A Short History of Nearly Everything

The summary

You are the end of an unbroken streak of luck that is almost too long to believe. The right orbit around the sun, a collision that gave Earth a moon of exactly the right size, and a line of ancestors stretching back billions of years in which not one link ever failed. As Bill Bryson puts it, not one of them 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” — the only possible sequence of combinations that could result, eventually and all too briefly, in you. Against that, 99.99% of all species that ever lived are extinct. Bryson’s project is to tell the story of how we came to know all this, and to make science, so often written dryly, feel like the adventure it actually is.

A universe that had every reason not to exist

In the 20th century scientists worked out that all matter expanded from a tiny, dimensionless point roughly 13.8 billion years ago. The proof arrived almost by accident. In 1965, radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson kept picking up a faint interference on a large antenna in New Jersey; the hiss turned out to be cosmic background radiation left over from the birth of the universe, the first hard evidence for the Big Bang. About 1% of the static on an old television is a remnant of that first moment. And the whole thing is finely balanced on a knife’s edge: had any condition been even slightly different, a cosmos capable of supporting life would never have formed.

Then there is the sheer scale. Pluto sits inside our own solar system and is still billions of miles away and unreachable; the Milky Way alone holds hundreds of billions of stars, and their light is so old that we see them as they were years ago. In 1961 Frank Drake estimated there could be millions of advanced civilizations in our galaxy, yet with average distances of more than 200 light years between them, catching a signal is nearly hopeless. Space is vast enough to make company probable and contact almost impossible.

Learning to weigh and date the Earth

Our solar system improbably coalesced from an enormous cloud of gas and dust more than four billion years ago, and 500 million years later, carbon dioxide warmed the young planet enough for life to take hold. Figuring out the Earth itself took centuries of stubborn, sometimes absurd effort. One of the first great surveys, the French Geodesic Mission to the Equator, grew out of a bet over whether the planet bulged more at the equator or the poles. Newton’s laws of motion and gravity spurred the expeditions that followed, and we eventually learned that Earth weighs almost 6 billion trillion metric tons and, thanks to its spin, is an oblate spheroid rather than a perfect sphere.

Understanding deep time came harder. James Hutton wrote opaquely but presciently about mountains raised by colliding land, and Charles Lyell popularized uniformitarianism, the idea that the same slow processes at work today shaped the Earth across unimaginable spans. Even so, it took a long while for people to accept what dinosaur bones implied — that entire species can simply vanish. The key to the planet’s real age was radioactivity, discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1896 when they found that certain rocks release energy without changing. It let Clair Cameron Patterson finally pin Earth’s age at 4.54 billion years. Curie herself became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win twice, and the only one to win in two different sciences.

The misfits who cracked reality

The people who explained the universe were rarely tidy geniuses. Einstein failed exams and struggled to find academic work before publishing relativity, which showed that space and time bend to the observer and that gravity curves spacetime itself. His E=mc² revealed that mass and energy are interchangeable — the matter in your body holds enough latent energy to rival 30 large hydrogen bombs. Max Planck’s quantum theory showed light behaving as both particle and wave; Bohr and Rutherford mapped the atom; Henrietta Swan Leavitt, working against the barriers of her time, devised a way to measure cosmic distances, and Edwin Hubble used it to discover the universe is expanding. Dmitri Mendeleev gave us the periodic table.

A foothold worth defending

Life clings to a narrow ledge. The precise distance from the sun, a molten core generating a protective atmosphere, a stabilizing moon, an intricately timed chain of events — all of it had to line up. It stays precarious. A cataclysmic asteroid finished the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and by some estimates civilization-ending near-misses cross our path two or three times a week, while Yellowstone’s supervolcano could erupt at any time. Life began as simple microbes around four billion years ago, then became plants, sea creatures, and land life, and microbes still make up at least 80% of all biomass. Darwin explained the engine — natural selection — but hid his theory for nearly 15 years, fearing the backlash. Modern genetics later confirmed how deep the kinship runs: every living thing is an elaboration on a single original plan, and about half the chemical functions in a banana are fundamentally the same as those in you. As much as 97% of species may still await discovery, even as human activity drives extinctions and thins the ozone that shields us.

The bottom line

Existence is a run of cosmic near-misses too improbable to squander, and almost everything we know about that run was learned only in the last century. Life of any kind is so lucky and so precious that protecting it is the one obvious response. Read this if you want the whole sweep of science explained with wit and wonder instead of jargon.