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
Chemistry evolved almost accidentally out of alchemy in the 1600s, mentioning a German named Henning Brand who attempts to distill gold out of human urine in 1675. Brand fails, but he does accidentally create phosphorous after noticing that a batch of urine glows and spontaneously bursts into flames. Ironically, phosphorous is deemed so commercially potent that its retail price surpasses the price of gold after Swedish chemist Karl Scheele devises a way to mass produce it in the 1750s (catapulting Sweden into becoming the world’s largest producer of matches). Scheele insists on tasting every substance he works with, and he’s eventually found dead at his workbench surrounded by toxic substances in 1786.
Bryson stresses that many scientific contributions come from curious amateurs (like Brand), underscoring why it’s important for science to be engaging: it can stimulate curiosity and trigger experimentation, as Brand’s efforts show. Bryson’s memorable story of Brand’s urine bursting into flames also illustrates how scientific claims can be articulated through engaging stories, thus making scientific history come to life and prompting the reader’s engagement.
Themes
Chemistry is “thrust into the modern age” by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who amasses wealth from France’s poor with his despised tax collection company Fermé Générale. Though Lavoisier never discovers an element, he devises the system for naming elements (along with his wife, Madame Lavoisier). During the French Revolution, Lavoisier is denounced by his failed rival Jean-Paul Marat, and he meets his fate at the guillotine in 1793. Almost a hundred years later, a prestigious statue of Lavoisier is discovered to have been built using the wrong severed head as its model, and it’s melted for scrap metal during World War II.
Bryson shows how the scientific contributions of women are often obscured by patriarchy, since Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier is often solely credited for scientific work that he completed in collaboration with his wife. As before, Bryson emphasizes the human context around scientific discovery—another rivalry, it seems, ends up being a matter of life or death—thus illustrating how scientific history can be brought to life with memorable anecdotes.
Themes
Bryson argues that chemistry “lost its bearings” in the early 1800s, noting that nitrous oxide becomes popularized as the recreational “drug of choice” among England’s fashionable youth decades before its potential as an anesthetic is realized. The field of chemistry also suffers because of limitations in technology, and it also has a lower status because it’s seen as a commercial—rather than academic—enterprise. Eventually, an American named Benjamin Thompson (later Count von Rumford) sets up the British Institute after narrowly escaping being tar-and-feathered in the American Revolution and inventing the drip coffee maker. Humphry Davy, the institution’s professor of chemistry, develops electrolysis and discovers many new elements— including aluminum, potassium, sodium, calcium, and magnesium—before dying from his nitrous oxide habit.
Bryson compares two factors that limit scientific progress: one that can’t be helped (namely, limitations in technology) and one that can (specifically, dogmatic belief in the superiority of academic enterprises). At this time, scientists are snobbish about contributions that are commercial in focus, and their prejudice slows down progress in chemistry. By contrasting these two factors, Bryson shows that science is already hindered by many things that can’t be helped—like limitations in technology—so it’s especially important for scientists to free themselves of prejudices that can impede scientific progress.
Themes
Chemistry isn’t formally established until the mid-1800s after J. J. Berzelius standardizes element symbols, and Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev devises the periodic table of elements in 1869. Incidentally, Mendeleyev only studied chemistry because his destitute mother hitchhiked 4,000 miles across Russia and convinced a scientific school to take him in when he was young.
Here, Bryson stresses that the importance of good expression in science isn’t limited to words—it also applies to symbols, tables, and other graphic elements that aid scientific discovery. Bryson also credits scientific progress to the often-unacknowledged perseverance of women (such as Mendeleyev’s mother).
Themes
Get the entire A Short History of Nearly Everything LitChart as a printable PDF.
Mendeleyev—inspired by the card game solitaire—organizes elements according to atomic number (number of protons per atom): hydrogen (one proton) comes first, while uranium (92 protons) comes last. Mendeleyev astutely assumes that the 63 elements discovered in his time aren’t the full picture, and so he devises the periodic table with placeholder spots that accurately predict where many new elements will slot in, allowing for further additions to be easily integrated. The periodic table is widely considered history’s most elegant chart, accommodating today’s 92 natural elements and a further 28 synthetic ones created thus far.
Bryson leverages the periodic table to show how scientific information, when well-expressed, can foster scientific progress. Bryson shows how the logic of Mendeleyev’s design leaves placeholder spots that clue scientists in to where more work needs to be done as they search for all the elements. Once again, Bryson shows how scientific progress hinges on much more than good ideas—it also relies on elegant, accessible, and inspiring ways of capturing such ideas.
Themes
Another defining moment in chemistry’s history arises in 1896, when graduate student Marie Curie is tasked with figuring out why her supervisor’s uranium salts burned an image (like light rays would) onto a wrapped photographic plate in his drawer. Curie names the effect “radioactivity” and goes on to become the only person in history to win Nobel Prizes in both Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911). Radioactive material is swiftly commercialized—finding its way into toothpaste and laxatives—before its fatal effects are discovered in the 1930s. Even today, many of Curie’s papers are still so radioactive that they’re too dangerous to be handled.
Bryson emphasizes Curie’s achievement in science—as the only person in history to ever win Nobel Prizes in both Chemistry and Physics—to underscore the profound contributions to science that women are capable of despite being largely undervalued in scientific history due to sexism. The swift commercial uptake of radioactive material shows how humans often rush into using new discoveries without proper concern for the damage they might cause to the environment or to themselves.
Themes
Not long after Curie’s discovery, the previous chapter’s young farm boy, Ernest Rutherford, is studying chemistry in Canada when he discovers that it always takes the same amount of time for half a sample of radioactive material to decay. He realizes that “half-life” could be used to calculate radioactive material’s age based on the amount of radiation and rate of decay. When testing his idea on a piece of uranium, he discovers that it’s 700 million years old, proving Earth is much older than anyone previously estimated, despite Kelvin’s protestations to the contrary. Kelvin later dies still adamant that his greatest contribution to science is his calculation of Earth’s age as 20 million years old.
Rutherford’s experiment shows that new discoveries leading to new insights are always possible—it’s hard to anticipate what’s around the corner when it comes to scientific discovery, meaning that everything scientists assume to be true can be changed in an instant when new information comes to light. Bryson thinks that an attitude of openness to this kind of change is essential for scientific progress, which is the exact opposite of Kelvin’s response to Rutherford’s experiment.
Themes
