Quotes from book
A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson

A Short History of Nearly Everything by American-British author Bill Bryson is a popular science book that explains some areas of science, using easily accessible language that appeals more to the general public than many other books dedicated to the subject. It was one of the bestselling popular science books of 2005 in the United Kingdom, selling over 300,000 copies.A Short History deviates from Bryson's popular travel book genre, instead describing general sciences such as chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics. In it, he explores time from the Big Bang to the discovery of quantum mechanics, via evolution and geology.

“There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

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

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Pages 1-2
Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

“Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“One planet, one experiment.” If”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything

“When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“But what is life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours — arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Page 336
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

“Absolute brain size does not tell you everything — or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn't have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Pages 446-447, footnote
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Page 3
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

“In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Page 53
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

“It is natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity — in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes — an interesting side branch.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Page 311
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

“Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Page 380
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

“As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: "In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things that happen from time to time." To which adds Guth: "Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts."”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

On the Big Bang
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

“All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

On the moment of creation; page 10
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

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