
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line, which separates Pennsylvania and Maryland, and the due were also
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responsible forone of the most accurate measurements of a degree of meridian.

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John Michell invented a machine built for measuring the mass of the Earth, but he
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died before he could use it. However, the machine was sent to a London scientist
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named Henry Cavendish, a shy man more eccentric than even Newton. Cavendish
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used Michell’s machine to announce that the Earth weighed six billion trillion tons.
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Surprisingly, this is an accurate number. Even despite today’s advances in

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technology, the “current best estimate for Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion
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metric tons, a difference of only about 1 percent from Cavendish’s findings” (62).
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Chapter 5 Summary: “The Stone Breakers”

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This chapter focuses on the origins and advances of geology. Bryson introduces a
genius scientist by the name of James Hutton, who “almost singlehandedly, and
quite brilliantly…created the science of geology and transformed our
understanding of the Earth” (64).
A predominant question of the late 1700s was wondering how ancient clamshells
and other marine fossils could be found on mountaintops. A group known as the
Neptunists thought that every natural phenomenon could be explained by rising
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and falling sea levels. They believed “that mountains, hills, and other features were
as old as the Earth itself, and were changed only when water sloshed over them
during periods of global flooding” (65). On the other hand, the Plutonists believed
that volcanoes were responsible for changing the face of the planet. While neither
group could definitively account for seashells on mountaintops, Hutton deduced
that the seashells on mountaintops had risen along with the mountains themselves.
He gathered this insight while observing the gradual geological changes of his
farmland, but it was a theory that suggested, for the first time, that Earth processes
require vast amounts of time.
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Despite Hutton’s genius, he was a terribly dull and unskilled writer. After writing his
theories into a paper, and then eventually a two-volume book, they received
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virtually no attention. It wasn’t until five years after his death, in 1802, that Hutton’s
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close friend, John Playfair, wrote a simplified and elegant version of Hutton’s work
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entitled Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth. Finally, Hutton’s work was
well received by the small group of scholars who took an active interest in geology.
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In 1807, a group of thirteen men met at a Freemasons Tavern and started a dining
club called the Geological Society. The men weren’t academics, but they were
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exceedingly wealthy and had the time and money to spend their summers doing
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fieldwork, or “stone breaking,” as they called it. The club was a space to share their
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findings. Barely a decade later, membership had grown to four hundred, and
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geology had become the hot topic of the nineteenth century.

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Bryson mentions many notable men who were at the forefront of geology. Dr.
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James Parkinson, best known for studying Parkinson’s disease,was one of the
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founding members of the Geological Society and the author of Organic Remains of
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a Former World, a vital geological text. Then there is Charles Lyell, a wealthy young
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man who became devoted to geology after studying under Reverend William
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Buckley at Oxford. Buckley was a leading authority on coprolites, or fossilized

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Bryson also explains how rocks used to be categorized by the timeperiod in which
they came from (Devonian, Jurassic, etc.) by spans of time (primary, secondary,
tertiary, etc.), or even by epochs (Pleistocene, Pliocene, etc.). However, as Bryson
states, “For most of the nineteenth century geologists could draw on nothing more
than the most hopeful guesswork” (74). Scientists including Edmond Halley,
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Charles Darwin, and Lord Kelvin all attempted to
hypothesize the age of the Earth, and all failed miserably.
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Chapter 6 Summary: “Science Red in Tooth and Claw”
This chapter is all about the discovery of dinosaur fossils, and how these were
essential to understanding the age of the Earth. Bryson begins by describing the
many early blunders on the part of scientists to correctly identify dinosaur bones.
First Bryson talks about Dr. Caspar Wistar, an anatomist, who, at a meeting for the
American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, was given a strange, never-before-
seen bone. Instead of correctly identifying the bone’s significance, Wistar brushed
it off. This bone belonged to a hadrosaur, and had Wistar recognized its
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importance, he would have discovered dinosaurs a half century before anyone
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else.
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Bryson also describes a strange rumor that was sweeping the globe due to French
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naturalist Comte de Buffon. Buffon, in his highly-regardedHistoire Naturelle,
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described America as a stagnant land lacking virility and vigor, despite the fact that
he had never so much as visited it. Thomas Jefferson met these claims with
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contempt, and sent Buffon the body of a moose to prove that America had strong
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and mighty creatures. This sparked a discovery spree in America amongst
naturalists, where ancient bones were being uncovered at unprecedented rates.
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While it was clear that massive beasts had once roamed America, unfortunately the
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naturalists were putting the bones together incorrectly. For example, the tusks of a
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mammoth were screwed on upside down, as the naturalists assumed that the
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“creature had been aquatic and had used them to anchor itself to trees while
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dozing” (81). This continued until Georges Cuvier, a man whose genius was in his
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ability to put a pile of bones together correctly. He correctly put the bones of the
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mammoth together, wrote a paper on it, and named the creature a mastodon.
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Cuvier also believed that the Earth experienced global catastrophes that in turn
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wiped out entire species.

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Bryson moves on to William Smith, who brought clarity and cohesion to rock dating.
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He noticed that “By noting which species appeared in which strata, you could work
out the relative ages of rocks wherever they appeared” (82). This is important
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considering the paleontological momentum that began occurring all over the world.
In 1812, in England, a child named Mary Anning found a fossilized sea monster,
today known as the Ichthyosaurus. She went on to spend the next thirty-five years
gathering fossils and revealing to the world that strange creatures once existed
that don’t now. In the same vein, Gideon Algernon Mantell was a doctor and bone
collector who found innumerous dinosaur fossils, including the Hylaeosaurus.
However, Mantell didn’t get credit for his findings. Instead, a man named Richard
Owen, the leading expert on “all kinds of animals living and extinct—from
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platypuses, echidnas, and other newly discovered marsupials to the hapless dodo
and other extinct giant birds,” was credited with coining the term dinosauria, which
means “terrible lizard” (88). Bryson points out that Mantell and Owen lived as
enemies, and that Owen often stole other people’s research. However, one good
thing came out of Owen: he created what we know today as the modern museum.
Feuds ran rampant during this time in paleontology. Edward Drinker Cope and
Othniel Charles Marsh, two men responsible for discovering “Nearly every dinosaur
that the average person can name,” worked in such a competitive and reckless
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state that they constantly rediscovered the same species, collectively working to
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make a huge classification mess, some of which still isn’t sorted out to this day (93).
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Bryson states that “by the turn of the twentieth century, paleontologists had literally
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tons of old bones to pick over. The problem was that they still didn’t have any idea
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how old any of these bones were” (95). This resulted in a slew of scientists trying to
estimate the date of the Earth. While many got it wrong, a farm boy from New
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Zealand, Ernest Rutherford, “produced pretty well irrefutable evidence that the
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Earth was at least many hundreds of millions of years old, probably rather more”
(96).
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Chapter 7 Summary: “Elemental Matters”

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This chapter details how chemistry moved from the practice of alchemy to a
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respectable science. For much of the eighteenth century, scientists often walked
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the line between alchemy and chemistry, resulting in bizarre and accidental
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discoveries. Bryson mentions Hennig Brand, a man convinced that he could turn
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urine into gold. After letting fifty buckets of urine stew in his cellar for months and
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converting it into paste, the substance began to glow and suddenly ignite into
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flame. Thus, Brand accidently discovered phosphorous. However, Swedish chemist

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Karl Scheele made the substance profitable by using it to invent matches. Brand
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went on to discover eight elements and various useful compounds, but didn’t
receive recognition for any of them. Strangely, Brand insisted on tasting every
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substance he worked with, which ultimately led to his untimely death at the age of
forty-three.
This century marked an obsession with élan vital, the mysterious force that brought
objects to life. Bryson states that:
“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
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to the 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) (99).
It was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier who “thrust chemistry into the modern age” (99). A
member of minor nobility, Lavoisier, alongside his fourteen-year-old wife, spent
most of his days in his home laboratory. While he never discovered a new element,
he helped to make sense of other people’s findings, “identified oxygen and
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hydrogen for what they were and gave them both their modern names,” and
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helped found the metric system (100). His genius was cut short by the French
Revolution; in 1793, during the Reign of Terror, Lavoisier was beheaded.
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Bryson points out that “chemistry, having come so far in the eighteenth century,
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rather lost its bearings in the first decades of the nineteenth” (102). Nitrous oxide
was discovered, but people used it as a recreational drug long before they realized
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it could be used as an anesthetic during surgery. Count Von Rumford, also known
hi
ha
as Benjamin Thompson, discovered thermodynamics and invented such useful
objects as a drip coffeemaker and thermal underwear. He also founded the Royal
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Institute, the learned society that actively promoted chemistry as a science, and
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propelled Humphry Davy into the spotlight. Due to electrolysis, the “technique of
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applying electricity to a molten substance,” Davy discovered a dozen new

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elements (104).
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Bryson goes on to mention other notable chemists. John Dalton, a Quaker, was the
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“first person to intimate the nature of the atom,” while Lorenzo Romano Amadeo
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Carlo Avogadro discovered that “two equal volumes of gases of any type, if kept at
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the same pressure and temperature, will contain identical numbers of molecules”
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(104). Sweden’s J.J. Berzilius became the first person to decide that elements
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should be abbreviated by their Greek or Latin names, and Ivanovich Mendeleyev

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created what is known today as the periodic table. Henri Becquerel and Marie
Curie discovered radium, which eventually killed Curie—she died of leukemia from
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radiation poisoning.
Part Two, comprised of Chapters Four through Seven, opens with this quote by
Alexander Pope: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in the night; God said, Let
Newton be! and all was light.” This quote illustrates the theme running throughout
Chapters Four through Seven: that Newton’s three laws of motion are central to
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everything we know today. While each chapter has a different thematic focus—
measuring the Earth, the rise of geology as a scientific field, paleontologyand the
discovery of the first dinosaur bone, and how chemistry became a respectable
science--each chapteralso comes back to Newton’s theory.
Bryson stresses that during the nineteenth century, when dinosaur bones and
chemical elements were being discovered, the idea of élan vital, the mysterious
force thought to bring objects to life, had taken the world by storm. Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein was written during this time, and serves as a fictional rendering of
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what scientists believed to be real at the time.
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Chapters 8-12
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Chapter 8 Summary: “Einstein’s Universe”
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This chapter chronicles how Einstein’s theories changed what we know about the
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universe. Bryson states that by the end of the nineteenth century, scientists
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assumed that they “had pinned down most of the mysteries of the physical world:
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electricity, magnetism, gases, optics, acoustics, kinetics, and statistical mechanics,

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to name just a few, all had fallen into order before them” (115). Scientists believed
there wasn’t much left that science had to do.
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Before Einstein, there was J. Willard Gibbs, a scientist who knew that science still
had a lot more to offer. From 1875-78, Gibbs produced a collection of papers that
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showed how thermodynamics “didn’t apply simply to heat and energy at the sort of
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large and noisy scale of the steam engine, but was also present and influential at
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the atomic level of chemical reactions” (117).

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There were also Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, who disproved the
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longstanding belief that luminiferous ether, an imaginary substance that was

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thought to permeate the universe, was real. Michelson invented a device known as
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the interferometer, which measured the Earth’s travel time around the Sun. After
years of measurements, Michelson found that the “speed of light turned out to be
the same in all directions and at all seasons” (119). This proved that Newton’s laws
might not apply everywhere in the universe.
There was also the theoretical physicist Max Planck, who came up with quantum
theory, which “posited that energy is not a continuous thing like flowing water but
comes in individualized packets, which he called quanta” (119). Plank’s ideas laid
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the foundation for modern physics. He was proceededby Albert Einstein. Einstein,
a hobby physicist who was working at a Swiss patent office, produced one of the
most brilliant scientific papers of all time, entitled “On the Electrodynamics of
Moving Bodies.” With no footnotes, citations, or mention of anyone else’s work, it
seemed that Einstein had come up with his conclusions completely on his own.
From this paper, we get the famous equation E=mc^2, where E is energy, m is
mass, and c is the speed of light squared. This was groundbreaking because it
demonstrated that mass and energy have an equivalence:
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“They are two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter; matter is
energy waiting to happen. Since c^2 (the speed of light times itself) is a truly
36
enormous number, what the equation is really saying is that there is a huge
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amount—a really huge amount—of energy bound up in every material thing”
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(122).
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Einstein’s theory explained how radiation worked and that the speed of light was
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constant.
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In 1917, Einstein produced another brilliant paper on the idea of relativity. Here,
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Einstein theorized what happens when light encounters gravity. Bryson states that
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“In essence, what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute, but
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relative to both the observer and to the thing being observed, and the faster one
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moves the more pronounced these effects become” (124). Contrary to intuition,
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time is a part of space. Time is ever changing, and has shape, with three
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dimensions known as spacetime. Spacetime, Bryson states, is best visualized as a

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mattress: imagine a heavy iron ball in the middle of the mattress; the mattress will
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sag with the weight of the ball. This is essentially the effect that the Sun (the iron
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ball) has on spacetime (the mattress). If one were to try to roll a smaller ball across
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spacetime, it will try to go in a straight line according to Newton’s law, but it will
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inevitably fall into the slope of the sag and roll downward. This is Einstein’s
definition of gravity—“a product of the bending of spacetime” (126). In this way,
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gravity isn’t a force but an effect of spacetime being warped. Yet, the biggest
realization to spring from this theory is the idea that the universe must be
expanding or contracting.
About the same time that Einstein was devising these theories, an astronomer
named VestoSlipher observed a Doppler Shift occurring indistant stars, which
essentially means the stars appeared to be moving away from us. However, Slipher
didn’t get the recognition for this observation. Instead, Edwin Hubble, regarded as
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the most outstanding astronomer of the twentieth century, took all the credit. He
discovered how old and how big the universe is. By observing “standard candles—
stars whose brightness can be reliably calculated and used as benchmarks to
measure the brightness (and hence the relative distance) of other stars,” Hubble
observed that the universe is quickly and evenly expanding in all directions (130).
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Mighty Atom”
Bryson opens this chapter by quoting physicist Richard Freyman, who said that if
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you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be “All
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things are made of atoms” (133). Atoms are the focus of this chapter, and Bryson
emphasizes how everything a person can see, even the air one breathes, is made
36
of atoms. A molecule (Latin for “little mass,”) is basically two or more atoms working
12
together. Bryson gives the analogy that “Chemists tend to think in terms of
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molecules rather than elements in much the way that writers tend to think in terms
of words and not letters, so it is molecules they count, and these are numerous to
m
say the least” (133). For example, one cubic centimeter of air, roughly the size of a
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sugar cube, contains 45 billion billion molecules.
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Atoms are also tough, and survive almost forever. Bryson states that “Every atom
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you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of
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millions of organisms on its way to becoming you” (134). Basically, Bryson sums up
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the attributes of atoms by calling them “small, numerous, and practically

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indestructible,” which has made them difficult to understand, let alone study (135).
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English Quaker John Dalton (first introduced in Chapter 7),wrote A New System of
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Chemical Philosophy, making atoms more understandable. While the idea of atoms
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wasn’t new, Dalton’s ability to describe the size and character of atoms was
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revolutionary. He was also the first to give the elements atomic weights. Despite
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Dalton’s work, many well-known scientists doubted the existence of atoms at all. It
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wasn’t until Ernest Rutherford came along that atoms were more widely accepted
and understood.
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Rutherford was the first to discover that “the power inherent in the atom could, if
harnessed, make bombs powerful enough to ‘make this old world vanish in
smoke’” (138). He was also the first to realize that atoms are mostly empty space
with a dense nucleus in the middle. To visualize this, Bryson gives the example that
“if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be only
about the size of a fly—but a fly many thousands of times heavier than the
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cathedral” (141). It was this paradox that initially confused Rutherford, but it was
clear that the atom isn’t governed by the same rules as the macro world.
Bryson moves on to Niels Bohr, who puzzled over why wavelengths of hydrogen
“produced patterns showing that hydrogen atoms emitted energy at certain
wavelengths but not others. It was like someone under surveillance kept turning up
at particular locations but was never observed traveling between them” (142). Bohr
found the answer in his famous paper, “On the Constitutions of Atoms and
Molecules.” The paper explained the idea of a “quantum leap,” which essentially
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means that an “electron moving between orbits would disappear from one and
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reappear instantaneously in another without visiting the space between”(143). This
theory explained how electrons didn’t crash into the nucleus,along with hydrogen’s
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strange wavelengths. After these findings, Rutherford went on to discover
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neutrons, neutralizing particles that prevent the nucleus from exploding. His
03
associate, James Chadwick, proved that neutrons existed.
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Bryson also mentions Erwin Shrodinger, who invented wave mechanics, and
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physicist Werner Heisenberg, who invented a competing theory called matrix
mechanics. In 1926, Heisenberg developed a compromise of the two theories,
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which he called quantum mechanics. At the center of the theory was Heisenberg’s
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Uncertainty Principle, which states that “the electron is a particle but a particle that
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can be described in terms of waves” (144). In practice, this means that an electron’s
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movements are unpredictable, and scientists can only predict the probability of the
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electron’s movement. Bryson, quoting Dennis Overbye states, “an electron doesn’t
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exist until it is observed” (144). In other words, an electron must be presumed to be

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everywhere and nowhere until observed.

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Bryson mentions Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment, in which he places a

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hypothetical cat in a box with one atom of a radioactive substance attached to a

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vial of hydrocyanic acid:

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“If the particle degraded within an hour, it would trigger a mechanism that would
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break the vial and poison the cat. If not, the cat would live. But we could not
know which was the case, so there was no choice, scientifically, but to regard
the cat as 100 percent alive and 100 percent dead at the same time” (146).
Chapter 10 Summary: “Getting the Lead Out”
Bryson opens the chapter by introducing University of Chicago graduate

studentClair Patterson, who was attempting to use a new method of lead isotype
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measurement to date the Earth, and Thomas Midgely, Jr., an engineer and
inventor. Despite that lead was known to be dangerous, causing irreversible
damage to the nervous system, in the early twentieth century lead was found in a
variety of consumer products, including food cans, water storage tanks, and on
fruits, as a pesticide. But lead was most prevalent as an additive to gasoline.
Midgely was responsible for this addition, noting that tetraethyl lead reduced
engine knock, was easy to extract, and was highly profitable. The biggest oil
companies adopted this highly toxic gasoline additive and changed the name from
lead to ethyl, because it sounded less toxic. Countless production workers died or
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went insane from lead exposure, but the gasoline companies were good about
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covering up the casualties.
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Midgely also went on to invent the dangerous chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, the
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chemical that went into car air conditioners, deodorant sprays, and refrigerators,
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and aided in destroying the ozone layer. Ozone is a delicate form of oxygen that
soaks up dangerous ultraviolet radiation, protecting life on Earth. However, ozone
m
is fragile, and CFCs are highly destructive. Bryson notes that just “One pound of
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CFCs can capture and annihilate seventy thousand pounds of atmospheric ozone”
(152). In short, CFCs are arguably one of the worst inventions of the twentieth
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century.
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Bryson goes on to mention Willard Libby, who invented radiocarbon dating, which
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came from the realization that “all living things have within them an isotope of
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carbon called carbon-14, which begins to decay at a measurable rate the instant
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they die” (152). By figuring out how much the carbon in a sample had decayed,
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Libby could reasonably estimate the age of the object. This method allowed
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scientists to accurately determine the age of bones and other organic remains up
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to forty thousand years old, after which time the dating becomes unreliable.
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However, despite the benefits of carbon dating, there are many inherit flaws,
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including the fact that readings can be thrown off by even theslightest external
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factors.
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An English professor named Arthur Holmes solved the problems inherent to

carbon dating. In a similar but more reliable fashion, Holmes measured the decay
rate of uranium in lead. While this was a dependable way to date rocks, Holmes
also used this method to conclude that the Earth was at least three billion years
old. During this same time, professor Harrison Brown of the University of Chicago
devised a fresh way to count lead isotopes in igneous rocks. Instead of doing the
tedious work himself, he gave the task to Clair Patterson and assured him that she
would quickly find the true age of the Earth through this method. After realizing that
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no rock on Earth was ancient enough to accurately measure, he measured the age
of a meteorite. Through this process, Patterson declared that the definitive age of
the Earth is 4,550 million years old, a figure that stands unchanged to this day.
Patterson was also the one to discover that there was a lot of lead in the
atmosphere. From his measurements, he found that before 1923, the year lead was
introduced into gasoline, there was no lead in the atmosphere, but that since, the
levels in the atmosphere have skyrocketed. After this discovery, Patterson made it
his life’s mission to get lead taken out of gasoline. These efforts led to the Clean
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Air Act of 1970 and the removal from sale of leaded gasoline in 1986. Immediately
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lead levels in the blood of Americans fell by 80 percent.
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Chapter 11 Summary: “Muster Mark’s Quest”
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Bryson opens the chapter by talking about British scientist C.T.R. Wilson, who
studied cloud formations. Instead of regularly climbing the summit of Ben Nevis, he
m
built a cloud chamber, a “simple device in which he could cool and moisten the air,
hi
ha
creating a reasonable model of a cloud in laboratory conditions” (161). However,
much more than a cloud chamber, he discovered that when he accelerated
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particles through the fake clouds, they left a visible trail. Thus, his device became
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the first particle detector.

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From there, Ernest Lawrence invented an atom smasher known as the cyclotron. It
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works by accelerating a proton to extremely high speeds and then colliding it into
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another particle, to see what bounces off. Today’s particle accelerators have
b
evolved from Lawrence’s device, use huge amounts of energy, and are able to
lu
“whop particles into such a state of liveliness that a single electron can do forty-
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seven thousand laps around a four-mile tunnel in a second” (162). Totrap the ever-
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elusive particles, scientists need millions of gallons of water in underground

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chambers, where radiation can’t interfere. This all takes a lot of money. The Large
ea
Hadron Collider, for example, takes fourteen trillion volts of energy to run and cost
$1.5 billion to construct.
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Bryson notes that particle physics is vastly expensive, which is why scientists have
only uncovered over 150 particles so far. They also aren’t quite sure why these
particles exist. As Richard Feynman puts it, “it is very difficult to understand the
relationships of all these particles, and what nature wants them for, or what the
connections are from one to another” (164). Physicists don’t know when they’ll
reach the irreducible bottom, nor what they would find if they ever got there.
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To bring simplicity to this highly theoretical field, physicist Murray Gell-Mann

invented a new class of particles known as quarks, having taken the name from a
line in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. These quarks are broken down into six
categories—up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom—and these are further
broken down into the colors red, green, and blue. This became known as the
Standard Model, which Bryson calls a “sort of parts kit for the subatomic world”
(165). Gell-Mann’s arrangement basically states that “among the basic building
blocks of matter are quarks; these are held together by particles called gluons; and
together quarks and gluons form protons and neutrons, the stuff of the atom’s
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nucleus” (166). This is the simplest model of explaining the world of particles, but it
49
is incomplete, not considering many factors such as gravity or mass.
36
This is where superstring theory comes in. It states that what were previously
12
thought of as particles are actually strings, or vibrating strands of energy, that
03
“oscillate in eleven dimensions, consisting of the three we know already plus time
and seven other dimensions that are, well, unknowable to us” (167). And, as Bryson
m
notes, the theories get even more difficult to understand and bizarre from there—
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so difficult, in fact, that many physicists have a difficult time determining whether or
not a theory is nonsense or science. It seems that no matter how many physicists
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come up with various theories, it doesn’t appear that there will ever be one
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definitive theory for physics.

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Bryson ends the chapter by stating that “we live in a universe whose age we can’t
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quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know,

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filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws
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whose properties we don’t truly understand” (172).

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Chapter 12 Summary: “The Earth Moves”

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Bryson opens by talking about Charles Hapgood, a geologist who adamantly

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denied that there was any correspondence in shape between continents on

opposite sides of the Atlantic. He was going off the findings of K.E. Caster and J.C.
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Mendes’s extensive fieldwork, which somehow concluded that there were no

similarities between the continents. This, of course, was completely false, because
not only are the rock formations on both sides of the Atlantic in fact similar, they
are the same.
The first geologist to notice this was an amateur named Frank Bursley Taylor. By
regarding how similar the facing coastlines of Africa and South America were, he
came up with the idea that continents had moved around once upon a time. He
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also hypothesized that this shifting could have caused the mountains to rise.
Although he was correct, he couldn’t provide any evidence to support his claim,
and no one accepted his theory. However, in Germany, a theorist named Alfred
Wegener observed that animal fossils were frequently found on opposite sides of
oceans that were too wide to swim. Wegener came up with the theory that “the
world’s continents had once come together in a single landmass he called
Pangaea, where flora and fauna had been able to mingle, before the continents
split apart and floated off to their present positions” (174).
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According to Bryson, Wegener’s idea wasn’t widely accepted because the
49
consensus of the time was that the Earth moved up and down, not sideways. This
could be visualized by the baked apple theory, which suggested that “as the
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molten Earth had cooled, it had become wrinkled in the manner of a baked apple,
12
creating ocean basins and mountain ranges” (175). Of course, this was wrong, and
03
Wegener’s theory was lacking in many ways. It wasn’t until Arthur Holmes came
along and suggested that “radioactive warming could produce convection currents
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with the Earth” that people began to accept the idea that continents had once
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moved (176). Holmes’s idea became known as the continental drift theory, and the
fundamentals of it are still accepted today.
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Despite the truth of Holmes’s theory, the problem remained that no one knew
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where the sediment went. Since, for example, Earth’s rivers carry 500 million tons
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of calcium to the seas each year, if one were to multiply this number since the
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beginning of time, “the ocean bottom should by now be well above the ocean
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tops” (177). This predicament was answered by Harry Hess, a mineralogist who
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found that the ocean floors weren’t full of sediment, like everyone had assumed,
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rather they were full of canyons, trenches, and crevasses. During this same time in
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the 1950s, oceanographers took more detailed surveillance of the ocean floors and
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found that the biggest mountain range on Earth was mostly under water (some of
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its peaks rose above the water and created islands or archipelagoes). From these
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findings, Hess determined that “new ocean crust was being formed on either side
of the central rift, then being pushed away from it as new crust came along behind
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it. The Atlantic floor was effectively two large conveyor belts, one carrying crust
toward North America, the other carrying crust toward Europe” (179). This theory
became known as seafloor spreading, and helped to explain where all the
sediment went.
The continental drift theory developed into plate tectonics when it was discovered
that the entire Earth’s crust was in motion, not just continents. Bryson points out
that today “we know that Earth’s surface is made up of eight to twelve big plates
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(depending on how you define big) and twenty or so smaller ones, and they all
move in different directions and at different speeds” (181). If the plates keep shifting
as it’s assumed they have always done, Bryson notes that eventually some
interesting geological changes will occur, including California floating off and
becoming part of Madagascar and Africa pushing northward into Europe.
While these chapters primarily focus on the impact Einstein’s relativity and gravity
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theories had on our understanding of the world, Bryson also uses these chapters to
49
explore the personal and often eccentric lives of scientists. For example, Bryson
reveals that Einstein was working at a patent office when he comprised his famous
36
equation E=mc^2. But what’s even more amazing is that Einstein seemed to have
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devised his theory out of nowhere; meaning, he didn’t workfrom anyone else’s
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models. Another example is Thomas Midgley, who was responsible for realizing
that lead could be added to gasoline to stop engine knocking. Despite knowing
m
the dangers of lead poisoning, Midgley poured lead-laced gasoline all over his
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hands and inhaled it to show consumers that it was “safe.”
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While Chapters Eight through Twelve vary widely in regard topic, Bryson uses a
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similar rhetorical style throughout: he introduces the theme of the chapter by

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stating an interesting fact or statistic, he then explains the scientists and theories
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that made the initial theme possible, and he concludes by tying the theme of one
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chapter into the theme of the next. In this way, Bryson interconnects each chapter
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even when they don’t exactly align according to theme.

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Chapters 13-15
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Chapter 13 Summary: “Bang!”

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Bryson opens the chapter by talking about the soft water and strange rocks that
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were found underneath Manson, Iowa in 1912. The reason for this odd occurrence
was later known as the Manson Impact, “the biggest thing that has ever occurred
on the mainland in the United States” (190). A meteor had hit where Manson now
stands, creating a hole three miles deep and twenty miles across; in fact, the crater
would put the Grand Canyon to shame. However, after 2.5 million years of weather
and wear, the crater is now flat. While this site doesn’t draw much attention
nowadays, Bryson states that in the 1950s “Manson was the most geologically
exciting place on Earth” (191).
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During this time, meteor crater research was unsophisticated and misunderstood.
G.K. Gilbert was the first to hypothesize that the moon’s craters were caused by
meteors, but the scientific community at large scoffed at his idea, holding fast to
the notion that the moon craters were caused by ancient volcanoes. The meteor
craters on Earth were even less understood. For example, Meteor Crater in
Arizona, previously Barringer Crater, was incorrectly thought to be formed by an
underground steam explosion. It was only when Gene Shoemaker came along and
realized that the Barringer Crater was full of fine silicas and magnetites—
substances that shouldn’t be there—that scientists started to suspect that the
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impact came from space.
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Asteroids, unlike popular belief, aren’t found in clusters. Instead, these rocky
36
objects float around in loose formation millions of miles away from their closest
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neighbors. Thought to have been planets that didn’t quite make it, asteroids are
03
abundant in our solar system (some estimate their numbers reach the billions).
Asteroids were first discovered in the 1800s, and it was astronomer Gerard Kuiper
m
that systematized and accounted for every observed asteroid. Bryson states that
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“As of July 2001, twenty-six thousand asteroids have been named and identified—
half in just the previous two years. With up to a billion to identify, the count
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obviously has barely begun” (193).

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Asteroids are a concern for the Earth because they are unpredictable, and it’s
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hypothesized that at least two thousand asteroids big enough to jeopardize

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civilization routinely cross Earth’s orbit. Even a small asteroid the size of a house
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can destroy an entire city. On two separate occasions in the 1990s, asteroids
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nearly collided with Earth, and they arrived without warning. It’s guessed that these
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near misses could happen as frequently as two or three times a week.

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A huge breakthrough in both geology and astronomy happened because of a

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geologist named Walter Alvarez. While doing fieldwork in Bottaccione Gorge, in

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Gubbio, Italy, he noticed a thin layer of clay dividing two ancient layers of
limestone. Seeking the help of his father, nuclear physicist Luis Alvarez, Walter
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tested the clay using a process called neutron activation analysis, and found
iridium levels were three hundred times normal levels. Considering that iridium is a
thousand times more abundant in space than on Earth, Alvarez concluded that the
Earth had been struck by a devastating asteroid or comet. Furthermore, he
concluded that the dinosaurs had become extinct due to this sudden, explosive
event. This became known as the impact theory; however, the paleontological
society didn’t accept this theory. Instead, they held fast to their belief that dinosaur
extinction was a long, slow process.
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Chapter 14 Summary: “The Fire Below”
Bryson opens the chapter by introducing a young geologist named Mike Voorhis,
who “discovered one of the most extraordinary fossil beds ever discovered in
North America, a dried-up water hole that had served as a mass grave for scores of
animals—rhinoceroses, zebra-like horses, saber-toothed deer, camels, turtles”
(207). Each of these animals was thought to have died twelvemillion years
ago,during the Miocene Epoch. The animals were found buried under volcanic ash,
which was curious because there had never been any volcanoes in Nebraska.
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Today this site is called Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park.
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At first, the animals were thought to have been buried alive, but as it turns out they
36
all had hypertonic pulmonary osteodystrophy, which occurs after breathing a lot of
12
ash. Yet, no one knew where the ash had come from, until geologist Bill
03
Bonnichsen found that the ash matched a volcanic deposit from Bruneau-Jarbridge
in Idaho. As Bryson puts it, “The event that killed the plains animals of Nebraska
m
was a volcanic explosion on a scale previously unimagined—but big enough to
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leave an ash layer ten feet deep almost a thousand miles away in eastern
Nebraska” (209). As it turns out, there is a gigantic mass of magma, a volcanic
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hotspot, lurking under the western United States. It disastrously erupts every
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600,000 years or so, and today we call this spot Yellowstone National Park.
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We know very little about the center of the Earth. Bryson says that if the Earth were
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an apple, we have barely broken the skin. It was geologist R.D. Oldman who
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assumed that the Earth has a core because he noted that seismograph readings
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from an earthquake in Guatemala penetrated he Earth and bounced back at an

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angle. Seismologist Andrija Mohorovicic noticed a similar phenomenon on a

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shallower scale, and founded the Earth’s mantle. Another scientist, Inge Lehmann,
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discovered that the Earth has two cores, while Charles Richter and Beno
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Gutenberg devised a way to measure earthquakes, known today as the Richter

ea
scale.
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Earthquakes occur quite frequently, and the most common types happen when two
plates meet, as in California along the San Andreas Fault. Bryson describes that
“As the plates push against each other, pressures build up until one or the other
gives way” (212). The less common but more worrisome type of earthquake is the
intraplate quake, which can occur anywhere and at any time. Since these don’t
happen near plate boundaries, they are completely unpredictable. No one knows
what causes them.
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While many scientists have attempted to drill deep into the Earth to study its
center, all attempts have failed. As such, the only way to analyze the Earth is to
read waves as they travel through the interior.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Dangerous Beauty”
Bryson opens by saying that when most people think of a volcano, they imagine
the classic cone shape and the erupting magma and smoke, but there is another
type of volcano that doesn’t look like a mountain—these are known as calderas,
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and they are the most dangerous sort, capable of suddenly exploding and leaving
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behind a vast pit. This is the type of volcano found in Yellowstone. In fact, all 2.2
million acres of Yellowstone make up its caldera. If Yellowstone blows, the
36
aftermath is unimaginable.
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Yellowstone’s first eruption was 16.5 million years ago, and it has exploded a
hundred times since. However, the “Yellowstone eruption of two million years ago
m
put out enough ash to bury New York State to a depth of sixty-seven feet or
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California to a depth of twenty” (227). This ash was responsible for the Voorhis
fossil beds from the previous chapter.
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A startling discovery was made in Yellowstone in 1973, when suddenly the water
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levels began to ebb and flow, like what would happen if you lifted one side of a
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child’s pool and then the other. After a slew of geological testing, it was
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determined that Yellowstone had a restless magma chamber—which meant that

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Yellowstone is an active volcano, contrary to the belief at that time. This is how
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scientists discerned Yellowstone’s eruption cycles, and terrifyingly determined that

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it is due to explode again, and soon.

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Bryson states that even after extensive research, scientists still don’t understand
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why volcanoes erupt. In fact, they still know little about them at all.
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Part Four, consisting of Chapters Thirteen through Fifteen, opens with this quote by
British geologist Derek V. Ager: “The history of any one part of the Earth, like the
life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.”
This quote aptly portrays the tenor of each chapter in Part Four, in that this section
is about the dangers inherent to planet Earth. In particular, this section explores the
threat of meteors, asteroids, and volcanoes—particularly Yellowstone National
Park.
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This section is different from the others in that the chapters closely connect to each
other thematically. Each chapter assesses the threat of catastrophic natural
disasters occurring, and ties it to the past catastrophic events.
Chapters 16-26
Chapter 16 Summary: “Lonely Planet”
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Bryson opens by giving the statistic that “no less than 99.5 percent of the world’s
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habitable space by volume, according to one estimate, is fundamentally—in
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practical terms—off-limits to us” (239). He is talking about how inhospitable most of
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Earth is for humans considering that most of the planet is covered by oceans.
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Because water is 1,300 times heavier than air, humans can’t withstand the water
03
pressure of great depths. In fact, the record for deepest free diving is 236 feet,
which is quite a feat for a human but barely scratches the surface of the oceanic
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abyss.
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Bryson states that since the air we breathe is 80 percent nitrogen, when the human
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body goes under pressure, the “nitrogen is transformed into tiny bubbles that
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migrate into the blood and tissues” (241). If a diver ascends too quickly, these
trapped bubbles begin to fizz, clogging the blood vessels and causing immense
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pain. This is called “the bends.” The only way to avoid the bends is to stay for only
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the briefest time at the depths, which prevents the nitrogen in the body from
dissolving, or, alternately, to ascend in careful stages.
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Bryson states that a lot of what we know about surviving in extreme states comes
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from father-and-son team John Scott and J.B.S. Haldane. Haldane discovered the
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necessary rest intervals to avoid getting the bends, and also studied altitude
sickness in mountain climbers and carbon monoxide poisoning in coal miners. He
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was additionally a main component in combining the Darwinian idea of evolution

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to Mendel’s genetic work, which is known today as Modern Synthesis. John Scott
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invented a decompression chamber that could help save divers from the bends. He
was also the first to note that nitrogen becomes a powerful intoxicant beneath
depths of a hundred feet, for reasons that are still unknown today.
Despite the fact that Earth is inhospitable in many ways, Bryson mentions four
things that make our planet exceptional in regard to its ability to house life. The first
thing is that it is in the perfect location and orbit. Had Earth been only 5 percent
closer to or further from the sun, we wouldn’t be here today. We also have the right
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kind of planet, in that we have the correct atmosphere and the right elements in
the exactly accurate proportions. We’re also a twin planet, meaning our moon is a
companion planet to Earth. Without the Moon’s gravity, Earth “would wobble like a
dying top” (249). Finally, Earth had the correct timing: if things hadn’t played out
exactly like they did, we might not be humans today.
Bryson ends the chapter by talking about how there are ninety-two naturally
occurring elements on Earth, and yet little is known about them. In regard to
oxygen and hydrogen, Bryson states, “two of the most combustion-friendly
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elements around, but put them together and they make incombustible water”
49
(252). Or take sodium, one of the most unstable elements, and chlorine, one of the
deadliest; when you put them together you get table salt.
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Chapter 17 Summary: “Into the Troposphere”
03
Bryson opens by talking about the importance of our atmosphere. Without it, “Earth
m
would be a lifeless ball of ice with an average temperature of minus 60 degrees
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Fahrenheit” (255). Despite the atmosphere’s importance, it’s quite small, extending
upwards for only 120 miles (Bryson gives the visual analogy that this is like only a
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couple coats of varnish). The atmosphere is divided into four unequal layers:
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troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and ionosphere (sometimes called the

d
thermosphere). Essentially, the troposphere is closest to us and contains the

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warmth and oxygen we need to live; the stratosphere is the tiny layer where storms
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exist and is cold, well below freezing; the troposphere is warmer due to absorptive
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effects of ozone.
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Bryson then goes on to talk about the dangers of mountain climbing. After rising
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too many thousands of feet above sea level, even the most experienced
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mountaineers can experience the dangerous and sometimes-deadly effects of

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altitude sickness. Bryson states that “the human body reminds its owner that it
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wasn’t designed to operate so far above sea level” (257). 25,000 feet is known as
the Death Zone, but most people become severely debilitated at 15,000 feet. Yet
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fitness seems to have little to do with a person’s susceptibility to altitude illness.

Bryson gives the example that “Grannies sometimes caper about lofty situations
while their fitter offspring are reduced to helpless, groaning heaps until conveyed
to lower altitudes” (258). It seems that the absolute highest elevation that people
can continuously live is 18,000 feet, but these people:
have often spent thousands of years developing disproportionately large chests

and lungs, increasing their density of oxygen-bearing red blood cells by almost a
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third, though there are limits to how much thickening with red blood cells and
blood supply can stand(258).
Bryson goes on to state that air is surprisingly bulky: “Altogether there are about
5,200 million million tons of air around us—25 million tons for every square mile of
the planet—a not inconsequential volume” (259). When the air starts moving at the
violent speeds of a hurricane or tornado, it’s clear to see just how powerful air can
be. Bryson also mentions the surprising fact that one thunderstorm can contain the
same amount of energy as four days’ use of electricity for the entire United States.
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Convection is the same process that moves air around in the atmosphere and
propels the internal engine of the planet. The convection process is usually stable
36
and the weather predictable at the equator, but in temperate zones the patterns
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are seasonal.
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Bryson notes that the atmosphere seeks equilibrium. The heat from the sun is
m
unevenly distributed, causing differences in air pressure to arise on the planet. Air
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rushes to these spots to attempt to equalize things, resulting in wind. This was first
discovered by Edmond Halley, who noted that rising and falling columns of air
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produced “cells.” Despite this discovery, the father of meteorology was a

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pharmacist named Luke Howard, who named the cloud types in 1803.
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Chapter 18 Summary: “The Bounding Main”

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This chapter is all about water, or dihydrogen oxide. Water is everywhere and
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comprises nearly every organic thing, and Bryson gives the statistics that“A potato
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is 80 percent water, a cow 74 percent, a bacterium 75 percent. A tomato, at 95

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percent, is little but water. Even humans are 65 percent water, making us more
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liquid than solid by a margin of almost two to one” (270). Water is unlike any other
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liquid; it expands when close to freezing, and in its solid state it is a tenth more
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voluminous than it was before. Water molecules are also deeply attracted to other
water molecules, which is what creates surface tension strong enough to support
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insects and skipping stones.
Water is vital to the human body. Without it, a human will die in three days.
However, most of the water on Earthis poisonous to humans. Ocean water contains
seventy times more salt than humans can metabolize. There are also 320 million
cubic miles of water on Earth, which is all there will ever be. Water on Earth can
never be added or subtracted, which means that the water we drink has been on
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Earth since the beginning of time. Only 3 percent of the Earth’s water is fresh, and
most of that exists as ice sheets.
Despite the importance of water, the oceans weren’t really investigated until 1872,
when the former warship HMS Challenger sailed the oceans for three and a half
years, traversed 70,000 miles, collected over 47,000 new species of marine
organisms, and created the new scientific discipline of oceanography. In 1977,
oceanographers made one of the most important biological discoveries of the
twentieth century: tube worms. These wriggling, spaghetti-like creatures live on
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deep-sea vents, a place that was previously thought to be so toxic that life couldn’t
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possibly survive there. However, the tube worms thrived, feeding off bacteria that
derived their energy from the hydrogen sulfide in the vents. At these depths, there
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was no sunlight or oxygen, yet life was thriving froma process called
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chemosynthesis.
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Bryson ends by stating many disheartening facts about the devastating effects of
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overfishing, and the fact that despite how much we know about the oceans, we are
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also “remarkably ignorant of the dynamics that rule life in the sea” (285).
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Chapter 19 Summary: “The Rise of Life”

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Bryson opens by saying “Despite half a century of further study, we are no nearer
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to synthesizing life today than we were in 1953 and much further away from
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thinking we can” (287). The problem, says Bryson, lies in protein. Proteins are the
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result of amino acids strung together, and the human body is comprised of a million
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different types of protein. However, as Bryson points out, according to probability,

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proteins shouldn’t exist. Amino acids must be strung together in a particular order,
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much like the way letters spell words. But unlike spelling an eight-letter word, “to
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make collagen, you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right
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sequence. But—and here’s an obvious but crucial point—you don’t make it. It
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makes itself, spontaneously, without direction, and this is where the unlikelihoods
come in” (288). The odds of this happening are “larger than the number of all the
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atoms in the universe,” (288), and yet still occurred.
Proteins can’t exist without DNA, and DNA has no purpose without proteins. This is
because protein can’t reproduce itself, but DNA can. Furthermore, protein and
DNA can only exist in the nurturing environment of a cell, and the cell’s only
purpose is to house DNA and proteins. While Bryson admits this is the miracle of
life, he goes on to suggest various explanations for how proteins, DNA, cells, and,
ultimately, life came into existence. One theory is evolution, or the idea that
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proteins didn’t spontaneously form all at once, but rather amino acids assembled in
chunks over time “and in so doing ‘discovered’ some additional improvement”
(290).
Bryson goes on to say that if one wanted to create another living object, whether it
be animal, plant, or human, one would only need carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and
nitrogen. In fact, “Put these together in three dozen or so combinations to form
some sugars, acids, and other basic compounds and you can build anything that
lives” (291). While it’s not understood how this happens, scientists think they know
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one thing for certain, that life started 3.85 billion years ago. Considering the Earth
49
didn’t become solid until 3.9 billion years ago, this means that life started close to
when the Earth was created.
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After the 4.5 billion-year-old Murchinson meteorite crashed into Australia, and was
03
discovered to be comprised of seventy-four different types of amino acids, it was
hypothesized, in a theory known as panspermia, that the building blocks of life
m
came from space. The idea is that if one gets enough of these meteorites crashing
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into Earth, one would have the basic elements needed for life. However, this theory
doesn’t answer the question of how life arose, and only moves the responsibility
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elsewhere.
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Bryson points out that the most extraordinary fact in biology is that “Whatever
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prompted life to begin, it happened just once” (295). Every living thing on this Earth
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is the result of one moment of creation.

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Chapter 20 Summary: “Small World”

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This chapter is all about bacteria. Bryson points out that they are “on and around
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you always, in numbers you can’t conceive” (302). To put it in perspective, Bryson
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states that “Every human body consists of 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100
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quadrillion bacterial cells” (303). Not only do we need bacteria inside of us to live,
without bacteria in the world, nothing would rot. Bacteria also make the air
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breathable by making nitrogen. They are prolific, and can produce a whole new
generation in only ten minutes. Further, once in every million divisions, bacteria
produce a mutant. This ability to mutate is responsible for antibiotic-resistant
bacteria. Bacteria are basically like a super organism because they share genetic
information, and can seemingly bloom from anything with only a little moisture.
In 1969, ecologist R.H. Whittaker proposed that life be divided into five main
branches—Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, and Monera. This was a big deal
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because before this classification, microorganisms like bacteria weren’t recognized

as individual organisms; rather, they were lumped into the same category as plants
and algae. However, not much was known about the Protista category, mostly
because bacteria don’t thrive in petri dishes. Despite this, while looking at bacteria,
Carl Woese discovered archaebacteria, or archaea for short. Archaea are unlike
bacteria, and thus Woese had discovered an entirely new division of life.
Most microbes are beneficial or neutral to humans. In fact, only one in a thousand
are pathogenic to humans. Yeteven though most are benign, microbes are still the
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number-three killer in the Western world. As Bryson points out, “making a host
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unwell has certain benefits for the microbe” (312). Symptoms of illness, such as
sneezing, vomiting, or coughing, help spread the microbe into another host.
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However, if microbes make a person too sick too quickly, this isn’t beneficial,as
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both the person and the microbe will die.
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The human body is well equipped to destroy invaders. Each body holds over ten
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million types of white blood cells. White blood cells are like soldiers waiting to
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attack pathogens. While they are extremely efficient, some microbes can hide
themselves to avoid being seen by white cells, as with HIV.
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Bryson points out the devastating effects of over-antibiotic use, which mostly
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occurs due to giving antibiotics to farm animals. By doing so, the developed world
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is giving bacteria a chance to become resistant to antibiotics. For example, in 1952

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penicillin was effective at treating staphylococcus bacteria, but by 1997, penicillin

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had become useless against it. Bryson also mentions viruses, which are smaller
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than bacteria and aren’t technically alive. There are five thousand known viruses,
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causing anything from colds to flus to polio. While bacteria are made of thousands
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of genes, some viruses are composed of as few as ten genes. However, viruses
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can be devastating. Bryson provides the example of the Great Spanish Flu
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epidemic. While World War I killed twenty-one million people in four years, the
ea
Spanish flu did so in only four months. A total of 548,452 people died in America
alone, and nearly 50 million globally. Yet, despite the devastation, little is known
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about the Spanish flu; no one knows why it erupted at the same time in different
locations, nor why it was so deadly, when most flus aren’t.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Life Goes On”
Bryson opens by giving the statistic that less than 0.1 percent of all dead organisms
become fossils. This is because when most things die they decompose until
nothing is left. To become a fossil, Bryson states that “you must die in the right
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place. Only about 15 percent of rocks can preserve fossils, so it’s no good keeling
over on a future site of granite” (321). Basically, a dead organism must be buried in
sediment so that it can leave an impression, or decompose without exposure to the
elements. In addition, the fossil must be able to maintain its identifiable shape
despite being pushed down in the Earth. Only one bone in a billion becomes a
fossil, making fossils rare.
Bryson goes to the Natural History Museum in London to meet paleontologist

Richard Fortey, author of Life: An Unauthorised Biography. Fortey is an avid
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collector of trilobites, an extinct marine creature that existed some 540 million
49
years ago. Despite that trilobites are extinct, they are thought to be some of the
most successful animals ever to have lived. According to Bryson, “Their reign ran
36
for 300 million years—twice the span of dinosaurs, which were themselves one of
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history’s great survivors” (323). By comparison, humans have only lived for one-half
03
of 1 percent as long.
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For much of the nineteenth century, trilobites were assumed to be the only form of
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early complex life. But what makes them so interesting is that they seemed to have
appeared out of nowhere in history. As Fortey says, it can be startling to go to the
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right formation of rocks and to work your way upward through the eons finding no
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visible life at all, and then suddenly “a whole Profallotapsis or Elenellusas big as a
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crab will pop into your waiting hands” (324).

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Even more fascinatingly, these creatures suddenly appeared as many different

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species and in many different locations. How this could be remained a mystery
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until a man named Charles Doolittle Walcott came along. During a trip to the
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Canadian Rockies, he discovered “the holy grail of paleontology,” a shale outcrop

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full of fossils which dated back to the Cambrian explosion, the supposed time, 500
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million years ago, when life first appeared on Earth. Altogether, tens of thousands
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of specimens were collected, amounting to 140 species. Although Walcott made

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such an amazing discovery, he failed to see the significance of the fossils because
he dated them as modern creatures. It wasn’t until Simon Conway Morris visited
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these fossils years after Walcott’s death that the fossils revealed that the:
Cambrian [Period] had been a time of unparalleled innovation and

experimentation in body designs” (327). The fossils were all uniquely and
strangely shaped; some resembled pineapple slices, others had five eyes. From
these findings, scientists concluded that “Evolutionary success, it appeared, was
a lottery (327).
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However, not everyone viewed these findings as proof of evolution. Stephen Gould
believed that “evolution in the Cambrian period was a different kind of process
from today,” suggesting that it was an evolutionary period of trial and air, but that
“It was a fertile time when all the great ‘fundamental body plans’ were invented.
Nowadays, evolution just tinkers with old body plans” (331).
Chapter 22 Summary: “Good-Bye to All That”
Bryson opens by talking about lichens, “the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but
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among the least ambitious” (335). Lichen will grow just about anywhere, but they
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prefer to grow in desolate places without much competition. Because they grow on
rocks, many scientists throughout the ages were baffled at how the lichen received
36
nourishment, or produced seeds. Lichen are an amalgam of fungi and algae, in that
12
the “fungi excrete acids that dissolve the surface of the rock, freeing minerals that
03
algae convert into food sufficient to sustain both” (336). While the world has more
than 20,000 species of lichen, they are slow to grow, taking half a century to reach
m
the size of a shirt button. Bryson concludes by saying that “It would be hard to
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imagine a less fulfilling existence,” and that lichen life seems to exist just for the
sake of existing (336).
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Bryson states that “anytime life does something bold it is quite an event, and few
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occasions were more eventful than when life moved on to the next stage in our
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narrative and came out of the sea” (337). At the beginning of time, land was a
as
hostile place. Yet life had an incentive to leave the water: predators, especially
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sharks. Plants had left the water and begun colonizing land 450 million years ago,
b
but larger animals didn’t emerge until 400 million years ago. Because the air was
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oxygen rich during this time, the animals grew quickly (scientists have made
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assumptions about the oxygen levels during this because of isotope geometry).
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Despite being able to assume a lot about this time, scientists still don’t quite know
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where humans came from. This is because there has never been a fossil revealing
humans’ evolution from something else. Bryson states that since life began, it has
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consisted of four megadynasties. The first consisted of primitive amphibians and

reptiles known as synapsids. The synapsids then divided into four streams, only
one of which survived. This stream became therapsids, and this period is known as
Megadynasty 2. After 150 million years, there is Megadynasty 3, the Age of
Dinosaurs. After the dinosaurs abruptly die, Megadynasty 4 arrives, the Age of
Mammals. Yet, what made each of these Megadynasties possible was the process
of extinction. In fact, Bryson gives the statistic that “99.99 percent of all species
that have ever lived are no longer with us” (342). The Earth has experienced five
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major extinction episodes—the Ordovican, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and

Cretaceous. In the Permian period, more than 95 percent of animals went extinct
as didone-third of insects; this is the closest the Earth has come to total extinction.
Bryson points out, however, that these numbers are all just estimates based off the
available fossils.
Chapter 23 Summary: “The Richness of Being”
Bryson opens the chapter by talking about the secret rooms inside the Natural
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History Museum, the behind-the-scenes areas that house “some seventy million
49
objects from every realm of life and every corner of the planet, with another
hundred thousand or so added to the collection each year” (350). The back rooms
36
contain rare specimens found by the likes of Joseph Banks, Alexander Von
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Humboldt, and Charles Darwin.
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Bryson then starts talking about bryophytes, or mosses. Moss is different than
m
lichen, although the two are often confused for one another. According to Henry S.
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Conrad, “Perhaps no great group of plants has so few uses, commercial or
economic, as the mosses” (352). They are, however, prolific, and scientists are still
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unsure about how many species of moss there are because new moss species are
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still being found (although they know that there are more than ten thousand
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species to date). Len Ellis, an avid studier of mosses, has a collection of 780,000
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moss specimens that are folded into sheets of heavy paper.

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Bryson goes on to talk about Sir Joseph Banks, England’s greatest botanist. He
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and a group of travelers set sail on a three-year adventure around the world; when
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it was over, he’d brought back thirty thousand plant specimens, fourteen hundred
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of which hadn’t been documented. While Banks’s journey was unique, plant
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collecting in the eighteenth century was not. In fact, it became a mania of sorts, and
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innumerous new species were discovered during this time by botanists and
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amateurs alike. It wasn’t until Carolus Linnaeus came along that each newly
discovered plant and animal species was catalogued, and a system brought order
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to all the new information.
Yet, for all that we know, Bryson says that there is a lot we don’t know about plants
and animals. One of the main reasons for our lack of knowledge is that “Most living
things are small and easily overlooked” (365). For example, bed mites, a prolific
organism that has been with humans for quite some time, was only discovered
during the age of color television. Given this fact, it’s no wonder that “the rest of
the small-scale world is barely known to us” (365). The final reasons are that “We
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don’t look in the right places” (366), “There aren’t enough specialists” (367), and
“The world is a really big place” (368).
Chapter 24 Summary: “Cells”
Bryson opens with the fact that we are all made of cells. While we start as just one
cell, that cell splits, becoming two, and “after just forty-seven doublings, you have
ten thousand trillion cells in your body and are ready to spring forth as a human
being” (371). Each human cell carries a copy of the complete genetic code, which is
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basically the instruction manual for the body. Even the simplest cells are:
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far beyond the limits of human ingenuity. To build the most basic yeast cell, for
36
example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components
12
as are found in the Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns
03
across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce
(372).
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Bryson continues by saying that human cells are a “country of ten thousand trillion
citizens, each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being”
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(372).
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Of the 200,000 different types of proteins working inside of us, scientists

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understand only about what 2 percent of them do. Surprises happen all the time.
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Bryson gives the example of how astonished they were to find nitric oxide, a toxin
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and air pollutant, being produced naturally in human cells. Most living cells don’t
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last more than a month, except for our brain cells; we receive about a hundred
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billion at birth, and we don’t get any more ever again.

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Robert Hooke was the first person to describe a cell in 1665—he called them cells
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because they reminded him of monks’ cells. There is no up or down inside a cell,
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no gravity, and every bit of space is used. Everything we eat or drink are combined
in the cells and converted into electricity (an amount we can’t feel because it’s 0.1
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volts of electricity traveling in nanometers). The cell is made up of an outer

membrane, a nucleus, and cytoplasm. If the furious activity inside the cell were
slowed down, we would see that it’s just millions of objects like “lysosomes,
endosomes, ribosomes, ligands, peroxisomes, proteins of every shape and size”
bumping into each other and performing ordinary tasks (378).
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Chapter 25 Summary: “Darwin’s Singular Notion”
Bryson opens by introducing Charles Darwin, who published On the Origin of

Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. At the age of twenty-two, he
embarked on a sea voyage with Robert FitzRoy, and brought back enough
specimens to keep him busy for years. During this time, he developed a theory for
the formation of coral atolls, but, interestingly, not a theory of evolution. In fact, a
theory of evolution had been around for quite some time. Darwin was responsible
for the idea that “all organisms competed for resources, and those that had some
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innate advantage would prosper and pass on that advantage to their offspring”
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(384). This became the theory of natural selection. Later in life, he also devised the
theory that humans evolved from primates, but he didn’t immediately share it with
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the world as he was afraid of the uproar it might cause.
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Bryson also mentions Gregor Mendel, who repeatedly bred and crossbred thirty
thousand pea plants, noting “every slight variation in the growth and appearance of
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seeds, pods, leaves, stems, and flowers” (392). Although Mendel never used the
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word gene, he invented the terms dominant and recessive to explain how each
flower has two factors, and when combined they produce “predictable patterns of
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inheritance” (392).
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Chapter 26 Summary: “The Stuff of Life”

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Bryson opens the chapter by saying “If your two parents hadn’t bonded just when
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they did—possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond—you wouldn’t be

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here” (397). In fact, looking back twenty generations, 1,048,576 people had to
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come together at precisely the exact correct moment for us to be here today. He
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gives these statistics to point out that somewhere down the line of our history, we
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are most likely geneticallyrelated to the people around us, including even our
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spouses. We are 99.99 percent similar to those around us, and it is the 0.1 percent
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difference that makes us individuals.

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Everyone has his or her own genome, which is comprised of chromosomes and
DNA. DNA is so good at replicating, and we have so much of it, that each cell
contains over six feet of DNA, which amounts to 3.2 billion letters of coding,
ensuring that each person is unique. Yet, despite all this activity, DNA isn’t alive,
which is why it can be extracted from dried blood at a crime scene or taken from
ancient bones.
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DNA was first discovered in 1869, by Johann Friedrich Miescher. However, its
importance wasn’t immediately recognized. This is because scientists couldn’t
figure out the link between DNA and protein; Bryson states that despite being
intimately intertwined, the two don’t speak the same language. They need RNA to
be the interpreter; that is, RNA “translates information from a cell’s DNA into terms
proteins can understand and act upon” (401).
It wasn’t until Thomas Hunt Morgan came along that the link between inheritance
and chromosomes became better understood. By methodically breeding and
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crossbreeding fruit flies, Morgan could isolate certain mutations, such as
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differences in eye color. However, it wasn’t until a man named Oswald Avery
infected an innocuous strain of bacteria with foreign DNA, thus making the bacteria
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infectious, that there was a visible link between heredity and DNA.
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Many different scientists are responsible for our current understanding of DNA.
However, it was Francis Crick and James Watson that received the most credit for
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solving the mysteries of DNA—they discovered DNA’s helix shape and the four
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chemical components of DNA: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine.
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These were the building blocks to understand that the human genome is basically
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“a kind of instruction manual for the body” (408). The genome lists the parts of
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human, but doesn’t tell us how we work, which is why so little is still understood
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about the genome.

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Section Five, the largest of the sections consisting of chapters sixteen through
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twenty-six, has a wide and often-disconnected focus. Consisting of such themes as

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the resilience of life on Earth, the atmosphere, the strange properties of water,
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theories about how life came into existence, bacteria, microorganisms, DNA,
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fossils, cells, and Darwin, this section is a hodgepodge entitled “Life Itself.” Yet, like
previous sections, these chapters follow Bryson’s familiar rhetorical style.
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Essentially, Bryson is attempting to paint a cohesive picture of human history in

these chapters. By moving from the macro to the micro, Bryson demonstrates that
all of life is interconnected. Humans need things like air and water as much as they
need things like bacteria and cells to survive. As he aptly states, “all life is one. That
is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there
is” (415).
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Chapters 27-30
Chapter 27 Summary: “Ice Time”
Bryson opens the chapter by talking about the Tambora mountain explosion of
1815. The explosion was equivalent to sixty thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs, and
killed a hundred thousand people. This was proceeded by 1816,known as the year
without a summer, where global temperatures were abnormally low. This caused
mass famine due to crop failure. However, the global temperature that year only
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fell by 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. But, as Bryson points out, Earth’s natural thermostat
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is “an exceedingly delicate instrument” (420).
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Bryson goes on to say that the nineteenth century was a cold time: “For two
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hundred years Europe and North America in particular had experienced a Little Ice
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Age, as it has become known, which permitted all kinds of wintry events—frost fairs
on the Thames, ice-skating races along Dutch canals—that are mostly impossible
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now” (420). For this reason, scientists during this time failed to see that compared
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to former epochs, their weather was balmy. In fact, they failed to understand how
arctic reindeer bones were uncovered in warm climates and how vast rocks were
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stranded in improbable places.

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While there was a theory that giant floods had carried the boulders onto
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mountainsides, it was James Hutton who theorized that widespread glaciation was
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the culprit. Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz adopted this theory and made the field of
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glaciation his own. To understand the dynamics of glaciation, Agassiz traveled

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everywhere, from mountaintops to dangerous crevasses. While his theory wasn’t

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initially accepted, it ultimately gained international esteem.

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Bryson discusses James Croll, who wrote a series of papers placing “particular
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emphasis on the motions of Earth and their effect on climate change” (423). Croll
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was the first to suggest that changes in the Earth’s orbit might explain the onset
and retreat of ice ages.
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Serbian academic Milutin Milankovitch added to Croll’s theory, stating that:
As Earth moves through space, it is subject not just to variations in the length
and shape of its orbit, but also to rhythmic shifts in its angles of orientation to the
Sun—its tilt and pitch and wobble—all affecting the length and intensity of
sunlight falling on any patch of land(425).
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By working out the angle and duration of incoming solar radiation at every latitude
on Earth, a process that took Milankovitch twenty years, he calculated the
relationship between ice ages and planetary orbit.
Chapter 28 Summary: “The Mysterious Biped”
Young Dutch doctor Marie Eugene Francois Thomas Dubois was the first person to
actively search out the earliest human remains. He went to the Indies on a hunch,
and,surprisingly, found what he was looking for. After working in Sumatra for a
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year, he found “a section of ancient human cranium now known as the Trinil
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skullcap. Though only part of a skull, it showed that the owner had had distinctly
nonhuman features but a much larger brain than any ape” (436). Dubois called the
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artifact Anthropithecus erectus, and tried to claim that it was the missing link.
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Today this artifact is known as Homo erectus, or Java Man.
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Around this same time, Raymong Dart, head of anatomy at the University of the
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Witwaters and, was “sent a small but remarkably complete skull of a child, with an
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intact face, a lower jaw, and what is known as an endocast—a natural cast of the
brain—from a limestone quarry on the edge of the Kalahari Desert at a dusty spot
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called Taung” (437). Dart recognized that the skull was earlier than Java Man, and
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placed it at two million years old. Because it appeared remarkably human, Dart
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named the artifact Homo simiadae, meaning “the man-apes.” However, his
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discovery was rejected by most authorities because it had been theorized, and
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widely accepted, that apes and humans had split at least fifteen million years ago
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in Asia.
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After Dart’s discovery, a flood of new artifacts was found. By the 1950s, the number
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of named hominid types was over a hundred. To introduce some order to these
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finds, F. Clark Howell proposed “cutting the number of genera to just two—
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Australopithecus and Homo—and rationalizing many of the species” (439). This

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order didn’t last. Today, there are over twenty different recognized types of
hominid.
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Bryson states that for most of history, humans were in the same line as
chimpanzees, yet little is known about the prehistory of chimpanzees. However,
about seven million years ago, a new species, the australopithecines, emerged
from the chimpanzees. The most famous hominid remains in the world belong to a
3.18-year-old australopithecine found in Ethiopia in 1974. The skeleton became
known as Lucy, and her founder, Donald Johnson, claimed she was the missing link
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between ape and human. Although Lucy’s skeleton was only 40 percent intact,
scientists hypothesized that she could walk and was a good climber.
Chapter 29 Summary: “The Restless Ape”
Bryson opens by stating that sometime nearly a million years ago, a hominid first
used a tool. It was a teardrop-shaped axe, and soon many other hominids were
doing the same thing. In fact, whole societies began doing little else other than
making tools. According to Ian Tattersall, “They made them in the thousands. There
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are some places in Africa where you literally can’t move without stepping on them.
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It’s strange because they are quite intensive objects to make. It was as if they
made them for the sheer pleasure of it” (453). These tools became known as
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Acheulean tools, after St. Acheul, in northern France, where the first examples
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were found.
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It seemed that Homo sapiens loved these tools, as they were found all over Africa,
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Europe, and western and central Asia. But what surprised scientists, Bryson notes,
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is that these tools have never been found in the Far East. In the 1940s, Harvard
paleontologist HallumMovius drew what’s now known as the Movius line, a line that
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runs in a southeasterly direction across Europe and the Middle East. The line
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clearly demonstrates that only Oldowan tools were used in all southeast Asia and
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into China. Since Homosapiens traveled far beyond this point, it’s been a mystery
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as to why they would suddenly abandon their treasured tools.

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Another paleontological mystery was discovered when Jim Bowler found human
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bones in a sand ridge in Australia. Using carbon dating, it was found that the bones
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were 60,000 years old. However:

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This was unexpected to the point of seeming practically impossible. At no time

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since hominids first arose on Earth has Australia not been an island. Any human
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beings who arrived there must have come by sea, in large enough numbers to
start a breeding population, after crossing sixty miles or more of open water
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without having any way of knowing that a convenient landfall awaited them
(455).
Scientists don’t know how or why they got there, especially considering that
scientists previously assumed that people couldn’t even speak 60,000 years ago,
let alone build watercraft.
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The main theory to explain early human movement has always been that humans
dispersed from Eurasia in two waves. The first wave consisted of Homo erectus,
who left Africa nearly two million years ago. Then, about a hundred thousand years
ago, a smarter species of creature, the Homo sapiens, left in a second wave.
Scientists don’t know how Homo sapiens replaced Homo erectus, but they did. In
fact, scientists know very little about Homo sapiens in general. Another idea,
known as the multiregional theory, believes that only Homo sapiens left Africa, and
that Homo erectus is an earlier version of the Homo sapiens.
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Chapter 30 Summary: “Good-Bye”
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Bryson opens by talking about how the dodo bird went extinct at about the same
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time that Isaac Newton’s Principia was being published. On the connection, he
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says:
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You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of
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occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being—a
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species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the
heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a
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creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t even remotely capable of
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understanding what we were doing to it as we did it(470).

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Bryson uses this as an example of how destructive humans can be on the

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environment around them. He gives the statistic that “over the last fifty thousand
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years or so wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, in often

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astonishingly large numbers” (471). In fact, the natural extinction rate throughout
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biological history has been about one species lost every four years, but human-
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Bryson mentions that we know little about what species have existed and then
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gone extinct. Naturalist Tim Flannery became obsessed with this idea and created
A Gap in Nature, a book that catalogs animal extinctions from the last three
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hundred years—a task that required him to travel the world looking through old
drawings, musty specimens, and written descriptions.
Bryson concludes by saying that humans, whether we’re here by luck or

Providence, have a responsibility to care for life on Earth. He ends the book by
saying, “We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, if to make sure
we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more
than lucky breaks” (478).
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The last section is entitled “The Road to Us” and focuses primarily on the various
theoretical roads that have led to us being here today. This includes the various ice
ages and species extinctions and evolutions that precipitated the arrival of the
human. While Bryson spends a great deal of time explaining this process and all
the fossils that accompanied each discovery, these chapters differ from the others
in that Bryson concludes with a personal plea. The last chapter, entitled “Good-
Bye,” focuses on how humans have negatively impacted their environment by
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causing mass species extinctions. In this chapter, he uses facts and statistics to tell
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the accurate and devastatingtruth about the potential future of humanity. Unlike
other chapters, in which Bryson attempts to remain fairly neutral, he concludes this
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chapter with a personal plea to take care of the planet and to make it better.
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MAJOR CHARACTER ANALYSIS

Edmond Halley
An English astronomer, Halley had a long and productive series of careers. 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” (45). He also invented the weather map and actuarial table,
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and worked with Isaac Newton to discover why planets were inclined to orbit in a
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very specific and precise ovular shape.
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Isaac Newton
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Cambridge’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Newton was equally brilliant
and strange. Described as a “solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia,
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famously distracted” man, Newton was as interested in alchemy as he was in
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mathematics and science (46). In a series of strange self-experiments, Newton
inserted a long sewing needle into his eye and wiggled it around, just to see what
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would happen, and also sometimes stared at the sun for as long as he could.
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Yet, amidst these eccentric tendencies, Newton invented calculus, laid the
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foundation for the science of spectroscopy, and wrote Principia, a paper explaining
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his three laws of motion.

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Henry Cavendish
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A brilliant London scientist, Cavendish was born into a lavish life of privilege.
Although he was the most gifted English scientist of his age, he was also arguably
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the strangest. He suffered from such extreme shyness that he couldn’t interact with
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people. In fact, if approached by anyone, Cavendish would immediately run away.

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It is for this reason that he remained a solitary man, locking himself away in his own
personal laboratory.
Cavendish was the first person to create water by isolating hydrogen and
combining it with oxygen. He also discovered “the law of the conservation of
energy, Ohm’s law, Dalton’s law of Partial Pressures, Richter’s Law of Reciprocal
Proportions, Charles Law of Gases, and the principles of electrical conductivity”
(60). He alsoprovided clues that would lead to the discovery of noble gases.
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James Hutton
Born in 1726 to a wealthy family, Hutton created the science of geology and
transformed our understanding of the Earth:
[Hutton} conducted experiments with chemicals, investigated methods of coal

mining and canal building, toured salt mines, speculated on the mechanisms of
heredity, collected fossils, and propounded theories on rain, the composition of air,
and the laws of motion, among much else (64).
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However, his main interest was geology. Hutton was a poor writer, however, and
his papers went virtually unnoticed until after his death.
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Charles Lyell
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Born into wealth, Oxford graduate Lyell hardly ever worked. Instead, he devoted
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his life to the pursuit of geology, and wrote The Principles of Geology, which
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“shaped geological thinking far into the twentieth century” (71). He also invented
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the geological time periods known as epochs.

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Gideon Algernon Mantell

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Described as “vain, self-absorbed, priggish, [and] neglectful of his family,” Mantell

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was lacking in character yet an avidly-devoted amateur paleontologist (84). He

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collected dinosaur bones before dinosaurs were a known clade—so many, in fact,
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that the bones filled Mantell’s house.

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Richard Owen
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Owen, a doctor and anatomist, often stole the limbs and organs of cadavers in
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order to dissect them. It was said that his own son thought him heartless, and that
he was the only person Charles Darwin ever hated. Physically unattractive and
ruthless towards those he didn’t like, Owen was generally an unlikable man.
However, despite his secretive and disturbing nature, he was a leading expert on
anatomy. He could take a pile of bones and put them back together with
exceptional accuracy. He was also the driving force behind London’s Natural
History Museum, and he was the first person to propose that museums should be
open to the public.
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Albert Einstein
Born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, Einstein didn’t show early signs of being a genius.
He didn’t learn to speak until he was three and failed his college entrance exams
on the first try. During his teenage years, he gave up his German citizenship to
avoid military conscription, and had a baby out of wedlock (which was given up for
adoption).Yet, while working at a Swiss patent office, Einstein developed his theory
of relativity, which would change our understanding of the world forever.
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Charles Darwin
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Born on February 12, 1809, Darwin was born to a prosperous physician. While his
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mother died when he was eight, Darwin nonetheless had an advantageous
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upbringing. However, he continually disappointed his father with his poor grades.
Darwin began work toward a degree in divinity from Cambridge, but after taking a
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sea voyage where he experienced ample adventure and accumulated a multitude
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of specimens, Darwin dedicated his life to science.
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Later in life, Darwin suffered mysterious physical symptoms that were never
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diagnosed, and he retired to his home, becoming a hermit. Hewrote the widely-
influential On the Origins of Species, and proposed the theory that humans
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descended from apes.

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THEMES
Origins
While Bryson wrote this book to explain the history of everything on Earth, he
constantly comes back to the idea of origins: how did the Earth begin, and how did
our life on this planet start? Although each section explores the different
components of life on Earth, Bryson continually ties these elements back to our
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origins as a species and as a planet. Bryson opens the book with the lens drawn
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back, lookingat things such as the universe and our solar system at large. He then
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focuses in, tying everything together by illustrating how the very things that
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comprise these vast structures are also the fundamental building blocks of the
human body.
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Bryson also provides continual information revealing the origins of each scientist
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he introduces. For example, rather than just stating the scientist and explaining his
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or her contribution to the field, Bryson gives an often-thorough background history
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of each scientist. By doing so, he reveals that each scientist is human, and
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simultaneously flawed and genius.

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The Lack of Sufficient Evidence

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Throughout the text, Bryson demonstrates the painstaking lengths scientists have
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gone to in order to understand the origins of life on Earth. He lists the wide array of
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scientists, theories, and technologies that have made our current knowledge
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possible. And yet, he repeatedly states that for everything that scientists know, we
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still know so little about how the world began, how life blossomed, and why we’re
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here. This common thread helps to weave the understanding that life and planet
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Earth are amazing. It also helps readers understand that discovery is a lengthy
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process, and for every new discovery an equal number of unanswerable questions
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arise.
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The Good and the Bad
Bryson goes to great lengths to demonstrate that not every scientific discovery has
been a good one. While scientists have done an abundance of good for our
species, like inventing life-saving antibiotics, they have also done an incredible
disservice to the planet. For example, while chemists were busy discovering a
plethora of new elements, they also stumbled upon such harmful substances as
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CFCs, which destroy the ozone layer. In addition, as technology advances, the
moral implications of these advancements become increasingly vague. For
example, although fishing technology has become increasingly advanced, allowing
fishermen to haul in unprecedented amounts of fish and thus feed more people,
the effect has been devastating for the oceans. As the fish populations continue to
decrease at alarming speeds, where do humans draw the line? Throughout each
section, Bryson is adamant to point out the harmful effects of each new discovery
whenever possible.
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IMPORTANT QUOTES
1. “No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny,
how spatially unassuming, is a proton.” (Chapter 1, Page 9)
Protons are a part of the atom, and atoms are what make up everything in the
universe. Here, Bryson emphasizes that miraculous nature of existence on
Earth, how everything is comprised of something invisible to the naked eye.
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2. “The average distance between stars out there is 20 million million miles.”
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(Chapter 2, Page 27)
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This statistic emphasizes how alone we are in the universe, and yet,
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according to many theories, such as Drake’s equation, it’s entirely probable
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that humans may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations.
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3. “He spent endless hours studying the floor plan of the lost Temple of King
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Solomon in Jerusalem (teaching himself Hebrew in the process, the better to
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scan original texts) in the belief that it held mathematical clues to the dates of
the second coming of Christ and the end of the world.” (Chapter 4, Page 47)
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This quote is describing Isaac Newton. Like many of the other scientists
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described in this book, Newton was an eccentric man with interests that lay
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far outside the realm of science. He was also quite into alchemy and the idea
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that he could turn base metals into precious ones.

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4. “It was the first really universal law of nature ever propounded by a human
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mind, which why Newton is regarded with such universal esteem.” (Chapter
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4, Page 49)
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This is referring to Newton’s law of gravitation as demonstrated in the famous

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Principia. Despite his eccentric nature, Newton, like so many other scientists,
contributed something invaluable to our understanding of the world today.
5. “Today, scientists have at their disposal machines so precise they can detect
the weight of a single bacterium and so sensitive that readings can be
disturbed by someone yawning seventy-five feet away, but they have not
significantly improved on Cavendish’s measurement of 1797.” (Chapter 4,
Pages 61-62)
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Cavendish was the first person to accurately assess the Earth’s weight, which
is an amazing feat considering the technological hindrances of his time. But
more amazing still is the fact that despite all our technological achievements
of the modern age, scientists haven’t been able to improve upon Cavendish’s
estimate.
6. “That the bone didn’t attract greater interest is more than a little puzzling, for
its appearance came at a time when America was in a froth of excitement
about the remains of large, ancient animals.” (Chapter 6, Page 79)
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This quote refers to the first dinosaur bone ever discovered. Despite that it
was unlike any bone found before, Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation’s leading
36
anatomist of the time, didn’t recognize that he was witnessing a never-
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before-seen species. Instead, he dismissed the bone, and thus dinosaurs
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weren’t to be discovered for another half a century.
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7. “Before Owen, museums were designed primarily for the use and edification
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of the elite, and even then it was difficult to gain access.” (Chapter 6, Page 91)
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Richard Owen was the first person to transform our expectations of what a
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museum should be used for. He believed that everyone should be able to

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view artifacts. In fact, he even came up with the idea of labeling each
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museum piece, so that the common person would know what they were
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looking at.
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8. “Chemistry as an earnest and respectable science is often said to date from

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1661, when Robert Boyle of Oxford published The ScepticalChymist—the first

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work to distinguish between chemicals and alchemists—but it was a slow and

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often erratic transition.” (Chapter 7, Page 97)

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For much of the eighteenth century, many chemists also considered

themselves alchemists, and the line between the two pursuits often blurred.
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This led to strange and accidental discoveries. For example, Hennig Brand
was convinced that he could turn human urine into gold, but in the process
invented phosphorous.
9. “Thanks to the devoted and unwittingly high-risk work of the first atomic
scientists, by the early years of the twentieth century it was becoming clear
that Earth was unquestionably venerable, though another half century of
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science would have to be done before anyone could confidently say quite
how venerable.” (Chapter 7, Page 111)
The early twentieth century was a time of vast discoveries, when the first
chemists uncovered that the world was comprised of never-before-known
elements, many of which were discovered by accident.
10. “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
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world: electricity, magnetism, gases, optics, acoustics, kinetics, and statistical
49
mechanics, to name just a few, all had fallen into order before them.”
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Because of this fact, many scientists assumed that there wasn’t much left on
03
Earth to be discovered. They were, of course, vastly mistaken, as shortly into
the twentieth century Einstein came along with his theory of relativity, and
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this changed everything we thought we knew about the universe.
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11. “In essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute, but
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relative to both the observer and to the thing being observed, and the faster
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one moves the more pronounced these effects become.” (Chapter 8, Page
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124)
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This is Bryson’s way of simply stating Einstein’s complex theory of relativity.

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Bryson furthers this analogy by saying that the theory is like a bystander
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watching a train moving by at a fast speed. Things appear distorted to the

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bystander, but to those inside the train, things appear normal.

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12. “While Einstein and Hubble were productively unraveling the large-scale
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structure of the cosmos, others were struggling to understand something

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closer to hand but in its way just as remote: the tiny and ever-mysterious
atom.” (Chapter 9, Page 133).
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This is an important realization, in that many of Earth’s biggest discoveries

happened simultaneously.
13. “The problem with measuring the age of the Earth was that you needed
rocks that were extremely ancient, containing lead- and uranium-bearing
crystals that were about as old as the planet itself—anything much younger
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would obviously give you misleading youthful dates—but really ancient rocks
are only rarely found on Earth.” (Chapter 10, Page 156)
Unable to find such rocks on Earth, scientists used meteor rocks, remnants of
creation, to more accurately assess the age of the Earth. This was an
important discovery because all previous attempts at dating the Earth had
been unsuccessful.
14. “The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite
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compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know,
49
filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical
laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.” (Chapter 11, Page 172)
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12
In this quote, Bryson is emphasizing that for all the scientific advancements
03
and discoveries that have been made throughout the ages, we still know so
little about the world around us. In fact, it seems, that the more scientists
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discover, the less they know for sure.
hi
ha
15. “Think of the Earth’s orbit as a kind of freeway on which we are the only
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vehicle, but which is crossed regularly by pedestrians who don’t know

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enough to look before stepping off the curb.” (Chapter 13, Page 193)
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Here, Bryson is making an analogy to describe the unpredictable nature of

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meteors in relation to the Earth. Meteors frequently come close to the Earth,
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and often scientists didn’t even know they were there until they were close to
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the Earth’s orbit.

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16. “For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of
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catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by

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human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic

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sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into

the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles
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an hour.” (Chapter 13, Page 204)
Bryson is describing what would happen if a huge meteor were to crash into
Earth. We wouldn’t know it was there until too late, and it would devastate
the entire planet.
17. “We know surprisingly little about what happens beneath out feet. It is fairly
remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and baseball has been
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playing World Series for longer than we have known that the Earth has a
core.” (Chapter 14, Page 209)
One refrain in the book is the idea that for as much as we do know, we know
so little about the world around us. In this case, Bryson is pointing out that so
little is known about the Earth’s center, mainly because we have no way of
physically looking inside the Earth. What we do know about the Earth’s
center has come from examining seismograph readings and reading waves
as they travel through the interior.
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18. “In the 1960s, while studying the volcanic history of Yellowstone National
Park, Bob Christiansen of the United States Geological Survey became
36
puzzled about something that, oddly, had not troubled anyone before: he
12
couldn’t find the park’s volcano.” (Chapter 15, Page 224)
03
Virtually the entire 2.2 million acres of Yellowstone National Park make up a
m
vast volcano known as a caldera—an enormous hot spot. Even more
hi
ha
terrifying is the fact that experts believe Yellowstone is due to erupt any
moment.
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19. “The most striking thing about our atmosphere is that there isn’t very much of
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it. It extends upward for about 120 miles, which might seem reasonably
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bounteous when viewed from ground level, but if you shrank the Earth to the
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size of a standard desktop globe it would only be about the thickness of a

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couple coats of varnish.” (Chapter 17, Page 255)

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Despite that our atmosphere is incredibly important—in fact, essential to life

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itself—it is an incredibly small and fragile thing.

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20. “What we do know is that because heat from the Sun is unevenly distributed,
ea
differences in air pressure arise on the planet. Air can’t abide this, so it rushes
around trying to equalize things everywhere. Wind is simply the air’s way of
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trying to keep things in balance.” (Chapter 17, Page 261)
Although meteorologists understand the mechanics of wind, they often have

a difficult time making predictions because wind is an unpredictable entity.
21. “Because water is so ubiquitous we tend to overlook what an extraordinary

substance it is. Almost nothing about it can be used to make reliable
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predictions about the properties of other liquids and vice versa.” (Chapter 18,
Page 271)
Water is unlike any other liquid known on Earth. In fact, scientists still aren’t
sure why water behaves the way it does. For example, while most liquids
contract by about 10 percent when chilled, water becomes nearly a tenth
more voluminous when chilled to the point of freezing.
22. “Proteins are what you get when you string amino acids together, and we
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need a lot of them. No one really knows, but there may be as many as a
49
million types of protein in the human body, and each one is a little miracle.”
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12
Bryson continually expresses how amazing protein is in the human body. Life
03
wouldn’t be possible without protein, and yet scientists still aren’t sure how
protein works. They know that statistically speaking, protein shouldn’t exist.
m
That’s because protein makes itself spontaneously, and without direction.
hi
ha
23. “The bottom line is that life is amazing and gratifying, perhaps even
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miraculous, but hardly impossible—as we repeatedly attest with our own

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modest existences.” (Chapter 19, Page 291)

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By this point, Bryson has spent much of the book explaining various
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discoveries and theories that have attempted to explain how life arose and
M
flourished on Earth. It’s clear that life does exist, so it’s not impossible, and
b
yet so much is still an inexplicable mystery.

lu
C
24. “If creatures as intimately associated with us as bed mites escaped our
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notice until the age of color television, it’s hardly surprising that most of the
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rest of the small-scale world is barely known to us.” (Chapter 23, Page 365)
ea
Bryson is commenting on the little-known nature of the small-scale world

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around us. Scientists are still discovering new microorganisms every day.
This is because microorganisms are small and easily overlooked, and
oftentimes scientists don’t look in the right places.
25. “Every cell in nature is a thing of wonder. Even the simplest are far beyond
the limits of human ingenuity. To build the most basic yeast cell, for example,
you would have to miniaturize about the same components as are found in a
Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then
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A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING Reader's Club Masood Ali 55
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somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce.” (Chapter

24, Page 372)
Here, Bryson is commenting on the mysteriously amazing nature of cells.

Cells are vital to life. Yet, for as small as they are, they are immeasurably
complex.
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ESSAY TOPICS
1. According to the title, Bryson attempts to provide the reader with a “short
history of nearly everything” that has happened thus far on Earth. Does he
achieve his goal? Why or why not?
2. In Bryson’s introduction, he states that one of his intentions with this book is
to give readers science that is accessible. Does he achieve this goal?
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3. In Bryson’s introduction, he states that one of his intentions for writing the
49
book was because he wanted to understand the oldest, biggest questions in
36
the universe. Does he succeed at this?
12
4. Bryson states that he isn’t a scientist. Considering his many personal
03
opinions that are scattered throughout the pages, does Bryson’s lack of a
m
scientific background help or hinder the narrative?
hi
ha
5. Could Bryson’s book be used as a scientific textbook in a classroom? Why or
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why not?
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6. Bryson makes an argument in the last chapter of the book. What is that
d
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argument, and how does it affect the reading of the previous chapters?
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7. Which of Bryson’s accounts of famous scientists was the most interesting to

M
you, and why?

b
lu
8. Does Bryson’s background as a journalist help or hinder the scientific subject

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matter?
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9. Which facts in the book most surprised you? Offer five examples of things
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you were startled to learn and include why you were taken aback by them.
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10. Were you more interested in the big things (planets, dinosaurs, meteors) in
Bryson’s book, or the small things, such as bacteria and cells? What drew you
more to one than the other?
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R

CHAPTER SUMMARIES AND ANALYSES 4

Gideon Algernon Mantell 45

measurements, and gives helpful and often eccentric background information

CHAPTER SUMMARIES AND ANALYSES

in the known universe. Before atoms, there was a vast nothingness.

from a “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” to a sentient human being (3).

Basically, we are incredibly lucky to be here; since the beginning of time,

everything had to align perfectly for us to be here today.

against all odds, a notion that is thoroughly explored in later chapters.

Chapter 1 Summary: “How to Build a Universe”

There is controversy in the scientific community regarding when the moment of

how our Earth is a sphere, there is no edge to the universe.

Chapter 2 Summary: “Welcome to the Solar System”

huge moon had gone unnoticed for so long.

Chapter 3 Summary: “The Reverend Evan’s Universe”

collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a

six supernovae to date.

Bryson concludes that supernovae are critical to the foundation of creation

for life to begin.

Chapters 1-3 Analysis

Edmond Halley. Halley, a well-respected scientist and inventor, was driven by a

Newton, Cambridge’s Professor of Mathematics, was a genius, and equally strange

the subsequent apocalypse. Despite these eccentric tendencies, Newton

responsible forone of the most accurate measurements of a degree of meridian.

Surprisingly, this is an accurate number. Even despite today’s advances in

Chapter 5 Summary: “The Stone Breakers”

geology had become the hot topic of the nineteenth century.

Buckley at Oxford. Buckley was a leading authority on coprolites, or fossilized

Chapter 6 Summary: “Science Red in Tooth and Claw”

wiped out entire species.

Chapter 7 Summary: “Elemental Matters”

flame. Thus, Brand accidently discovered phosphorous. However, Swedish chemist

applying electricity to a molten substance,” Davy discovered a dozen new

should be abbreviated by their Greek or Latin names, and Ivanovich Mendeleyev

Chapters 4-7 Analysis

electricity, magnetism, gases, optics, acoustics, kinetics, and statistical mechanics,

the atomic level of chemical reactions” (117).

longstanding belief that luminiferous ether, an imaginary substance that was

dimensions known as spacetime. Spacetime, Bryson states, is best visualized as a

Chapter 9 Summary: “The Mighty Atom”

the attributes of atoms by calling them “small, numerous, and practically

exist until it is observed” (144). In other words, an electron must be presumed to be

everywhere and nowhere until observed.

Bryson mentions Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment, in which he places a

hypothetical cat in a box with one atom of a radioactive substance attached to a

vial of hydrocyanic acid:

Chapter 10 Summary: “Getting the Lead Out”

Bryson opens the chapter by introducing University of Chicago graduate

An English professor named Arthur Holmes solved the problems inherent to

the first particle detector.

elusive particles, scientists need millions of gallons of water in underground

To bring simplicity to this highly theoretical field, physicist Murray Gell-Mann

definitive theory for physics.

quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know,

whose properties we don’t truly understand” (172).

Chapter 12 Summary: “The Earth Moves”

Bryson opens by talking about Charles Hapgood, a geologist who adamantly

denied that there was any correspondence in shape between continents on

Mendes’s extensive fieldwork, which somehow concluded that there were no

Chapters 8-12 Analysis

similar rhetorical style throughout: he introduces the theme of the chapter by

even when they don’t exactly align according to theme.