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
By the 20th century, scientists confidently believe they’ve “pinned down most of the mysteries of the physical world.” In 1875, young German scholar Max Planck is even advised to pursue mathematics instead of physics on the basis that there is little left to discover in physics. Nonetheless, Planck studies theoretical physics, only to realize with dismay that his findings on entropy have already been discovered by an obscure retiring American scientist named James Gibbs, whose similar 1875 discovery—that thermodynamic principles also apply at the atomic level—isn’t highly publicized.
Bryson leverages the advice that Planck is given to emphasize that overconfidence in the “mysteries” of the universe is a mistake. The advice that Planck receives couldn’t be further from the truth, since scientists will soon learn new insights about light that throw everything previously known into question. Bryson implies that no matter how much scientists think they have “pinned down” an issue, there is always more to be learned.
Themes
Meanwhile, in the 1880s, American scientists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley prove that “ether”—which was widely embraced by many scientists, including Newton, as an essential invisible substance that permeates everything—doesn’t exist. Newton hypothesized that the speed of light pushing through ether would change based on whether the perceiver stood toward or away from the light source. Attempting to measure this “ether drift,” Michelson and Morley are shocked to find that their experiments demonstrate light traveling at the same speed in all directions.
Michelson and Morley’s experiments provide the first clue that assumptions by physicists of the last two centuries are starting to unravel. This often happens when technological advances enable hypotheses (like Newton’s) to be tested for the first time. Michelson and Morley’s surprising results show that ether drift doesn’t happen, implying that something is off with Newton’s claim.
Themes
Planck attempts to make sense of the Michelson-Morley experiments in 1900, and he ends up formulating quantum theory. Quantum theory is based on the idea that light doesn’t travel as a continuous wave, but in chunks or packets, which Planck named “quanta.” Planck’s theory revolutionizes the field of physics. Around the same time, an anonymous clerk (with no status or university affiliation) publishes three papers in 1905 that also change the face of modern physics. His name is Albert Einstein, and the papers explain the nature of light as something that travels like both a particle and a wave. They also offer proof that atoms exist and lay out Einstein’s famous theory of relativity, which wins Einstein a 1920 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Planck formulates quantum theory—which completely changes the field of physics—less than a decade after scientists claim they have resolved all the “mysteries” of the physical universe. New insights about the behavior of light—as both particle-like and wave-like—contradict Newton’s picture of the world, which is taken as fact until this point. Planck’s theory thus exposes an important facet of scientific discovery: it’s often the case that the more scientists delve into an issue, the more they realize how little they actually know.
Themes
Einstein previously struggled in university—he failed his entrance examinations multiple times and eventually took up work as a bank clerk. Nonetheless, he changes the face of modern physics by formulating his infamous E=mc^2 equation, which states that mass (m) and energy (E) are two forms of the same thing, meaning that all physical objects contain latent energy and that mass can be converted into energy. It shows why radioactive objects—like uranium—radiate energy, and it explains why and how stars burn for billions of years (because even a tiny mass creates a much larger amount of energy). The equation also proves that ether doesn’t exist, and it shows that the speed of light is constant, universal, and unsurpassable.
Bryson emphasizes Einstein’s difficulties in university to show that profound contributions to science can come from people whom scientists might typically overlook, underscoring the importance of guarding against prejudices about the kind of people who are intelligent enough to pursue science. Bryson also stresses the elegance of Einstein’s equation, which, in one fell swoop, addresses many unanswered questions about the universe.
Themes
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Bryson suggests that relativity theory doesn’t sweep the public imagination the way other scientific discoveries (like dinosaur fossils) do because it’s “just so thoroughly nonintuitive.” It argues that space and time are relative to the observer. The most obvious example of this that’s applicable to humans occurs with sound: if we move away from a loudspeaker in a park, the sound seems to be quieter. The sound hasn’t changed, but our position relative to it has. A snail, however—which can’t move away nearly as fast—would not perceive the speaker’s volume changing.
Bryson emphasizes that it’s especially important for science writers to articulate ideas in accessible ways when science delves into increasingly counterintuitive areas, as it does with relativity theory. Despite the confusing nature of relativity theory, however, it’s still possible to render the picture accessible with the use of tangible, accessible examples, as Bryson’s loudspeaker analogy shows.
Themes
Another implication of relativity is that space and time aren’t separate, but interwoven like fabric. Bryson asks the reader to imagine a mattress with a heavy iron ball on it. The mattress will sag where the ball is. If one tries to roll a lighter ball across the mattress, it won’t roll straight across, but toward the sagging part. Objects in space—like the sun—do the same thing to the fabric of spacetime: they make it sag, so lighter objects roll toward them. The effect that we perceive as gravity is actually warped spacetime, sagging with heavy objects and affecting the paths of lighter objects.
The mattress symbolizes the nature of spacetime, and it shows how sometimes things (like spacetime) that are opaque to laypeople can explain phenomena that are visible to us (like gravity). Bryson once again shows the power of a good metaphor in rendering complex ideas accessible with his illustration of spacetime as something like a soft surface that’s punctuated with heavy objects, which affect the paths of other objects on the surface.
Themes
Einstein’s theory also implies that the universe isn’t static, but either contracting or expanding. Soon after Einstein figures out relativity, American scientist Vesto Slipher notices that distant stars appear red. The “red shift” effect implies that the universe isn’t static but expanding, because light moving away from humans appears red and light moving toward us appears blue. Unfortunately, Slipher doesn’t know about Einstein’s theory, so he doesn’t realize the significance of red shift. Slipher’s discovery has little impact until “a large mass of ego named Edwin Hubble” comes along.
Bryson indicates that scientific insights are often pieced together like jigsaw puzzles from the disparate contributions of different people. Slipher’s inability to understand the significance of his discovery shows that science is a collaborative, long-term endeavor: it takes time to make sense of new data, and sometimes existing data needs a new theory for its significance to be recognized.
Themes
Bryson describes Hubble as handsome, sporty, and intelligent, though prone to embellishing and exaggerating his achievements. Nonetheless, when a 30-year-old Hubble takes a position at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles in 1919, he “swiftly and unexpectedly” becomes “the most “outstanding astronomer of the twentieth century.” Hubble wants to know how old the universe is and how big is it. Answering the question requires knowing how far away specific galaxies are (something nobody knows in the early 20th century) and how fast these galaxies moving away from us (which red shift captures).
Bryson describes Hubble’s personality as egotistical and prone to embellishment to underscore that Hubble takes a lot of credit for scientific discoveries about the universe, yet he actually leans quite heavily on the contributions of others. Bryson raises the example of Hubble to show that often, the most famous people associated with a scientific discovery obscure the tireless work of undervalued contributors.
Themes
The missing piece of information—how to measure the distance of specific galaxies—is figured out by a woman named Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who works as a clerk at the observatory surveying telescope images. She realizes that certain older stars—which she calls “Cepheids”—burn fuel in a consistent pulsing pattern when they reach a certain age (or become “red giants”). Using these “standard candles,” as she coins them, the relative distance of other stars can be calculated. As a woman, Leavitt is only permitted to look at smudged photographic images rather than into the telescopes themselves, so Bryson finds her feat remarkable—especially since her boss, William H. Pickering (who can look into telescopes whenever he wants) thinks that the moon’s craters are caused by migrating insects.
Bryson exposes how much scientific progress is held back by patriarchal values when he describes the barriers to entry for women in astronomy. Women like Leavitt are often relegated to support roles and denied access to resources like telescopes. Bryson juxtaposes Leavitt’s ingenious “standard candle” measure with the absurdity of Pickering’s theory about migrating insects on the Moon to show how unjustified sexist assumptions about the capabilities of women are and how much such values limit scientific progress. Had Leavitt been permitted direct access to a telescope, she may well have made many additional contributions to astronomy.
Themes
Before 1923, scientists assume that there’s just one galaxy—ours—and everything else is distant gas clouds. But when Hubble combines Leavitt’s standard candle measure and Slipher’s red shift effect, he realizes that a gas cloud in the Andromeda constellation isn’t a gas cloud at all, but an independent galaxy 100,000 light years across and 900,000 light years away. The universe is far vaster than anyone ever suspected. (Bryson notes that scientists now estimate there are 140 billion galaxies, meaning if each galaxy were the size of a pea, their total number would fill concert hall.) Then, Hubble realizes—from red shift—that all the galaxies are moving away from us, getting faster as they go.
Bryson shows how Hubble’s insights about the size of the universe are dependent upon Leavitt’s and Slipher’s contributions. Without their insights, Hubble would not be able to realize that the universe is much vaster in scale than anyone could have imagined. This example shows how the important contributions of women like Leavitt to science are often overlooked. Hubble’s discovery also shows that humans really know very little about the universe—in fact, it’s so incomprehensibly large that there are many things we may never know.
Themes
Hubble fails to realize the significance of his finding until a Belgian theologian named George Lemaitre realizes that Hubble’s finding confirms that the universe isn’t static and eternal. It must have expanded from a single starting point, had a beginning, and might therefore one day have an end—like a firework, as Lemaitre puts it. Lemaitre effectively anticipates the concept of the Big Bang decades before Penzias and Wilson hear a hissing sound in an antenna at Bell Labs and inadvertently discover cosmic background radiation.
Bryson makes it a point to show that Hubble doesn’t fully probe the significance of his findings, further underscoring that Hubble takes more than his fair share of credit (much of which is owed to women like Leavitt). Once again, a new insight—here, that the universe is expanding—is completely groundbreaking, since it implies the universe might not have always been here. Bryson thus shows that the more humans learn about the universe, the more we realize how miniscule our knowledge is.
Themes
