If you’ve ever seen James Burke’s “Connections”, you’ll have a better understanding of how this book is organized, jumping from concept to concept, stringing together the big picture.īryson wrote the book because he found that science textbooks state facts, like the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but don’t really go into how these discoveries came about. Needless to say, there’s a lot of ground to cover. And each of these discoveries are based on previous discoveries. But he based his discoveries on a technique of radioactive dating and knowledge that meteorites are rocks from space. He made this discovery by assuming correctly that meteorites were formed at roughly the same time as the Earth, and since they didn’t come from the Earth, they couldn’t be contaminated with local minerals. For example, Clair Patterson finally discovered the age of the Earth in 1953. From the instant of the Big Bang to right now, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson chronicles how we ended up where we are – and how we figured it all out.Ī Short History of Nearly Everything starts at the beginning, with the Big Bang, but then it starts to jump around following the connections of scientific discovery.
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