“A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson

Why there are literally trillions of books in the world seeking to record the history of everything that has ever been, Bill Bryson did it in 624 pages.

Granted, it is a ‘short history’ of ‘nearly everything’ so you can’t expect a huge book or for everything to be covered…but for the most part, Bill does a great job. He succeeded at what he set out to do. 😀

All joking aside (and, yeah, I know the above is fairly lame…but hey, I have to try every once in a while 😕 ), this is a really good book that gives an overview of the atoms and physical laws that lead to the creation of the world. Speaking in layman’s terms, Bill does a good job weaving in studies from different fields of science into one story line.

I also enjoyed some of the stories Bill included about the lives of the scientists who figured out some of this stuff.

Sadly, however, I didn’t like the way the book ended as Bill shifted his focus from describing the atoms and physics of life to promoting human evolution, which, of course, is par for the course. I know that this disagreement with the book is more of a religious disagreement as I firmly believe that life on planet earth (all life, by the way) was created by a Creator who is still personally involved in the world today.

Another part of this disagreement is that science itself has not ‘proven beyond a doubt’ that the theory of evolution is in fact true. Instead there are many, many, many unknown factors and variables that have proven troublesome to evolutionist, including the mathematical unlikelihood that life of any type could have ‘evolved’ randomly (the number of random chances needed to create life is ten to twenty times greater than age of the universe, using the ‘old’ age nonetheless).

There is also the chance that the physical laws that we enjoy right now were not in place at the beginning of the universe – rendering any guesses backwards invalid.

In wrapping up, Bill Bryson’s book “A Short History of Nearly Everything” is a book worth reading as it give you an overview of the current scientific mindset in an easy to understand manner. Just throw out the bones and eat the meat. 🙂