Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Short History of Nearly Everything, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science, Discovery, and Mystery
Writing, Wonder, and Inspiration
Progress, Sexism, and Dogma
Existence, Awe, and Survival
Summary
Analysis
On clear nights, amateur stargazer Reverend Robert Evans looks at dying stars from his back-porch telescope in Australia as a hobby. What Evans sees, however, is the stars as they were when their light left them, before traveling many light years toward Earth. The North Star we see now is the North Star as it was 680 years ago—it might have died since then, for all we know.
Bryson picks up on the idea of Earth’s immense distance from other celestial bodies, which he raised at the end of the last chapter, in order to emphasize that human knowledge of space is often limited to things that happened a long time ago because that’s all we can see. The fact that the night sky might look radically different in real time shows how little we know about the universe’s present state.
Themes
When a massive star dies, it releases a blip of light as bright as 100 billion suns: those blips are what Evans hunts. He’s so good at it that it’s like covering a Walmart parking lot with dining room tables and shaking a pinch of salt on each one. If you added one extra grain to one of those tables, Evans would be able to spot the difference. He doesn’t have any special training, just a good eye and a knack for memorizing star fields.
Bryson emphasizes how skilled Evans is by comparing his stargazing to spotting a grain of salt added to an entire parking lot’s worth of space. Scientific knowledge, then, depends not only on specialized training but the presence of individuals with the right intuitive skills, like a good eye and good memory.
Themes
In 1930, an aggressive fitness buff, bully, and “irritating buffoon” named Fritz Zwicky coins the term “supernova.” He hypothesizes that if a star were to collapse into a dense, concentrated core, atoms would be crushed together and their electrons and protons would create neutrons, leaving enough energy leftover to make a big light explosion that would be visible across the universe. Despite Zwicky’s “revolutionary” ideas, he has no how to prove his hypothesis. Zwicky also predicts that there’s extra mass in the universe that humans can’t see, which we now call “dark matter.” Five years later, Zwicky’s colleague Oppenheimer popularizes the idea of neutron stars “in a landmark paper” but doesn’t cite Zwicky because of Zwicky’s bad attitude.
Bryson’s story about Zwicky and Oppenheimer shows that scientific discovery arises from a blend of big thinking (to come up with a good idea or hypothesis) and specialized training (to provide evidence and data for the idea or hypothesis). Bryson also emphasizes the limited scale of human knowledge about the universe—there are some things, like dark matter, which we can’t even see or detect. Finally, Bryson alludes to internal politics among scientists, which he will expand on as he begins to weave in the impact of prejudices on the scientific endeavor.
Themes
Supernovae are extremely rare—spotting one is like standing on top of the Empire State Building and spotting someone lighting a 21st birthday cake in the window of a Manhattan building, which makes Evans’s skill even more formidable. His excellent memory of star fields helps, as does his location (the Southern Hemisphere), and his telescope (which he can move around easily, unlike massive professional telescopes). Most nights, however, Evans finds nothing.
Bryson invokes another metaphor—of spotting a candle being lit from the Empire State Building—to emphasize the vast scale that astronomers are working with, and the sheer imperceptibility of the data they’re looking for. All this shows that there are many mysteries to be uncovered, and a lot of perseverance is often necessary to uncover them.
Themes
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Nowadays, it’s easy to automate the process with a digital camera attached to a telescope that scans the sky, but Evans thinks that kills the “romance” of it all. Bryson wonders what would happen if a nearby star exploded. He asks astronomer John Thorsten, who tells Bryson that if a supernova were to happen near Earth, it would evaporate the magnetosphere (the magnetic zone around Earth that protects humans from harmful radiation) and annihilate us instantly. Luckily, there aren’t any stars large enough to collapse into supernovae close enough to Earth for that to happen.
Bryson introduces the idea of how easy it would be to obliterate human existence in order to help the reader realize how lucky we are to still be here and how precarious our existence is. He’ll expand substantially on this idea throughout the book. Here, for example, it’s just a matter of chance that there aren’t potential supernovae close enough to Earth to destroy us.
Themes
Supernovae are important because they explain where the energy came from that was needed to transform the universe’s basic gases to elemental matter after the Big Bang. In 1957, scientist Fred Hoyle shows how heavier elements are formed through supernova explosions, though his colleague W. A. Fowler receives a Nobel Prize for the discovery. Hoyle also shows that the energy released from a supernova enables interstellar material called “gaseous clouds” (with all the matter needed for life) to form and cluster. Controversially, Hoyle also believes that pathogens rain down on humans from space and that the Natural History Museum’s fossils are hoaxes, causing national outcry in the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, Hoyle’s research on supernovae helps scientists to piece together an origin story for “how we got here,” which Bryson summarizes next.
Bryson shows that it takes until 1957 for scientists to understand an important clue to the origins of life, which shows how young the scientific endeavor is and how far it has to go. Hoyle’s controversial claims about pathogens and fossils, however, show that scientists sometimes make absurd and bizarre claims that are often wrongly taken seriously because they are men who are in a position of power in the scientific world. Bryson thus begins to introduce the notion that patriarchal values can misdirect scientific progress.
Themes
About 4.6 billion years ago, a 15-billion-mile-wide gas cloud gathered where we are in space, and 99.99 percent of it created the sun. Two miniscule dust grains floated close enough to each other to connect via electrostatic forces, marking the conception of Earth. Grains kept colliding until a few clumps were big enough to dominate their orbits, gather more clumps, and form planets. 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized object crashed into Earth, causing some of Earth’s crust to separate and form the Moon. The moon began orbiting Earth, and its gravitational pull stabilized Earth on its axis.
Bryson’s origin story for the formation of Earth emphasizes how much chance is involved in Earth winding up as a planet that could sustain life. Earth’s conception—from dust clinging to dust—is a matter of pure chance. Furthermore, the chance collision with an asteroid creates a moon that can stabilize Earth on its axis, rendering the climate stable and the conditions for life possible. All of this is a sheer matter of chance.
Themes
When Earth was about a third of its current size, an atmosphere of gases including carbon dioxide formed. The sun was much younger and dimmer then, but the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere created a “greenhouse effect” that concentrated the sun’s rays, warming Earth. If it wasn’t for that early greenhouse effect, Earth would have frozen over and life wouldn’t have got going at all. After 500 million years of further collisions from asteroids and passing debris, life somehow got going. Four billion years later, Earth exists as we know it today.
Once again, Bryson emphasizes how much chance was involved in Earth forming an atmosphere that’s hospitable to life. Without the early greenhouse effect when the sun was dimmer, Earth would be a frozen empty desolate planet. Further chance collisions with asteroids all contribute to our existence, showing how rare it is that life began on Earth at all.
Themes
