Okay, I've finally emerged from the 400s with one big takeaway: my Spanish is improving all the time as I read with a pencil and dictionary and boldly speak every chance I get. On to the 500s, which is all hard science, all the time. "Everything under the sun"... or rather "everything in creation," as all the stuff beyond the sun is also included. The first decade is, as usual, for general introductions, and Bill Bryson seems like he would be an entertaining guide to life, the universe, and (almost) everything. I should have known better when I didn't read him in the 390's, and again when I so didn't read him in the 420's that he didn't even get a mention. Maybe I should confine myself to his travel books, having listened to both A Walk in the Woods and The Road to Little Dribbling with great enjoyment.
To be fair, A Short History is also a travel book of sorts... if time travel counts. Not only time travel as in, "I will begin the story of the Universe at the beginning of the Universe," as Dickens might have said, but also and even more time travel through the development of our ideas about the development of the Universe. Because, as it turns out, Bryson doesn't really want to write about neutrinos. He wants to write about how they were discovered-- and, more importantly, he wants to gossip about their discoverers.
He starts innocently enough, by detailing how the sound of the background radiation resulting from the Big Bang was simultaneously heard by two Bell Labs employees and described theoretically by a team of Princeton researchers. So, that's a pretty interesting story, and along the way you get a very clear idea of what this noise is and how much it matters. But one thing leads to another, and the next thing Bryson knows, the book has really become a series of anecdotes about the wacky antics of geologists, astronomers and the like, which is not exactly what I wanted. I was looking for a popularization of science, not a popularization of scientists. Oh well.
The stories I read were very entertaining, I'll give Bryson that, and along the way I did learn some very fun facts. My favorite fact is that good old Bishop Ussher, who dated the six-day Creation of Earth to October 23, 4004 BC, had long since ceased to hold sway over the thinking of even deeply religious scientists before Darwin made his discoveries. In 1770, for example, George-Louis Leclerc tried to estimate the earth's age based on patterns of heat loss, arriving at a figure very roughly in the neighborhood of 100,000 years. By the middle of the nineteenth century most educated people were thinking in terms of millions or tens of millions of years. Darwin did not knock down the "young Earth" theory--that had already been done. What he did do, along with Lord Kelvin, was turn the millions of years into hundreds of millions of years (current estimates are running about 4.6 billion). So that's an interesting little tidbit.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that what Bryson really wants to do in this book is what he did so well in the books I enjoyed-- he wants to tell human stories. He wants to talk about people, not ideas. So if you want to meet a lot of very smart, very odd people, and get a whirlwind tour of life, the universe and everything, I guess this is the book for you. As for me, nearly everything turned out to be a little too much.
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