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Readings and musings

Notes on A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

4/20/2013

2 Comments

 
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I just finished reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I enjoyed the book, but It definitely wasn't short and it definitely didn't cover nearly everything.

The true subject of the book was the history of science and our understanding of the world from a scientific standpoint: the Big Bang, physics, chemistry, genetics, biology, and geology. I liked how the book set out a lot of difficult questions that the author pondered initially and which inspired his search for answers.

My biggest takeaway was that there is still so much we don't know or understand about how our world works and how we got here today. That's both exciting and humbling. The book also confirmed which subjects I'm most excited about in science (physics and chemistry) and which I'm less excited about, simply by the level of attention and excitement I had for the various chapters. This is a great book if you want to see how the various scientific disciplines interact and want a high-level overview featuring all the big historical figures throughout science.

Intro
Atoms make u
Extremely fortunate due to evolution and from ancestor survival
Miracle of science
Layers of earth and hotness inside it like sun
How do scientists figure things out

Part 1; lost in the cosmos

1 how to build a universe
Proton
Singularity
Big Bang
No past and no where
Universe created in 3 minutes
13B years ago
Cosmic background radiation left over from Big Bang
Edge of universe
Most ancient protons from edge of universe coming in as microwaves
Inflationary theory
Perhaps many past failed big bangs
This was only one that could create us
No edge of universe because bends
Closed or open or flat universe theories

2 welcome to the solar system
Pluto moon finding based on where instruments pointed
Likely to have another thinking civilization

3 reverend Evans universe
Finding dying stars from past
Supernovae dying stars created heavier elements for solidifying universe
Our moon came from mars part hitting us

Part 2 the size of the earth

4 the measure of things
Triangulation to measure distance to moon
Haley
Wren
Newton
Alchemy
Principia
Laws of motion
Nonspherical earth
Norwood navigation of seas and trig and earth circumference
Venus transit
Cavendish
Measuring earth mass

5 the stone breakers
Geology
Layers of erosion and fossils
Heat from earth creating mountains
Fieldwork stone breaking
Lile
Earth aging difficult
Kelvin young genius
Thermodynamic laws

6 science read in tooth and thorn
Dinosaur fossil found in 19th century
Mastedon
Theory of extinctions anti religious 
Strata

7 elemental matters
Chemistry vs alchemy
Brownian motion
Mendeleev
Periodic table immense organizer
Curie radiation
Aging by half life
Rutherford
Radioactivity first considered healthy and put into consumer goods

Part 3 a new age dawns

Eight Einstein's universe
Gibbs
Planck
Ether
Einstein
Thought experiments
Hubble on astronomy and universe expansion and age calculation by galaxy red shift/fly away rate
Standard candles: stars used to measure universe distances through red shift rates
Universe expanding and had a beginning

9 the mighty atom
We are all short-lived atomic reincarnations
Dalton
All science is either physics or stamp collecting
Brains not wired to visualize universe or atomic scale and electron clouds
Cannot measure current state of universe precisely
Action at a distance with entangled particles

10 getting the lead out
Lead products and gasoline
Radiocarbon dating
Earth 4B years old based on meteorite rock dating
Work against leaded gasoline

11 master marks clouds
Particle detectors
Atom smashers
Quarks
Universe age 13B years

12 the earth moves
Continents in motion
Pangea
Same Animals on different continents
Land bridges
Continental drift theory
Subduction of ocean sediment
Plate tectonics

Part 4 dangerous planet

13 bang
Meteor impacts
Hundreds of millions of earth crossing potential asteroids
Very few ppl tracking them
Dinosaur extinction
Impact now would take us by surprise

14 the fire below
Volcanic eruptions
Know more about composition of sun than earth
Richter scale
 Tokyo on 3 meeting tectonic plates
City waiting to die
Know little about inside of earth and failed to go deep into it

15 dangerous beauty
Yellowstone supervolcano
Due for eruption
Largest active one in world

Part 5 life itself

16 lonely planet
Free diving
Nitrogen narcosis
Humans adaptable
Moon necessary for earth spin stability and fading away
Earth in perfect location
Perfect elements and magma to sustain life

17 into the troposphere
Wind extremely energetic
Coreolis effect
Fahrenheit made first accurate thermometer
Cloud classification

18 bounding name
Water so important and ubiquitous
Oceanography taught lessons about life
30M species in ocean
Extinctions by over fishing
Know very little about earths biggest system

19 beginning of life
Proteins miracles
Ordered assembly
Requires DNA who can only replicate
The big birth of first life form

20 small world
Bacteria on us everywhere
We require them to survive
Evolve more rapidly than us and share info
Single super organism
Bacteria under earth
Bacteria can be revived after 250M years dormant
Bacteria and host relationship
Can't be too efficient at hurting host or spreading
Some try to spread quickly like flu and some sit idle for years and then spring into action like HIV
White cells protect and fight
Swine flu killed as many as ww1 in 4 months

21 life goes on
Very few fossils survive and few of those are found
In favor of marine creatures

22 all that
Life on earth goes extinct very quickly
Life just wants to be
Humans are tiny fraction of all time life has been around
Extinction as way of life

23. The richness of being
Search for best classification system
Linnaeus
Lots of disagreements
Very inaccurate knowledge of how many living things on our planet

24 cells

25 Darwin singular idea
Struggle and natural selection
Mendel genes

26 the stuff of life
DNA
Purpose of life is to propagate DNA
Most of DNA made for reproducing it not helping u
Organisms slaves to genes
Most of DNA does nothing


Part 6 the road to us

27 ice time
Not understood why or when have ice ages 

28 biped
Human fossils very few
Evolution to us not predestined and random

29 restless ape
Stone tools
Humans have much less variability genetically than many animals because we all descended from one small area in Africa

30 good bye
Humans caused dodo bird to be extinct
Killed off many species
Lost track of many others
Bad at keeping track of things
All living things lucky to be here

2 Comments
Jason link
7/3/2014 03:54:49 pm

Hi thank you for the list of chapters and notes, I found it helpful.

I am currently working my way through this book. Bryson has an interesting way of writing - I would call it a convoluted narrative, with a main track and a winding off track as he delves into the lives and peculiarities of the various people and organisations encountered.

Reply
Jacob
11/22/2016 02:29:34 pm

Thank you for this, I found it incredibly helpful as it wasn't too long. Concise yet still covers all the main points in such a largely wonderful piece of literature :)

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