Bill Bryson - A Short History Of Nearly Everything

[FrostyBoy]

Anyone read this or reading it?

I can't stop reading it.

The way Bill writes it, really opens my eyes how we got from A to B.

And some of the stuff is amazing. Divers getting sucked through pipes the size of garden hoses?

Read this book if you haven't.

[KrazyHorse]

And some of the stuff is amazing. Divers getting sucked through pipes the size of garden hoses?

Horse****.

[Gangerolf]

Bryson

I haven't read this one but I highly recommend his other stuff. Like "Neither here nor there" and "Down under".
Hilarious guy

[Drake Tungsten]

Horse****.

Not saying it proves anything, but this video is awesome.

[Richelieu]

Currently reading it. Good book.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten

Horse****.

Not saying it proves anything, but this video is awesome.

That is indeed cool. The difference there is that it's not a tiny pipe; it's a big pipe with a tiny hole...

[Lazerus]

But the crab obviously died doing that so whats the point of this getting through small pipe thing ? of course its possible with a high enough vacuum ...

[FrostyBoy]

very cool Drake, thanks for that

[FrostyBoy]

btw KH, the bones are left behind inside the suit, the rest of the body is sucked up through the tube. It has happened.

[Tingkai]

Good book for old guys like me. A lot of the science I learned in school is long out of date.

[KrazyHorse]

I wish I had a copy of the video my friend made of a ping pong ball destroying an orange.

It was sick.

The things you can do with some PVC tubing and a vacuum pump...

[RGBVideo]

A random guy at Amazon.com had this to say about the book:

I read an interview with Bryson in New Scientist not long ago in which he admitted that he really didn't understand a lot of what all these scientists were telling him, and unfortunately that's all too clear in reading this book. As a consequence Bryson gives you a good deal of infomation peppered with some really horrid misunderstandings and errors. I'm reminded in reading "A Short History" of Bryson's book on language, in which he either repeats or invents any number of terribly inaccurate folk etymologies. Also a very readble but terribly inaccurate tome. He's great fun to read on personalities (although the accuracy of some of his characterizations is suspect) and he does have an ear for fascinating trivia, but science takes a back seat to all of this. All too often we get the beginning of an explanation that trails off into a "and anyways it's all very complicated but it's it just fascinating" sort of gee-whiz summary. One suspect that we've just reached the point where Bryson has either lost the thread of understanding or perhaps just decided that he doesn't care to understand something any further.

Any truth in this? The concept of the book looks interesting, but...

[Richelieu]

It's a great book for Civ Fanatics and an OK book for Poly's OT.

[Getao321]

I get to read it for class

the style is nice (I've definitly read more boring "fun" books)

the people / evolution of the ideas is definitly the point of this book. I think this book does a better job of explaining the history of many ideas than it does explaining the current model. I think he roots for the underdogs too much, however

[FrostyBoy]

From what I gather, Bill has written it not from the perspective of himself, but from the perspectives of the minds that made the discoveries first. Which is a brilliant way of doing it, it makes the book unbiased, it shows you in a sort of step by step form how things progressed over time.
It also makes it easy to visualise what they understood back then, and what we understand now.

VJ, having read most of the book now, I can tell you that Bill wrote this with the intention for a broader audience; and in order to do that, you have to keep the reader interested and entertained. Which is why Bill has constantly, throughout the book, praised and amazed so many aspects of the universe.