A Short History of Nearly Everything

I hate science. There I've said it.
Science textbooks, science teachers,
science classes....For me, it was
all, as Bryson writes in the book's
introduction, “...as if (they) wanted
to keep the good stuff secret by making
all of it soberly unfathomable.”

For the science hater (and, I suspect,
for the science lover), this is a
singularly wonderful book. Bryson makes
Einstein and Darwin, Dalton and
Rutherford seem like cool dudes.
He talks about big subjects like the
expanding universe, plate tectonics,
the human genome, and Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle the way other
people talk about baseball.
Highly recommended.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book:

From the introduction:
“Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted
that you could make it. Getting here wasn't
easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a
little tougher than you realize. To begin
with, for you to be here now trillions of
drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in
an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner
to create you....For the next many years (we
hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly
engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative
efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you
experience the supremely agreeable but generally
underappreciated state known as existence. (1)”

“It isn't easy to become a fossil....When
your spark is gone, every molecule you own
will be nibbled off you or sluiced away to
be put to use in some other system. That's
just the way it is. (321)”

“Of course, it is possible that alien beings
travel billions of miles to amuse themselves
by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or
frightening the daylights out of some poor
guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in
Arizona (they must have teenagers, after
all), but it does seem unlikely. (27)”

“Every atom you possess has almost certainly
passed through several stars and been parts
of millions of organisms on its way to
becoming you. (134)”

“The good news, it appears, is that it takes
an awful lot to extinguish a species. The
bad news is that the good news can never be
counted on. (206).”

Bryson quotes Freeman Dyson: “The more I
examine the universe and study the details
of its architecture, the more evidence I
find that the universe in some sense must
have known we were coming.”

“You have no secrets from your cells. They
know far more about you than you do. Each
one carries a copy of the complete genetic
code-the instruction manual for your body-
so it knows not only how to do its job but
every other job in the body. (371)”

“We are...uncannily alike. Compare your genes
with any other human being's and on average
they will be about 99.9 percent the same.
(398)”

“It isn't being an organism. In the whole
universe, as far as we yet know, there is
only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of
the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain
you, and even it can be pretty grudging. (239)”

“...if you were designing an organism to look
after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor
where it is going and keep a record of where
it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings
for the job. But here's an extremely salient
point: we have been chosen....As far as we
can tell, we are the best there is. We may
be all there is. It's an unnerving thought
that we may be the living universe's supreme
achievement and its worst nightmare
simultaneously. (477)”

“The upshot of all this is that we live in a
universe whose age we can't quite compute,
surrounded by stars whose distances we don't
altogether know, filled with matter we can't
identify, operating in conformance with
physical laws whose properties we don't truly
understand. (172)”